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
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 …
The internet exploded in the 90s from an obscure academic network into a world-changing total-environment, the ramifications of which we are still trying to understand. In that time, Thom Stark was living in the San Francisco Bay Area, reporting from the ground on the developing network technologies which undergird all of our modern communications. His website, StarkRealities.com, contains his nearly 100 columns from these formative years covering everything from technologies like Bluetooth, Wifi, IPv4 vs. IPv6, to social concerns regarding “netiquette”, privacy, spam, misleading marketing practices, and government regulation. They make up, for all intents and purposes, a comprehensive history text which never underestimates the reader. His work is a clear demonstration of how everything old is new again, for want of larger cultural absorption of what was, for early adopters, common knowledge.
Read the SCOTUS decision regarding corporate goals …
From the middle of Canada came Marshall McLuhan: a Winnipigeon. So too hails film editor Richard Altman, whose recently released McLuhan Unclaimed series of videos ought to give you something to think about for the next ten years as you think to play it in the background of your down-time. Altman deftly distills hundreds of hours of audio and video footage into a tight, psychedelic montage of meaning which can be jumped into at any point, for any duration, to give your brain something meaty to chew on. If you want to take a deep-plunge into what media ecology is all about, Altman’s McLuhan Unclaimed series is the best crash-course going; think of it as the acoustic, surreal complement to my more linear, visual, prosaic work. It’s nice to have company in the anti-environment, and in this episode we …
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 …
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 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 …
Kimberley Noble is a multiple-award-winning journalist for investigative and feature stories that explored the how things really work in corporate Canada’s corridors of power. She was former long-time staff writer for The Globe and Mail and Maclean’s Magazine, and won the National Newspaper Awards for Business Reporting for her coverage of both the Edper Group (the forerunner of the conglomerate now known as Brookfield) and of the big money behind the Canada-U.S. softwood lumber dispute. She was also nominated for two additional NNAs for series about executive compensation and white-collar crime; among other awards were a business writing prize for an investigative profile of Frank Stronach and a Professional Writers Association of Canada feature writing award for an analytical story about sentencing of Garth Drabinsky.
At present she is teaching Media Studies at the University of Guelph-Humber and was …
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.…
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, …
Hello World! My concerns, fellow netizens, are about how cyberspace has affected our sense of embodiment and existence in our physical world. I study and tutor on Marshall McLuhan, and develop my ideas in what I am calling a Full Stack Media Ecology.
My earnest questioning began in 2014. Answers finally manifested in 2017 with my video documentary series Silicon & Charybdis.
In March 2024 I released a book-length culmination of my work the past decade titled Cheating at Peekaboo Against a Bad Faith Adversary detailing how the work of Jean Piaget was used to hijack early childhood development in kids like TempleOS creator Terry A. Davis.
Read more about the complementarity between media ecology and developmental psychology here in Who You Callin’ a Robot?
In June of 2019 I “Toppled the Pillars of Cyberspace” in Toronto at the 20th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention. Watch or read my presentation and paper to get to know more about how this all started.
I’ve also presented twice at LibrePlanet for the Free Software Foundation. My 2023 talk on the Long History of Metrics Before and After Cybernetics presents a sprawling overview of how mechanical calculation and optimization took over our world, inspired by Marshall McLuhan.
