Full-Stack Media Ecology
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!…
On the 26th of October I attended a symposium at St. Michael’s College on the University of Toronto Campus called Reading Frankenstein: Then, Now, Next. The day was divided into those three parts, regarding the past, present, and future context of the novel to society. Here are my rough notes pertaining to the Now and Next portions of the day.…
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.…
On September 21, 2018 I attended the Many McLuhans Symposium at the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library in Toronto! Here is a journey through my takeaway from the event, told through excerpts and interviews, featuring many wonderful academics, McLuhan family members, and enthusiasts in the scene.
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Professor Paul Levinson, PHD, teaches Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City and is the author of many books, including The Digital McLuhan. In this ground-breaking episode we delve deep into McLuhanalia, the historical implications of modern events, and the social effects of technology. An absolute must-see!
Prof. Levinson’s website can be found at http://paullev.com/
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A broad conversation on Social Media with Don Talton, automation expert, media psychology grad student, and creator of the SafeNews media rating service. We talk history of the net, privacy and cultural problems, and the 2016 Election with lots of great context!
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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
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
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.
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An interview with television broadcaster Harold Channer, who has been interviewing guests on his hour-long television show Conversations with Harold Channer in New York City since 1973. With over 4000 hours of recorded interviews, Mr. Channer is one of the most prolific figures in the world of public access cable television.
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