Connective Visions

Summer vacations can also be ventures away from habit – especially when it comes to the U.S. media and the discussions they generate.

Your own thoughts, emotional habits, and actions in the past have been the primary focus of creating your current experience in the world. And every time you react to another person or thing with a particular set of thoughts or emotions, you’re deepening a tendency to see a world based on those types of projections…. [...]

A few weeks ago, my friend’s Norwegian husband was in Philadelphia and visited the University of Pennsylvania photography-and-text exhibit “Righteous Dopefiend.” When we got together for dinner a week later, he made the point, “I know what a dopefiend is, and I know what ‘righteous’ is, but what do the two mean together?” As a [...]

Although the source was a U.S. one and ultimately deserves the credit, my kudos to Norway for bringing me my own national news before the standard channels here did. Last night, my first awareness that the House had passed the health-care reform bill came from the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet – which I was not visiting [...]

When I taught communications, I regularly emphasized the model of “sender-channel-receiver” for passage of information. At any point along that line, the message (the information) can go astray. The sender has an intention that may not be conveyed clearly. The channel may abbreviate, damage, or delete the message. The receiver may misinterpret the message. If [...]

My father finished his midday news viewing today and announced, “They say it’s going to rain.” As it was pouring buckets outside, I couldn’t argue with them, and I said so. He frowned and said, “Yes, but I didn’t turn on the TV to find that out. I want to know when it’s going to [...]

The end of February is giving rise to a kind of media, climatic, and geographical mass effect. The 16th day of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics came on the heels of another Northeast U.S. snowstorm (the third of the month, but in Philadelphia, happily, the least bothersome) and on the day of the seventh-largest earthquake in [...]

Today I sporadically followed the results of the curling semifinals on NBC’s Olympic Web site and on my beloved Facebook group, The Norwegian Olympic Curling Team’s Pants, as I didn’t have the station access (or time) to watch the whole match. The group’s updates were most reassuring as NBC had the Norway vs. Switzerland results [...]

Thanks to Facebook, I have found myself tonight not only blogging on the Norwegian Olympic curling team but waiting with bated breath for an AP scoop related to them. Some might say that Facebook has much to answer for. A large number of fans on Facebook have been saying so tonight. At roughly 0300 GMT, [...]

In an excellent bit of questioning, a friend remarked to me that most of my Facebook postings seemed to be about “imaginary farm animals” and professed that she didn’t understand the penchant of so many for “electronic farming.” A day later, four more friends joined the Facebook group “I dont care about your farm, or [...]