Now and then, for creative purposes, I need to stray a little ways away from the stated theme of Banapana: “Our Minds on Media.” I also find that some of the subjects I write about, like advertising, and putting microchips in our brains gives me agita. I need a break if I’m going to keep consistently writing. And I’m not entirely sure that Marshall McLuhan would not argue that shopping carts are a medium. He made the argument that the wheel was a technological extension of the foot and therefore a medium. Does this not make the shopping cart an extension then of the foot and back. If human history had taken some different development track in which we never developed a consumer culture—a really difficult hypothetical for me to imagine—would the shopping cart even exist? It’s an artifact of us, but also our economy.

And what happens to these artifacts of economy in nature? To answer that question, it is best to turn to “The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America” by Julian Montague.

This beautiful tome is either the result of a sincere artist or a wry comedian; I’m honestly not sure which. Upon receiving this as a Christmas gift from my sister, I was immediately reminded of books like “How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening for Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths, & Civil Servants”—whew!—by David Rees. When I first randomly encountered this book at Powell’s Bookstore, I was angry and pulled it off the shelf and rifled through it with fury. This artisanal crap had gone too far! Then, I found the chapter on how to break into a friend’s place and sharpen their pencils and the word “SATIRE” blinked on and off in my vision. Mr. Rees is willing to wink at the audience to let us know what’s up. Mr. Montague, on the other hand, doesn’t flinch. Reading the Afterword, one finds that this is serious social commentary. No offense to him, I can’t help but read it as dry wit and I find it hilarious.

The book is gorgeous.

I adore the fact that it presents a sincere identification system. This accomplishes two things. One, it presents an opportunity for the author to show a lot of photos of shopping carts that are not just a random collection. The overlay of logic helps to give reason and order to the collection. Like a Linnaean taxonomy system, any one can present a pile of animal photographs, but placing them in relation to one another makes it an investigation. Two, (and I think this may be an unintended result) it makes for a great safari guide!

So, book and phone in hand, I headed to the nearest supermarket near me. My first encounter was to be expected. I had merely parked in the grocery store parking lot and immediately I found three Class A, false strays.

From there, I ventured into the surrounding woods behind the supermarket complex. Not surprisingly, within 200 yards of the main parking lot, I discovered this specimen. According to the guide, since this cart is within “two blocks” it should be categorized as a close false. However, an examination of the close false carts in the above photo reveals green handles and seat flaps. This might indicate that the cart in the woods is from elsewhere. So, at the moment, the categorization of this stray cart remains fuzzy to me. I intend to check on it again in a matter of weeks.

Thanks to the early work of Julian Montague and his stray shopping cart project I hope to further my own research to other shopping complexes in the area and find more strays. Stray shopping cart safaris such as these can take hours of time and careful orienteering when looking for the truly outlying stray. Luckily, unlike many fauna, stray carts do not spook easily. I’ll return with more updates as the hunt progresses. Until then, happy shopping!

I think 2024 is going to be a serious year, so I decided to take my bingo card seriously, too. These are all legitimate predictions. Some of them (like Betelgeuse going supernova) are pretty low probability, but they’re within reason! For instance, scientists have discerned that Betelgeuse has entered its carbon fusing stage, which means it will blow within decades, not centuries! Don’t worry, it poses no danger to us. It will, however, be a bright spot in the sky that you can see during the day. It will be as bright as the moon! So, like I said, some of these items are low probability, but still possible.

Banapana is Back

On January 13, 2005, I first posted to my brand new blog, Banapana, Our Minds on Media. I kept it running, mostly with a post a week until March 30, 2013. Then, I was done. Blogging had turned into Twittering. People were moving away from the blogosphere to other platforms and the site no longer felt relevant to me. But the concept of “Our Minds on Media” never got too far from my thinking.

On January 25, 2005, I tried to coin the term LUI or Language User Interface. Nobody really cared. We were dealing with some pretty dumb chatbots and I was thinking about A.I. in the Unix command line. In fact, in 2005, I would have hesitated to call anything A.I., but rather it was all ML (machine learning) to me.

Now, in 2023, A.I. has become vogue like never before with ChatGPT, Bard, Orca, Pi, etc. In fact, the Media has retroactively—wait, what is the comic book term for this? Retcon!—The Media has retconned machine learning algorithms, like your email spam filter, as A.I. Since the aforementioned A.I. have arrived, I feel like I was pretty correct about the idea of the LUI. And I feel like I have been correct about other matters regarding how media is changing our thinking.

So, ten years after Banapana closed up shop, I think it’s time to re-open. It’s not just what’s going on with AI¹. There are other significant developments occurring in which media is affecting our cognition that merit a closer look. iPhones being dopamine delivery systems that rob people of money, for instance.

I feel the need, more than ever, to remind people of what Marshall McLuhan espoused in his 1964 masterwork “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man“—media are just extensions of a human’s abilities and sense. We are arriving at two interesting points simultaneously. One, there are a hell of a lot more senses than five. Most neurologists will argue that there are more like 30-35 senses. We’re just beginning to understand human thinking. If video is an extension of vision, then what is the extension of Proprioception? Two, we’re starting to simulate all of those senses with a new type of intelligence—one that won’t think and feel like we do. Things are getting weird and that’s what Banapana is to me. It’s time to start it back up.

I’ve started a Substack (to be a thoroughly modern writer) and I’ll be posting more here on Medium. The old WordPress version of Banapana is available and I’ll keep posting there until I convert it to a Sveltekit blog before the end of the year! See you there.

