Well, why not :-)?

Barebones goes presidential with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Found on a site of a German Cowboy. 

Things are picking up. Call this a presidential brand positioning of barebones. Freely handed over by a netfellow

Thanks to all of you for picking up this blog, and a happy election to the two of you.

By the way, do you notice that candidates actually do the proximity dance in the picture? 

For more on proximity dance, please go here.

Cheers :-) 

Barebones communication is on medicine. Its own medicine.

It was the original idea, that this was going to be a bilingual blog, but that is not going to work. Not 80 percent in English, and the rest in Danish. It would put off those who don’t speak Danish, I am afraid.

So the blog will stay in English. 

I am not going to make any rocket science out of this, but communication is ALSO the ability to take the other man’s position. So, I simply asked myself what my answer would be if someone asked me for advice on an bilingual blog. The barebones answer would be: Forget It.

And so I forgot it . 

And while we are at it; I managed to track down Britt the last day of the last year.

I talk about Steuart Henderson Britt, who wrote Psychological Principles of Marketing and Consumer Behavior, Lexington Books, Lexington, Massachusetts, USA (Library Thing). And one of my all times favorites in terms of content and systematics in this area. In his book he even has a good chapter on gestalt psychology, which is pretty rare.

Why did I want to track him down? To have his permission to quote from his book on this blog. Remember that I told you, that barebones stands on 4 legs? One of these legs are the naturalistic inspiration within the human sciences. Britt is the reference I will use - for the most part anyway. 

Only thing with this book is that the title is a bit misleading. The title explicitly is to narrow, in my humble opinion.  This is a base book on communication in general, and well worth using here.

So, I started writing to the publisher in Massachusetts. The answer came promptly:

Dear Mr. Skjaerven,

Lexington no longer controls the rights to this book.  You may want to contact Northwestern University which has an archive of the author’s work.  Here is the information from the website”.

Then I wrote to Northwestern University, and I had a very friendly chat with Kevin B. Leonard. I couple of emails into the correspondence, I wrote:

Dear Kevin B. Leonard

Thanks you for your answer.

No, I don’t think that is any risk involved here. I don’t see what risk that could be other than revitalizing the book and the great work Henderson Britt has done. I’ll be more than happy to refer to NUL with every quote. 

BTW, its ironical that I end up talking to you :-).  In the late seventies I bought a copy of all the books you had in your series: Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy. These books,in fact, will be one of the main inspirations for dealing with communication on my blog. Interesting how things can turn out.

Best wishes

Knut Skjærven  

 Kevin B. Leonard answered:

Dear Knut,

Thanks for your message.  Good luck with your blog.  Please don’t feel you must refer to NUL (ed. Northwestern University Library).  I do hope you will feel free to refer to Britt and the fact that his papers are here at Northwestern.  We’re always happy to deal with interested patrons … (ed: continued).

Best wishes,Kevin 

Unfortunately, Steuart Henderson Britt passed away in 1979, and Northwestern University Archieves, that hold his papers in their archives are in no position to tell me who has the copyright at present. They simply don’t know. Steuart Henderson Britt had no children, and his wife has presumably passed away as well.

Quotations from the book in question, will be made by fair use and respect for the limitations given below:

Those of you that have already investigated gestalt psychology will know that the notion Prägnanz is important. 

Why then have I not used it?. Simply because it is a bit difficult to know what the word means within the gestalt psychology tradition. Some English translators say that the word cannot be translated into English. Others state, that the English word for it is pregnant. 

Well, none of them are wholly wrong. 

Even within the German language there seems to be some problems with this word. The big “Etymologisches Wörterbuch“ by Friedrich Kluge at Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1975 Edition, does not mention it. However, it mentions the adjective prägnant, which in their definition means “kurz, doch vielsagend”. And they add: ”  17. Jh. frz. prégnant zu lat. preagnans “schwanger”.

To add to the confusion is not unusual to find some gestalt theorists stating that there is a factor or a law of prägnanz, just as we e.g have a factor of proximity, a factor of similarity and factor of closure.  

Not so in this context.

I would rather see prägnant used about the general capacity, that makes the gestalt factors, in their various forms, possible. And as some gestaltists would say; this a capacity in the object, not in the subject.

I will use the word as an alias for outstanding, distinct, explicit, and with that little trick I have moved from and urge for a descriptive definition to that of a normative definition, which makes the world much easier for all of us.

I just wanted to bare the bones in this, somewhat, confusing matter.

Maybe this was not very kurz, but hopefully it was vielsagend enough. If not, I must try again . 

Yesterday, I was playing around searching on google.

