Full-Stack Media Ecology

Year: 2018

Web 1.0 as content of Web 2.0

In a 1964 article entitled New Media and the Arts published in the University of Wisconson’s Arts in Society, Marshall McLuhan summarized his theory of media as so:

To sum this up, it can be enunciated as a principle that all new media or technologies, whatever, create new environments, psychic and social, that assume as their natural content the earlier technologies. Moreover, the content of these new environments undergoes a progressive reshaping so that what had appeared earlier as dishevelled and degraded becomes conventionalized into an artistic genre. TV, as the latest archetypal environment or technology, is very much in this dishevelled phase. The movie remained in such a dishevelled phase for decades. Whether Telstar is already a new archetypal environment that assumes the present TV form as its content will appear fairly soon. The principle of new technology as

What’s Changed Since McLuhan

In Marshall McLuhan’s time the globe had been criss-crossed by copper wires, etherized by aerial antennae, and circled by satellites. Unlike today, this communications infrastructure was not intermediated by computers. The signal was direct, excepting the time-delay of recording and playback. The content of McLuhan’s media was, in a word, analogue: it was transduced from the energy of its input by electronic sensor into transmittable signals of analogous proportion. This means that the sound waves were directly represented by fluctuations in the electricity of the wires carrying them or the electromagnetic radio waves being broadcast. The light being picked up by the television cameras scanning finger was faithfully reproduced on the cathode ray tube. While the form of each media certainly had a role in shaping and biasing the content by its forms, the “nerves” of the electronically-extended nervous system …

Silicon & Charybdis III: McLuhan & Microcomputers

After over a year of work, I’m very pleased to release Silicon & Charybdis III: McLuhan & Microcomputers! It’s a leap above the first two episodes, and I hope you find it to be the authoritative, definitive history of the computer medium. How did simulation swallow everything? The short answer is: gradually. But the long answer is way more interesting and, more importantly, human.

It’s been a really long road toward producing this little documentary, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!…

My Cyberspace: Part Three

Continued from Part Two.

In Grade 11 I took my first programming class. Although I had played around with Logo in elementary school, and had created many complicated DOS Batch files, this was my introduction to all the formal elements of modern computer programming. We learned Turing, an educational object-oriented language developed at the University of Toronto. I wrote a multiplayer Tron/Snake-style game which would send each players key-presses back and forth across the network, but it often got out of sync resulting in the screens of both players looking different and perhaps both thinking they had won or lost. My final class project was a graphical implementation of  Battleship. In Grade 12 we learned Java, an language with plenty of actual real-world usage.…

Slow Technology

I’ve been typing lots of stuff on a 386 laptop lately. It’s an IBM PS/2 L40 SX, upon which I’ve installed Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Word 2.0.

Quick tip: In Windows 3.1 there was no user folder or Documents folder. When you went to save a Word file, the default would be to save it inside the program files folder for Word, which is a weird place to keep your documents. But if go in to properties dialogue for the Word shortcut in Program Manager, then you can change the working directory of the application. That way you can choose where in the DOS path the program thinks it is running. So if you made a folder called C:\DOCS and then made that the working directory for Word then your first File->Save command would automatically open up within your new

Chairman of the Board Ho

In 2004, prolific online poster humdog wrote a extremely insightful analysis of the nature of internet communications and the “board ho”.

people do amazing acts of self-disclosure online. they do it, and i think they do it for one reason only. there is a different economy online and the payout is in attention and in time, not money attention is the big payout online.

The idea is that internet forums grow and thrive on the irrational self-disclosure of Too Much Information by people who commoditize all the private details of their lives and give it away in return for attention.

one of the things i see on blah blah boards is that many of the people who frequent them regularly appear to be people whose lives are not working for one reason or another. voices on the boards seem to

My appearance on Conversations with Harold Channer

After I spoke with Howard for my podcast, he invited me onto his own show which is broadcast on Manhattan Neighborhood Network local access cable television. Since I started working on Silicon & Charybdis I’ve been neck-deep in studying the works of Marshall McLuhan and trying to apply them to computers. I’ve found a few friends in the McLuhan scene since, many of which have been on Conversations in the past, so I am honoured to do so in kind. It was a pleasure to share some of my thinking on computers as a medium and their role in society and current events. I look forward to many more such occasions, with Harold or anyone else!

Erratum: The Vanity Fair article that I mention actually came out in 2009.

 …

My Cyberspace: Part Two

As you can see from part one, each modern computer itself is a vast terrain for exploration. Every application is a maze of screens and dialogues and options, providing tools which offer an incalculable variety of possible workflows and possibilities. Operating systems themselves are highly configurable and have deep levels of access and abstraction going down from the high-level user interface deep into the internals upon which it depends. All the files and resources which came with software can be pulled apart and opened, modded and configured. A modern computer is an entire cyberspace in and of itself.

The Web

But, of course, once the internet gets thrown into the mix, computers often seem to become flattened into mere machines which run your web browser. It wasn’t always this way, but started in 1993 when the world wide web …

My Cyberspace: Part One

Everyone has their own cyberspace; this is the story of mine.

My family first got a computer when I was about 6 years old. It was a Compaq Contura 4/25c laptop, a 486 computer running DOS with Windows 3.1. There were two games, both for DOS. One was a Berenstain Bears colouring book, the other was educational involving several minigames with a frog and lilypads. I spent a lot of time exploring every nook and cranny of that computer. I discovered typing “help” at the DOS prompt provided a list of commands to try out. I found the “dosshell” which I thought was edgy because it had the word “hell” in its name. I liked watching the Surface Scan in ScanDisk. I couldn’t figure out the difference between edit.com and qbasic.com beyond a few extra menu entries. I increased our

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