The CEME

I’m shook.

Both literally and figuratively, in case there was any confusion.1

While checking out a wikipedia entry on a book title, I witnessed a CEME2.

A Canon Event Mandela Effect.

Though perhaps “experienced” is more accurate than “witnessed”, because like I said, I’m shook.

Let me explain. No, too much, let me sum up.

I was shared a link to Vilem Flusser’s Thinking Further: Fragments in Communicology, which looked interesting enough. I had never heard of either the author or the term “communicology” before, but had read a couple pieces by Kittler, who wrote the introduction to this, so I was intrigued, and being the studious sort I did the old “right-click, search on Duck-Duck Go”3 on that new term.

Which is when I fell through the CEME.

You see, a couple of my degrees are in the field of Communication Studies, so I’ve been exposed to a fair bit of it, but I’ve never heard of a branch of the field referred to as Communicology before. Which, fair, it’s a pretty big tent, and there’s a lot of sub-disciplines, and we can always learn a little more.

But this Mandela Effect-like experience I was having as I scrolled through the Wikipedia page (linked above) felt like someone was rewriting the history of the field in new terms that I had never heard of, with authors I was only vaguely aware. Maybe, kinda sorta?

Was this some hallucination in the post-truth Age of AI? No, I didn’t think so, as I had no reason to believe both the University of Minnesota Press and the Friedrich Kittler, mentioned on the book cover shown above, were artifacts of a hallucinating AI. My trust still existed.

But the evidence before me on the Wikipedia page was shaking the foundations of that trust.

The page in question, just in case someone quilts the CEME later and the evidence vanishes.

And by dint of it shaking my foundations4, this is why this particular Mandela Effect is a Canon Event, the CE to the ME I was experiencing.

CEME, pronounced seam, even though it kinda looks like meme, stitching together the cracks between two scraps of the fabric of reality, where things are not as they seem. The light shining through the fragments, the sintering not quite complete, still visible as the world is re-woven, an antonym to those Lacanian quilting points that bind the scraps together.

Observers close to the subject can still see the patches, that the scraps of fabric don’t quite match, and can spot where they were joined if they were present to see the weavers of the CEME in action.

Ya gotta know where to look.

After a while, evidence of the seam fades, as it looks like it was always there. You need to experience it, the rending, the tear, to know what took place.

Will I buy the book? Hmm. Do I dare?

Perhaps, I always was the curious sort.

But let this post be my stitch in the weave, so I can find my way back.

I’ll let you know how it is…

  1. (Though more the later, if I’m being honest). ↩︎
  2. Pronounced “seem” or “seam”, though we’ll have to get into the meaning of these homophones in a little bit. ↩︎
  3. I’ve moved on from Bing-ing things. ↩︎
  4. I’ll let you queue up the AC/DC tune, I don’t have a media budget here. ↩︎