The Structural Study of Myth
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Add Sticky Note
- the translator is a traitorposted by mwesch on 2008-10-21
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but should the actual data be conflicting, it would be as readilyAdd Sticky Note
claimed that the purpose of mythology is to provide an outlet for repressed
feelings.- vs. psychoanalytic (Freud, Jung, Campbell)posted by mwesch on 2008-10-21
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it will be claimed that in such a society grandmothers areAdd Sticky Note
actually evil and that mythology reflects the social structure and the social
relations- vs. structural-functionalismposted by mwesch on 2008-10-21
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To
discover a suitable pattern of rows and columns for those cards, special devices
are needed, consisting of vertical boards about six feet long and four and a
half feet high, where cards can be pigeon-holed and moved at will. In order to
build up three-dimensional models enabling one to compare the variants, several
such boards are necessary, and this in turn requires a spacious workshop, a
commodity particularly unavailable in Western Europe nowadays. Furthermore, as
soon as the frame of reference becomes multi-dimensional (which occurs at an
early stage, as has been shown above) the board system has to be replaced by
perforated cards, which in turn require IBM equipment, etc. - -
born from different or born from same?
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born from one or born from two?
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to find a satisfactory
transition between this theory and the knowledge that human beings are actually
born from the union of man and woman. -
The myth has to do with the inability
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the
persistence of the autochthonous origin of man -
denial of the autochthonous origin of man
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difficulties
in walking straight and standing upright. -
third column refers to monsters being slain
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blood relations which are overemphasized
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But if we
want to understand the myth, then we will have to disregard one half of
the diachronic dimension (top to bottom) and read from left to right, column
after column, each one being considered as a unit. -
Now for a concrete example of the method we
propose. We shall use the Oedipus myth -
The true constituent units of a myth are not the isolated
relations but bundles of such relations, and it is only as bundles that
these relations can be put to use and combined so as to produce a meaning. -
each gross constituent unit will consist of a
relation. -
The technique which has been applied so far by
this writer consists in analyzing each myth individually, breaking down its
story into the shortest possible sentences, and writing each sentence on an
index card bearing a number corresponding to the unfolding of the story. -
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Myth, like the
rest of language, is made up of constituent units. -
f there is a meaning to be found
in mythology, it cannot reside in the isolated elements which enter into the
composition of a myth, but only in the way those elements are combined -
t is that
double structure, altogether historical and ahistorical, which explains how
myth, while pertaining to the realm of parole and calling for an
explanation as such, as well as to that of langue in which it is
expressed, can also be an absolute entity on a third level which, though it
remains linguistic by nature, is nevertheless distinct from the other two. -
Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole,
one being the structural side of language, the other the statistical aspect
of it, langue belonging to a reversible time, parole being
non-reversible. -
everybody will agree that the Saussurean principle of
the arbitrary character of linguistic signs was a prerequisite for the
accession of linguistics to the scientific level. -
Let us
consider, for instance, Jung’s idea that a given mythological pattern—the
so-called archetype—possesses a certain meaning. -
it is the
combination of sounds, not the sounds themselves, which provides the significant
data -
Therefore the
problem: If the content of a myth is contingent, how are we going to explain the
fact that myths throughout the world are so similar? -
From a theoretical point of view the situation remains very much the
same as it was fifty years ago, namely, chaotic. Myths are still widely
interpreted in conflicting ways: as collective dreams, as the outcome of a kind
of esthetic play, or as the basis of ritual. Mythological figures are considered
as personified abstractions, divinized heroes, or fallen gods. Whatever the
hypothesis, the choice amounts to reducing mythology either to idle play or to a
crude kind of philosophic speculation.
An Explanation Of The Fable, In Which The Sun Is Worshipped Under The Name Of Christ.
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After having demonstrated, on what astronomical foundation
was reposing the fable of the incarnation of the Sun, under
the name of Christ, in the womb of a virgin, we shall now
examine the origin of that, which makes him die and afterwards
resuscitate at the vernal equinox under the form of the
Paschal Lamb. -
In the Hebrew Genesis the millesimal
expression, which is employed in that of the Persians,
is not used; but the Genesis of the ancient Tuscans, conceived
for the remainder in the same terms, as that of the Hebrews,
has preserved this allegorical denomination of the divisions of
time, during which the all-powerful action of the Sun, the
soul of Nature is exercised. Its expressions on this point, are
as follows:“The God architect of the Universe has employed and consecrated
twelve thousand years to the works, which he has
produced, and he has divided them into twelve times, distributed
in the twelve signs, or houses of the Sun.“At the first thousand, he made Heaven and Earth.
“At the second, the Firmament, which he called Heaven.
“At the third, he made the Sea and the waters which flow
upon the Earth (dans la terre).“At the fourth, he made the two great flambeaux of Nature.
“At the fifth, he made the spirit (âme) of the birds, of the
reptiles, of the animals, which live in the air, on land and
in the waters.“At the sixth thousand, he made man.”