Cognitive Restructuring

First off, some nice thoughts. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy finds its roots in the 1970s schism of behavioral psychology and cognitive psychology, and I suppose, in some ways, is an attempt to reconcile the two. In brief, strict behaviorists argue that thinking is merely a side effect of behavior that is driven by external stimulus. If an animal (including humans) receives some stimulus, there will be a resulting physical “output” which includes activities such as thinking. Cognitive psychology research, however, had its roots in reaction to behaviorism by focusing on things like language which appear to be mental activities capable of occurring without external stimulus. To see more on the differences, check out this nice video on the matter. My personal favorite demonstration of the incompleteness of behaviorist theory is Roger Sheppard’s mental rotation problems. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy then, in large part, makes the argument that thinking can change behavior, and in particular, thinking about your thinking. And Psychology Today has a nice summation of some of those techniques. Of interest to the concept of minds on media is that one common tool in all of these techniques is the use of media (yes, that includes paper) record objective measurements of thinking in order to reflect and act on them. The truth is, human memory is pretty shoddy and its easy to remember just the outliers of bad outcomes or be deluded into thinking that bad thoughts and actions are useful. Yet, the simple act of writing down three happy things in a journal at the end of each day improves your overall happiness. And, you guessed it, there’s an app for that and more.

The Monoculture

I’m always grappling with why the concept of the monoculture bothers me quite so much. On the one hand, there is something unsettling about billions of people all going to the same restaurant to eat the same subpar meals. Where is the uniqueness of life in that picture. On the other hand, the idea that even McDonald’s is a homogenous thing the world over is pretty handily dismantled by this entertaining posting over at the Awl petitioning for the creation of a “McWorld” restaurant in Times Square that features all the different food fare from McDonald’s around the world.¹. Still though—and I’m still scouring the science on this one—it seems to me that healthy brains like new things and the Monoculture seems to work against the creation of brain healthy environs in that regard. So, if you’re like me—a little suspicious of the monoculture—be sure to increase your awareness of corporate infiltration in your like with this excellent graphic from Visual.ly that illustrates how most of your household products are produced by only five firms: Five companies that make 60 household products

Droning On and On

When taking a McCluhan perspective on media (as this blog frequently does) one sees media developments as extensions of the human anatomy and senses. Writing extended (over distance) our communication and roads extended our legs. It is no wonder that one of the most powerful empires of the ancient world was Rome, which made extensive use of roads and writing. Turning to a more modern empire, we have the United States, and its particular brand of sense extension in the drone. Drones have been quite the trending topic this month with people becoming more and more aware that this is a weapons delivery system out of control of the usual checks and balances of the US government. Let me be perfectly clear: You, as a US citizen, can be put on a kill list by the CIA, by executive order, and executed by drone attack. That’s why there’s a lawsuit. And don’t think this couldn’t happen, it has and other innocent US citizens have been caught in the crossfire. If you want more details on the rise of the drones, I highly recommend this article from Time; “Drone Home.”

Terrorist Twitterers

Boing Boing reports that a twitter account associated with Somali terrorists has been suspended. The terrorists have issued statements to the effect that they believe this has occurred because the West is afraid of them getting their message out through non-mainstream channels. From Reuters:

“They shut it down because our account overpowered all the Christians’ mass media and they could not tolerate the grief and the failure of the Christians we always displayed (online).”

Aside from it being somewhat humorous that they sound like incensed teenagers, I find it hypocritical that they don’t seem to recognize Twitter as an invention of the West. It’s kind of hard to believe that if they had their desired caliph-state (see Afghanistan pre-2001) that they would have come up with Twitter… or the Internet for that matter—kind of a Western-scientific invention, that.

On That Note

The Internet is going to transform the way that government works. No, seriously, it is, one day. That’s sort of the topic of Clay Shirky’s engaging Ted talk. From Ted:

“Clay Shirky argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible — with deep social and political implications.”

Clay Shirky’s best idea yet (IMHO) is that the Internet is creating spare cognitive cycles that he calls a cognitive surplus. In short, the human race (in first-world counteries, anyway) have been largely a consumption-oriented group because of the nature of our broadcast media. The Internet has largely turned that idea on its head and is maker producers of us all, as well as allowing for the coordination of groups across the world to create markets that would otherwise be relegated to obscure micro-niche status. How McCluhan! He details this in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. I haven’t read it yet, but this is definitely on the short list of books to review here on Banapana.

Is Siri the Future?

This one’s been being bandied about for a while. I wrote about it in 2005 along with DJ Adams over at Openp2p primarily asking the question if a language user-interface (LUI) might be the next real option to the graphic user interface (GUI). I think so, but the cognitive power behind these systems really still has a ways to go, as evidenced, I think, by the fact that we were asking this question in 2005. Still, Kontra, of CounterNotions adds to the debate pointing out some new developments such as Siri operating without a screen in cars as adopted by nine different automakers. To me, processing power in the client device is still a big stumbling block for this interface. Play a game with a friend to see my point. Arm yourself with iPhones and try to answer some inane question¹ like “What was the name of the comedian that starred with Kevin Bacon in ‘A Few Good Men’?” All results will get you to the IMDB page for “A Few Good Men”—definitely where the answer is. (Hint: the comedian’s name is Kevin, too.) To put it mildly, Siri will take longer, but not, because the answer is elusive, but rather because parsing that particular question takes a while—it’s a long question is my point. I suppose that if you’re not great at thumb-typing, the advantage is moot. Looks like it’s time to update my LUI editorial. 🙂