Full-Stack Media Ecology

Year: 2019 (Page 1 of 2)

Mission Statement

Human being can be considered from two inextricably interwoven perspectives: Human nature and the human condition. Think of it as nature vs. nurture, except what is nurturing our being is the total physical environment all together.

Since post-modern theories of Social Constructionism focuses only on the content of media as environmentally-constitutive, it fails to present a relatable account of the contemporary human condition for a growing number of people. That is where Media Ecology comes in.

Creating and internalizing a fuller view of our material, technological world allows all human being—human beings—to become clearer and more relatable by relief. People as products of their environment become distinct and empathetic as we internalize the total environment as backdrop and see how it differently shapes all of us.

Only once we see the physical world for what it is can we put …

1995 – Bob Logan on Marshall McLuhan

Continuing my extraction of interviews from the 1995 Understand McLuhan interactive CD-ROM, I’m very happy to share an interview with Robert K. Logan, former University of Toronto physics professor, communications theorist, author and collaborator with Marshall McLuhan. His defense of his colleague and friend, McLuhan Misunderstood: Setting the Record Straight, is an invaluable essay providing essential context for reading and empathizing with the “guru of the electronic age”. Nobody can better provide a “hard science”-informed bridge to the enigmatic, artistic McLuhan than Bob Logan.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with Marshall McLuhan?

A: Well, I would like to talk about my relationship with Marshall McLuhan, because it was a great privilege to have known this man and to have been able to have collaborated with him. I was first introduced to him by …

Virtual Reality, 90s Style

I had a great visit today to the research library at The McLuhan Institute, run by Andrew McLuhan and stocked with his father Eric’s vast collection of materials. It’s an extra-acadamic resource for studying media, containing many historical and current books (presently being catalogued) marked-up and annotated by Eric McLuhan, tying them into and updating the legacy of Marshall McLuhan’s media work. I found lots of interesting things penciled in the books I flipped through.

For instance, in Virtual Reality by Howard Rheingold I found some underlines Eric made in this paragraph of page 16.

Imagine a wraparound television with three-dimensional programs, including three-dimensional sound, and solid objects that you can pick up and manipulate, even feel with your fingers and hands. Imagine immersing yourself in an artificial world and actively exploring it, rather than peering in at it

1995 – Derrick de Kerckhove on Marshall McLuhan

I loaded up Windows 3.1 in order to run a 1995 interactive CD-ROM called Understanding McLuhan and there was an interview section full of interviews! Here is second never-before-posted-online interview, this time with McLuhan’s student and translator, and long-time director of the McLuhan Center at UofT, Derrick de Kerckhove. Unless you bought this CD two decades ago, you haven’t read this!

 

Q: What influence has McLuhan had on you? Was there a flash when you realized the importance this man would have in your life or in the work that you would do?

A: Yes, the influence of McLuhan on me, and I am saying on me, not just my work, was pretty radical. Very strong, and very continuous. And it happened in stages, deepening stages. The first time was just coming into his room for the first class …

A Proper Study

When you walk into a proper study, you are confronted by an overwhelming surface of book-spines, all displaying more titles, all at once, than you can consciously read. And yet, you can soak them in rather quickly. They are mostly non-fiction. They are all related to a few topics which are gone into in-depth and overlap like a gradient.

It is clear that the owner has spent several decades amassing this collection, and now sits in this room like the focal point of the concave surface which these books converge into. Through methodical reading, through the gentle weaving of a tapestry of associations and resonances (and some connections), these books have provided a lever out into space, onto which the reader has gradually migrated the interiority of their being. They have, over much applied experience, developed a point of view …

Derrick de Kerckhove’s rebuttal to my de-electrification of computing

In my last post, I gave a response to a question that had been asked by a viewer regarding my MEA presentation. The question came in two parts, the first part being “about the relation between the simultaneity of the computer (due to electric speed up) and the linear one-thing-at a-time structure of the CPU.” In the second part, it was clarified to be a question of whether the computer is “electric” in the sense McLuhan meant in using the term. I interpreted it to be about how McLuhan saw electric media of his day, vs. its nature today. My response began definitively, “No…”

This morning I was pleased to find a response from Prof. Derrick de Kerckhove in my email inbox!

This is a lovely and instructive comment, Clinton and I enjoyed it a lot. The main

Q&A: Is a computer electric in McLuhan’s sense of the word?

This is the first installment in a new category of post called Q&A. When I receive interesting questions, I’ll post the answers here on my blog. Got a question? Fire away!

No. McLuhan’s electronic media were all variously complex devices of electronic components: oscillators and electron valves (vacuum tubes and transistors) modulating and adjusting waves of current which were analogous to sound patterns, light patterns, etc. They instantaneously transmitted the energies raw reality transduced into the charge in a conductor. That’s what Morse discovered crossing the ocean back from Europe at the end of a trip he had embarked upon to distract himself from his sorrows. While traveling in America, he received a letter too-late, warning of his wife’s sudden sickness and returned home to find he had missed her funeral and burial. During dinner, onboard a ship called the …

Media Ecology for the OCaC III: Reunifying The Soul

The third installment of my very own Media Ecology course. The rest of this post contains the full shooting script with embedded slides, and so can be considered a more boring print-form of the video.

Hi! I’m Clinton, and this is Media Ecology for the Online Community as Classroom. Today we are going to take a deep dive into two monumental books by Swiss architectural historian Siegfried Giedion, because in this series we are opting to take the long-way home to our title subject, situating computers and cyberspace as just one more development of the ever-evolving ground upon which—and, increasingly, within which—human communities gather.…

A Faculty of Interrelations

The importance of this essay by Architectural Historian Siegfried Giedion in the history of media ecology is well laid-out on the McLuhan’s New Sciences blog. Transcribed from the April 1944 issue of Architecture and Engineer Magazine and reproduced here in full.

WE HAVE TO MAKE ORDER

… A Faculty of Interrelations

By SIEGFRIED GIEDION

Great changes are foreshadowed in our cultural structure. The elements of this change already exist in science, whether biology or physics, in art, in architecture and in many other fields. But these elements are unrelated: they have no inner contact with one another.

There can be no question that what is and what will continue to be the outstanding task of our time, interrupted at the moment by a dangerous war. Even as the soldier has to prepare the means of defense in peace times, …

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