{"id":73,"date":"2018-03-24T18:06:46","date_gmt":"2018-03-24T18:06:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/?p=73"},"modified":"2018-03-24T18:16:03","modified_gmt":"2018-03-24T18:16:03","slug":"liquid-media-in-a-strangely-liquid-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/2018\/03\/24\/liquid-media-in-a-strangely-liquid-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Liquid Media in a Strangely Liquid Society"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Umberto Eco. (Wikipedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

This morning is a morning of cascading ironies. One of my favorite writers is Umberto Eco<\/a>. I love about half of his fiction enormously. I like his writings on semiotics, and his essays are all gems – especially the collection “Travels in Hyperreality<\/a>” which includes a semiotic critique of the Madonna Inn<\/a> – considered a cultural treasure in my home town<\/a> which was just down the road from there. So I am reading this morning “Chronicles of a Liquid Society<\/a>” a collection of Eco’s posthumous articles that he wrote for newspapers – he is noted for his humorous analysis of popular culture in that realm. There is on page 47, a discussion about email doubles and people who have registered email accounts using his name. He says the same thing has happened to Salman Rushdie and even, Dante Alighieri! He lists a few of Dante’s literary dopple-gangers. One of the addresses that he published was one of my own! I have used DanteSB@yahoo.com since the mid-90s\"P.47 as a spam dump or throw-away email address. The cascading ironies around this is how I sometimes used this email address – for instance, I ran a Nomic<\/a> game for instance that was based on secret societies that were definitely influenced by his book “Foucault’s Pendulum<\/a>.” I created the DanteSB (which stood for “Dante, Santa Barbara”) in case I needed to put an email address on the net. Dante has always been a favorite writer as well. At the time, I saw the internet and its layers of access (gopher space<\/a>, WAIS, MUDs<\/a>, MUSHes<\/a>, etc.) as circles of hell. So I adopted that name. Occasionally I would get email from people who thought it meant “Dante’s Beatrice” but they were to be sorely disappointed. I always wanted to meet Umberto Eco – I even emailed him in Milan on my first trip to Italy to let him know that I was in town. I can’t remember what email address I used for that. I invited him out for a coffee like he was supposed to know who I was. But at least, most finally, I made my way into one of his books posthumously, through the nether regions of the web.<\/p>\n

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This morning is a morning of cascading ironies. One of my favorite writers is Umberto Eco. I love about half of his fiction enormously. I like his writings on semiotics, and his essays are all gems – especially the collection … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[14,17,15,18,19,16],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philo","tag-dante-alighieri","tag-dantesb","tag-eco","tag-irony","tag-semiotics","tag-umberto-eco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}