This site will focus on my academic work through which I plan to explain our modernistic techno-culture enslaved by programmable electronics. This page is my flowery pitch. I need to talk about how tools are powerful media of communication, and how we don't just use tools but incorporate them into our world view, living as we do in the halo of the reciprocity of our minds and our tools inter-operating. I can then talk about the ultimate tool, software, and how it exists because of who we are, which is a product of our own devising. Humans flex and adapt as existential challenges present themselves while we constantly upgrade our ability to deal with each other and our world through new media, which lately amounts to new soft tools.

Tools project the will to be bigger and better than our flexible physiques and plastic brains permit. Tools are imbued with meaning, at once promise and limitation, vessels of knowledge, ideas and intentions of their makers for those who would be extended through them.

We travel on a restless sea of media¹⁾, the siren-song of delicious usability and novelty begging our attention. Buffeted by waves and wind, we imagine and then just take new directions, stirring up our own turbulence, addicted to the ride more than focused on a destination.

In considering the transactions that change us, that convey meaning between minds through media, reflexivity, the reciprocity of minds and tools, is instrumental.

So we become who we think ourselves to be. Then, who exactly do we think we are?

Our Earth's watery seas support a world of life, plus all that's needed by those lives and all that they produce, churned by tides, currents and winds, the vast interface with the land and air highly permeable. The seas of media consist of electronics, globally interconnected, with a world of software driving it, churned by successes, calamities, social tides, technological change, and, of course, affluence, the vast interface with humanity highly permeable.

Like any tool, software is a vessel of knowledge and intent, promise and limitation. But unlike physical tools yet like any stored medium, software has no substance, being just data kept somewhere and transmitted elsewhere at need. Importantly though, beyond other stored media through which we share and perceive meaning, software can and does directly impact our physical world - a virtual hammer for driving actual nails. Embodied as syntactical constructs called programming languages, software is the ultimate tool.

I've coined the term, tool shop effect, to help explain what's going on here. Woodworkers, for example, modify and adapt their tools, and make new ones with the tools they already have. A busy woodshop is festooned with jigs and templates for controlling processes and augmenting existing tools. In a machine shop, it's the same story. Machinists use machines to make other machines and parts, which are used to change the machines that made them.

The tool shop is a generalization of places where process and product, product and process, mingle and feedback on one another. Tools, readily created and discarded or kept at need, mediate in the creation and transmission of knowledge, techniques and patterns to ultimately create saleable products - products that may well be tools themselves. And so it goes for software engineering, except that the reciprocity of tools and minds, the tool shop effect, is amplified by software being so perfectly soft, a mere mental construct, a figment. With software developers at the helm, we are cast on the programmable sea, enthralled by its reciprocity with our seafaring selves.

The conception-day gift²⁾ that enables us to discern and convey meaning so creatively is language. Languages are the brilliantly expressive cultural tools we use to encode and decode meaning; language endows the ability to do that. We can evoke language deliberately but meaning emerges, seemingly unbidden, from the locus of a yet opaque, non-linear calculus of agency, experience, culture and circumstances. And it works in both directions, turning meaning into some kind of transmittable medium, such as a language, and incoming media into meaning.

I contend that all tools are inconceivable without language and, therefore, a product of it. And it's the stimulation we feel when creating and perceiving meaning that drives us to communicate incessantly. Meaning is everything and without it there is nothing.

No discussion of language and media can proceed without mentioning the mother of all reciprocities, communication and culture. You can’t have culture without communication to carry it; and meaningful communication is deeply challenged without the explanatory context that culture provides. This mutual embrace of communication and culture is an old saw for those who study the humanities.

One might wonder if there would be a great nothingness if there ever was a moment when neither communication nor culture existed to buoy the other. We actually have no idea what that would be like because to be human is to communicate incessantly regardless. As meaning encoded in media bursts forth at every conceivable opportunity, little cultures form instantly and existing cultures change constantly. Entrenched cultures entrench further or fray at the edges. The instrumental communication that we can neither withhold nor ignore is carried by media, most often as speech and simple tools until relatively recently in human history.

Within a culture, its members are both privileged and doomed by the media and cultural appurtenances they accept and use, striving and struggling under their power to change and improve them. The pace and scope of cultural and technological change is a rough measure of what people tend to accept as progress. For many, as our global connectedness exposes so many opportunities for change it can seem immoderate. Yet for its purveyors, a constant drip of change-induced endorphins has always been irresistible. Fresh ideas for improved media and tools at the ready, they create and adapt existing media and their tools to better communicate and to change their various cultures, salient and ambient, pervasive and small.

The advent of writing was significant in the extreme, transforming what we could say into a permanent record for others to consider later and elsewhere. It's not that oral traditions didn't serve; they've existed for millennia and into today. It's that even the earliest writing offered a heightened experience in the realm of meaning-making and a permanence that changed us forever. As objects can become what they symbolize, then written words themselves became the meanings they conveyed, just as spoken words served for millennia. The story I have to tell starts in Mesopotamia.

So we have minds reaching/extended outside their bodily containers to share meaning through media; and external media pouring in through senses stimulating the emergence of meaning.

I suggest that all of this implies that self-aware/conscious life is quite different from just life: driven, as we are, by our natures, however explained, the pleasure we find in mediated experiences, especially new ones, is as real and compelling as that for any animal driven by the pursuit nourishment.

So driven as we are and with such reflexive consequences, the ultimate emergence of the Soft Tool Culture was perhaps inevitable given the luck of our circumstances. My task is now to tell the story of our journey on seas of media, starting in ancient Mesopotamia, culminating today. We've done all we could throughout history to become more than our mere selves, both physically and mentally, through new media. This relentless development of media helps explain how it is that humans have changed without evolving genetically since becoming hunter-gatherers. Our evolved inclinations are so useful and enslaving, yet their genesis was influenced by a world so different from the one we've since created for ourselves. It's perhaps a concern that this ultra-modern human experience is driven by such deep instincts, because deep down, as a species, we're kinda crazy, greedy and pretty mean, really, prone to a collective narcissism that could very well kill us off. The Internet and our relentless poisoning of the ecosphere are examples of this behaviour.

I figure that knowing who we are and how we came to be like this should be useful going forward.