Year: 2018

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

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 …

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.…

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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