Author: Clinton (Page 5 of 8)

Steve Jobs tripping balls on LSD, commanding fields of wheat

Product Designers are the new Ad Men

June 8, 2021 / Clinton / 1 Comment

Affordances are, for cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, the primary features of our perceptual salience landscape. The overlap between the salient landscape and McLuhan’s inner landscape are striking. Whatever is salient to us in our environment comes to our attention by proposing some interaction or participation with it (i.e. involvement for McLuhan). For the English professor McLuhan, steeped in art criticism, it is the deviation between the interior landscape and the material environment which he found of particular salience—particularly as it this gap presented itself as an abysmal, in-salient void to nearly everyone else.

After James Gibson coined the term affordance (he also coined the term percept in the ’50s, a term used by McLuhan in counterpoint to concept) the handle was taken up by product designers and HCI (human computer interaction) theorists as a means of creating easy-to-use …

God’s Man on the Inside

June 6, 2021 / Clinton / 0 Comments

Over the past six years I’ve typed out some 4000 personal notes of many various sorts. There have been weeks where I’ve typed some 5-10 thousand words a day, and some weeks where I haven’t written a thing. Many are commentaries on books, films, and online discussions with excerpts, page references, and time-codes. Many are snippets of stray thoughts and ideas, or delicate words which had floated into mind which I had fancied enough to preserve. A great many are long dumps of stream of conscious thoughts, begun with the intention to write-down a conscious thought-in-mind, but which sprawled outward during the recording into unforeseeable tangents and strange destinations.

Ideally I’d take some of these long essays and polish them, or dissect them, into proper essays or papers. But in reality, I’ve seldom the time nor inclination to revisit my …

Stitched Into the Matrix: A Review

March 7, 2021 / Clinton / 0 Comments

Since the industry’s pivot to peacetime in the late 1940s, computers have come to constitute our modern material environment literally, metaphorically, and aesthetically. Like a store-front window marketing display by Frank L. Baum, the ground-floor, street-facing show-room of IBM in the 1950s offered New Yorkers (regardless of outdoor conditions) a brightly-lit, unchanging view into the timeless, abstract world of computing outside of our own (Harwood, 46). Engineers in white lab coats moved spindles of tape and decks of cards, literally working inside the computer as they bused data between shiny large cabinets for curious onlookers twenty-four hours a day.

And there went everybody. The nature of the data being processed—demographic, financial, the results of opinion polling and sales data and audience testing and tracking—placed newly-minted “consumers” even deeper inside of computers. Not as components within the computer’s functioning, but as …

Two new long video interviews

January 26, 2021 / Clinton / 0 Comments

In the past two weeks I’ve been interviewed twice on two different excellent podcasts.

The first was for the first McLuhan Symposium on the Parallax Podcast Sweeny vs Bard hosted by Alexander Bard and Andrew Sweeny.

And the second was with James Kourtides on his podcast The Rooster’s Crow.

Check them both out!…

Lots of new off-site Activity

December 6, 2020 / Clinton / 0 Comments

Hey folks!

I know it looks like not much has happened here lately, but that’s because I’ve been working on lots of larger projects.

First and foremost: I’m very pleased to take on the responsibilities of Journal Production Manager and Associate Editor for The New Explorations Journal out of the University of Toronto. This peer-reviewed academic journal assumes the mission statement of Marshall McLuhan and Ted Carpenter’s original Explorations journal. We also run a regularly-updated blog (linked to above) to which I’ve been contributing new writings!

But what about the podcast?

I’ve had lots of ideas about what to do with Life in the Foam. However, once again, I haven’t been inactive. The New Explorations Journal also has a podcast which has already released three episodes (at the time of this posting).

When the next copy of the journal …

Gerry Fialka interviews The Concerned Netizen

July 25, 2020 / Clinton / 0 Comments

Californian film-maker and James Joyce aficionado Gerry Fialka and I sat down for a very interesting interview on July 24th, 2020. He’s been collecting thought-provoking questions and I tried to give them my best answers. 🙂…

Painter and Model, 1928 by Pablo Picasso

The Corporate Mob

June 23, 2020 / Clinton / 0 Comments

The simultaneity of electric communication creates an environment of togetherness for users. By using these media, individuals are irresistibly collectivized through its content. Individuals whose bodies are scattered across the habitable face of the planet get the uncanny sense of being in the same place, creating shared memories in common and, thus, share in common identity. Having traveled together, the result is a tribalism which is called—quite pointedly—mass. Communing in the same shared electric body, mass audiences are the dominant subject of 20th century history: it is the mediums of press, radio, and television which unite the developed world.

The innate sense of belonging, or co-involvement in a group is palpable. And yet today we find that sense of electric interrelation artificially mis-interpreted, pigeonholing our modern tribal identity into statistically-quantifiable, superficial signifiers. The source of our feeling of belonging to …

A Portrait of the Media Theorists as a Young Man—My MEA2020 Presentation

June 18, 2020 / Clinton / 0 Comments

Very glad to present to the Media Ecology Association yesterday. 🙂…

1995 – Neil Postman on Marshall McLuhan

January 20, 2020 / Clinton / 4 Comments

After Marshall McLuhan’s passing in 1980, educator and lifetime New Yorker Neil Postman became the central figure in the field which has come to be known as Media Ecology.

Through his work both in founding Media Ecology as a graduate program and in authoring many of its key texts, such as Amusing Ourselves to Death, Technopoly, and Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century Postman taught generations growing up late in the age of television—during the early rise of microcomputers—to use enlightenment values in carefully and consciously assessing the potentials and morality of modern technology through consideration of his six questions, which are:

1. What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?

2. Whose problem is it?

3. Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?

4. What new

…

Mission Statement

December 6, 2019 / Clinton / 0 Comments

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 …