I came up with a number of hits searching “connotation” . I starting reading some of them. One hit from a site on museums was very interesting. It seems that I recognized some of the wording. It sounded very familiar. 

I had to go back to my post on denotation and connotation on this blog, and found that the text was a copy/paste of that text. Some letters were gone from the original, and the two pictures had gone as well.

Here is the original text from this blog. 

I don´t know about this. Should I be flattered, or not? It was a deliberate rearrangement without any reference or link.

Well, I decided to go with the former . 

Comments are welcome. 

By the way, as this blog grows, I will add all books that are referred to in Library Thing.  If you want to have a look at references in one go, then you are welcome to go here.

Well, come to think of it, I might actually add more books than those I refer to on the blog . 

As I have suggested elsewhere, this blog will be built up of themes. 

New themes may be added along the way, but the themes so far, are: 

main themes:

gestalt psychology, tagged as gestalt psychology

gestalt factors, tagged as gestalt factor 

semiology or semiotics, tagged as semiology and/or semiotics

hermeneutics and phenomenology, tagged as hermeneutics and/or phenomenology

naturalistic human sciences, tagged as naturalism (not yet in operation)

barebones notebook, tagged as notebook

barebones toolbox, tagged as toolbox 

minor themes: 

miscellaneous, posts that do not belong to any other theme, mostly of informative character

picture, all posts that contains pictures in them 

barebones pitstop, posts that mainly are famous or non-famous quotations, that may add to the picture, and give inspiration for further reading. These pitstops will be posted without any further comments from me, which means that you yourself have to elaborate on them, and make them meaningful. Pitstops will be tagged as pitstop. (Not yet in operation).

multiple tagging: 

Posts will normally not have one tag only, but more tags. This is to make sure that, even if you don’t follow this tight tag structure when searching for themes, but a more intuitive method, you will most likely get to your destination anyway.

Good luck with it. 

———————–

This post has also been posted as a page. I need to do some retagging in former posts, but that will be done in a couple of days time. Best way to navigate this blog is through the tag cloud.

How to navigate this blog? 

Basically, a blog consists of posts, pages and different types of links for navigation. And comments. 

All posts are loaded sequentially, meaning that posts comes after each other in a chronological order. They are on the front page till they are pushed off by newer posts. After that, you need to retrieve them from the archives. That can sometimes be difficult if they are not tagged properly. Particularly as blogs grow.

Pages, normally, are of a more permanent character, when it comes to accessing them from the front page. They don’t go anywhere. Are not pushed off. On this blog you will find pages at the top of the blogroll (at the right hand side).

When using the blog, it is important, that you are aware of how the blog is intended, and structured. On this blog, and in this project, the chronology is not important.

It is true that both posts and pages are loaded chronologically, since that is a simple necessity. However, posts will not be outdated. Even if  posts are one week old, or for that matter one year old, that do not mean that these posts are not important anymore.  

Reason Why: The blog will be oriented around several themes, and all of these themes will be active at the same time. 

In addition to that, the blog will, hopefully, be quite extensive.

At the moment I have barely scratched the surface. If you go to resources (in pages), you will find that there are 4 main resource themes; gestalt psychology, semiotics or semiology, hermeneutics and the naturalistic human sciences. Add to that; an experience theme. Add to that; a barebones notebook theme. 

The naturalistic inspiration alone will, hopefully, mount to some 150+ posts relevant for communication, and that amount will be difficult to cluster, and sort, without using the tag tool precisely .  It will hopeless for you to try to access such an amount randomly by simply going to the archives.  

To follow a specific theme, I suggest that you use the tag cloud to access it. Just hit the tag label in question, and you will get all posts relevant for that theme.   

I will try to be very precise when tagging posts, so that is will be easy for you to follow a theme. All posts concerning gestalt factors e.g. will be tagged “gestalt factors”. All posts that contain pictures will be tagged “picture”.  All posts concerning  the barebones notebook, will be tagged “notebook”… and so forth. 

Besides, posts that belong a specific theme will not be loaded after any pre-planned schedule, and certainly not in one row of posts. That goes for any present and future theme. That makes it even more difficult to follow a theme by using the archives.

So, you should use the tags in the tag cloud to navigate.

Why this complicated, you may ask? It’s not complicated once you get the hang of it. And it’s precisely what tags are for.

In fact it mirrors of how you have to deal with communication acts in any real life situation. Not bit by bit, and one aspect at a time, but all at once.

For your information; This post is also posted as a page. 

Just for your information, the domain name http://barebonescommunication.com is now operational. And you can write to barabones communication at direct@barebonescommunication.com