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Now it will not be very difficult to
prove, that it is again the worship of Nature and of the Sun,
her first and most brilliant agent; that the hero of the legends
known by the name of the Gospel, is the same hero, who has
been sung, only with far more genius, in the poems on Bacchus,
on Osyris, on Hercules, on Adonis, &c.
Digital Urban: Twitter Live Maps with GeoRSS and Atlas
Tags: twitter, georss, atlas on 2008-08-25 -All Annotations (0) -About
in list: Digital Archeology
more fromdigitalurban.blogspot.com
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Expect a lot of papers from Social Scientists in the near future. Come to think of it we have just included Twitter in a book chapter entitled The Visual City, coming soon...
Education, Innovation and Inspiration : Multitasking impairs ability to learn
Tags: multitasking on 2008-08-19 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromblogs.technet.com
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Sometimes it feels as though I put a ton of information in RAM but it never gets written to my HD.
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Tags: reading, technology, media, ecology, mediaecology, carr on 2008-08-19 and saved by222 people -All Annotations (115) -About
more fromwww.theatlantic.com
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That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
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deep reading
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The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well.
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there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation.
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Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
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The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
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The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
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Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
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Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.
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“In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
William James's The Varieties of Religious Experiences Chapter 3
Tags: James, VRE, religous, experience, sacred, EME2008 on 2008-07-23 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromxroads.virginia.edu
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undifferentiated sense of reality
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the whole array of our instances leads to a
conclusion something like this: It is as if there were in the
human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective
presence, a perception of what we may call "something there,"
more deep and more general than any of the special and particular
"senses" by which the current psychology supposes existent
realities to be originally revealed.
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/prtrt11.txt
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It awakens,
or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis,
an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged, and
at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty. -
If you bear this in
memory you will see that art necessarily divides itself into three
forms progressing from one to the next. These forms are: the lyrical
form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate
relation to himself; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his
image in mediate relation to himself and to others; the dramatic form,
the form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to others. -
The instant wherein that supreme quality
of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended
luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and
fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic
pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which
the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as
beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart. -
force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a
universal one -
It means certainly
a stasis and not a kinesis -
You see I use
the word ARREST. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather
the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are
kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to
something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts
which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper
arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore
static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing. -
the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of
whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with
the human sufferer
The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism
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more fromjcmc.indiana.edu
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Person-to-person communication is supplanting door-to-door and place-to-place communication
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Communication will be everywhere, but because it is independent of place, it will be situated nowhere.
Pigslop - Encyclopedia Dramatica
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more fromwww.encyclopediadramatica.com
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He had a mutually-beneficial symbiotic relationship with ED, using and creating some of the material contained in these articles for his videos. But as time went on, his e-fame went to his head, and Pigslop developed an extreme case of unwarranted self-importance, resulting in one of the lulziest cases of serial snow-balling self-ownage in YouTube history.
Patriotic Nigras - Wrecking Second Life Since 2006
Tags: anonymous, creed, manifesto, individuality, deindividuality on 2008-06-02 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.freewebs.com
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We will do it through madness.
And we will remove you from the high place you have
built yourself. -
Wherever someone takes themselves too seriously, we will be there.
Wherever someone has an inflated ego, we will be there. -
We cannot be stopped.
We have no leader.
We have no true names.
We are Anonymous, and our numbers are vast.
We are everywhere, and we never forgive. -
We will take all of the filth in the world;
images you never want to see, stories you never want to
hear, memories you never want to see again, we will bring
it all into the light of day and laugh at it as you run
screaming, -
deindividuality
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We are here to remind you of this.
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You are a mindless horde of filth, traversing the universe on a small ball of dirt. A speck upon a speck in the vastness of existance.
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We have news for you...
You aren't special. -
As the internet has grown in popularity,
a disturbing phenomenon has occurred:
Everyone thinks they they are SPECIAL. -
the next form of social
evolution on the Internet.
John Edwards' Virtual Attackers Unmasked | PEEK | AlterNet
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more fromwww.alternet.org
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"[T]he truth is, there is something terribly wrong with Second Life, isn't there…? [W]here once you had the freedom to object, think, and speak as you saw fit, you now have IP bans and hypocritical labelers coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission."
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"This is the modern-day equivalent of hippies freaking out the squares," wrote a blogger at Wired. "You see countless news stories about this, over and over again: the gray humorless drones of political parties or corporations rushing to establish a presence in Second Life because it's the thing to do, only to find themselves staring directly into the collective Goatse.cx of the Internet's soul."
Connections X
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On the freewheeling Internet, anyone can be a publisher, noted Howard Rheingold,
author of several seminal books on new media and founder of the influential WELL
on-line network. Those demonstrating the most innovative new-media products at
Connections were not newspaper publishers--they were cable companies, advertisers
developing their own content, and entepreneurs like Todd Chronis, president and
publisher of WalkSoft, an interactive newspaper culled from wire services.Yet the future is far from bleak. "The Internet will be the CB radio of the
'90s," said Stephen Weiswasser, president of Capital Cities/ABC Inc.'s multimedia
group. "You're not going to change passive [readers] into active trollers of the
Internet....We're going to have to go to the folks who have traditional views of
mass media."
