"A truly good man does nothing, Yet leaves nothing undone. A foolish man is always doing, Yet much remains to be done."-- Lao Tsu

We can understand the extent of the commercialization of the media as we watch and listen to the hegemonic CNN-TV network, and as I watch and listen to our Canadian CTV network so I understand of its copy catting subordination to CNN.

We have no time to reflect and understand what is happening in the world as we are bombarded with news in the form of static information. As a brain talker opens his/her mouth so we have headlines appearing left, right, up and down of the TV screen; we have all at once and together the latest stock market quotes along with the real time news, only to have all this information stop at once and have a commercial. And all this information is driven by the financial implications of everyday's multitude of popularity statistical polls as we are all converging into one way to think, to do business, and to live.

What is happening with all this convergence of everything is wrong, first because it excludes everybody who doesn't participate in this hegemonic convergent world and we are talking about billions of people, and secondly because this monolithic way to behave constraints our freedom, intelligence, creativity and in the end our democracy.

It is not our way of life that we have to defend with force, it is our humanity that we have to defend from all these convergent destructive forces. Our humanity is our languaging, that is our coordination of behaviour to become more intelligent individually and collectively, and our languaging includes our understanding to make sense of our historical experiences which are related in time and space.

We must redirect ourselves and find again our humanity in our history of languaging and I am happy today I came across the web site re:constructions published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). We already mentioned the leading role of MIT in its effort to put all of its courses free of charge on the Internet and of its innovative counter-intuitive approach to challenge the property copyrights of a market driven world. And today, again we see MIT taking the innovative lead to let us have the opportunity to reflect on the tragedy of September 11 and "encourage critical analysis of the words, images, and stories which fill the media - as well as the ones we are not hearing or seeing."

We reconstruct our understanding and our civil behaviour as we language to one another and reflect to our languaging for a better world for us all. We find out truths not in the financial implications of statistical opinion polls but in our history, and that is why I find this re:constructions web site a refreshing opportunity for understanding what we mean as we speak to one another in a very confused world where money and power are the driven forces of the Free Market, a Free Market not for the people but for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

In the definitions page of this MIT's site we find the historical definitions of the many words our politicians are mouthing, we find the definitions of the following words: Act of War, America, Barbarians, Cowards, Evil-Doers, The Day of Infamy, Globalization, Madmen, Martyr, Retaliation, Rogue, Shadows, Terror, Tragedy.

We construct our own realities and we have also the responsibilities to become more intelligent in our languaging. Therefore, please visit the re:constructions web site and reconstruct your own personalized reality as I reconstruct my own and as we all take a brief interlude from our brainwashing and convergent media.

References

LIFE, THE MULTIVERSE AND EVERYTHING: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE IDEAS OF HUMBERTO MATURANA, by Vincent Kenny, Roma October 2, 1985. Invited paper presented at the Istituto di Psicologia, Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore http://www.oikos.org/vinclife.htm

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: the Economics of Ideas and the Public Domain Economics. By Mario deSantis, April 8, 2001 http://www.ftlcomm.com/ensign/desantisArticles/2001_300/desantis354/mit.html

re:constructions, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) http://web.mit.edu/cms/reconstructions/