Barry's use of descriptions of the biological processes involved in seeing and perceiving was fascinating. The explanations of sight throughout my years in elementary and high school always seemed inadequate. We were given detailed pictures of the bones of the body, the chambers of the heart, descriptions of how the lungs work, the layers of the skin. But with the eyes, it always seemed like I was asked to rely on a type of faith. There were rods and cones. A teacher would hold up a prism and say something about different waves of light. Yet, even then, it seemed that sight was one of the best ways to start getting at the idea that our knowledge of the world was contextual, that our beliefs were situated and not universal. For a number of years when I was a child and young teenager there was a question that came up in conversations; it seemed that many people had individually had this thought and didn't know what to make of it. ... What if we each saw colors completely differently? What if my blue was your orange, but, at the same time, we were consistent in our difference and so we would never know?
I haven't thought about this question or my dissatisfaction over the rod and cone explanation in quite a while. In part, my reflections were inspired by Barry's descriptions of biological processes, the parts of the eye, the ability to see as learned. However, I wonder if I'm also brought back to my earlier years in school by the number of times in this text that Barry references "Channel One."
Barry doesn't seem to have a high opinion of the programming -- "Given the current pervasiveness of advertising in public schools under the guise of educational programming, particularly as part of "Channel One," this type of exploitation may be more generally acceptable than might at first be thought" (61). Ok. Yes, there was something about Channel One that seemed very similar to MTV. I don't remember the commercials, but I'll trust Barry on this one. However, Channel One also brought free televisions to each of the classrooms in my middle school. And every day we would watch roughly 10-15 minutes of news, engaging with current events in a way that many of us arguably would not have otherwise.
On a different note, I was immediately struck by Barry's epigraph to Chapter 1 -- "The map is not the territory" (15). We've heard this phrase so many times, and I think it becomes ever more relevant as we increasingly rely on things like Google maps, our GPS devices, and Yelp to guide us from point to point on the map. When GPS doesn't recognize that a road is shut down for construction, when a business isn't at the location that Google Maps shows, it's frustrating, of course, but it also makes apparent the difference between the map and the territory. What was surprising, for me, about this epigraph is that I had no idea before reading this book who Alfred Korzybski was. To find that he was the first to use this phrase, as opposed to Jean Baudrillard who used it and then argued not only was the map not the territory but that the map now preceded the territory, may seem like a little thing to take away from this book. However, this is a phrase that I've returned to several times in my writing, and am now grateful to have learned more of the back story behind it's origin. At the same time, it still upsets me to some degree that Barton and Barton's "Ideology of the Map" is so similar to Baudrillard's and doesn't explicitly give him credit. Their piece also begins with a reference to the Borges tale, discusses the difference between the map and the territory and then expands on this idea by saying that there are rules of inclusion and exclusion.
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