Wired 13.08: We Are the Web
- the machine is uspost by mwesch on 2007-03-03
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Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don't see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into.
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Time magazine explained why the Internet would never go
videoblogging : Message: Re: [videoblogging] Re: what is vlogging
Tags: youtube, history, prehistory, vlogging, 2005 on 2008-05-31 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromtech.groups.yahoo.com
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> i was curious because we had just launched a new video blogging service at
> www.YouTube.com. many of the same questions being asked here, we had also
> asked ourselves as this is still a nascent area for technology.
www.YouTube.com
everyone is doing Flash...
amzing all these little hosting services popping up.
how many more are in here?
what about RSS feeds?
jay
videoblogging : Message: Re: [videoblogging] YouTube--public discussion of their TOS
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I too think it would be a nice addition, but I don't see any proof that it
will ever happen. Steve's hit and run e-mail a year ago is a good
indicator that YouTube quickly turned from a "yeah, we'll talk with you"
company to a "I'll have my people contact your people" company. Fact is
that YouTube don't seem to give a shit (or they would've have added CC
licenses already) and their users don't give a shit either (they've got
plenty of users uploading video regardless). So there's not much of an
incentive.
videoblogging : Message: (No subject)
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more fromtech.groups.yahoo.com
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blogging shares many common traits
with letter writing / diary keeping – it is periodic, its is a dialog
and unlike say, a phone conversation, it is author-centric(very
much 1st person in its content) and it is a cumulative form of
story telling. -
So, what
can a video blog do or rather, what can I do with a video blog that
I cannot do with other mediums? It attracts me because of this
unique combination of traits in a visual medium. It is irrelevant to
me if its content is edited or `real' or `art'. What is most
interesting to me is that it provides a way to tell a story that could
eliminate worn-out narrative forms without relying on
`postmodern' or ironic or self-aware tricks, most of which are
rapidly becoming traps.
videoblogging : Message: Welcome part II
Tags: vlogging, history, youtube, prehistory, 2004 on 2008-05-31 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromtech.groups.yahoo.com
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The ability to put video on blogs seems amazing to us, but there seem to be
some obstacles.
1. Technically, the process takes too long.(capture, import, optimize, write
some HTML, post).
2. existing servers don't allow much bandwidth and storage space. You'll either
get screwed becasue too mnay people watch your posts, or you have to earse your
archive video because youre out of space.
3. what is the language of videoblogging? is it little movies? or moments from
your life?
videoblogging : Message: Welcome
Tags: vlogging, history, youtube, prehistory, 2004 on 2008-05-31 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromtech.groups.yahoo.com
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I've
posted a few video entries on my blog, but it's a lot of work, and
the bandwidth usage is a bit scary.
Media Revolution: Podcasting (Part 2); 2/06
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more fromwww.newenglandfilm.com
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A large group
of vloggers, over 2,000 at last count, actively participate
in the Yahoo! Videoblogging
Group from all over the world. -
most new computers come with free video editing software
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You don't even need a video camera to start
videoblogging, the mashup culture is in full force -
Marhshall McLuhan argued that in each socio-cultural era
the medium in which information is created and transmitted
determines the essential characteristics of that culture. He
also predicted the evolution of an interconnected "global village". The shift from a centralized media industry
modeled on industrial revolution structures to a
decentralized chaotic information-age soup is having a
profound effect on the messages we exchange and shaping the
characteristics of our culture. The global village comes to
a crescendo with podcasting, and you can participate in the
revolution with tools that are easily within reach: your
imagination, the computer you're using to read this web
page, and a video camera. We're not going to predicting
what's next, as that's going to depend on what you, yes you,
plan to do with new media. If the flutter of one butterfly wing, can
trigger a chain reaction of events resulting in a storm
half-way across the planet, imagine the effect millions, or
billions, of individually produced videos will have on the
characteristic of the global village and the media
landscape. -
genuine conversation with their audience,
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With the cost of video cameras in the hundreds,
sophisticated computers with video editing software
available for just over a grand, and high speed always-on
internet connections costing less than the average cable
television subscription, the means of both production and
distribution are now in the hands of practically anyone with
something to say -
podcasting (both video and
audio) is a bottom-up movement and squarely the domain of
individuals who are being guided by human creativity and
expression, rather than corporate agendas and economic
exigencies. -
By the end of 2004, bloggers
were using the ability to add video as an enclosure to an
RSS feed, allowing viewers to subscribe to videos and have
them delivered automatically to their computers. This solved
the problem of click and wait, where you had to wait for a
video to start playing when you clicked on it from a web
page.
Prime Time for Vlogs? - May 1, 2006
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Rocketboom has 250,000 visitors a day, and that number is rising fast.
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