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Full-Stack Media Ecology

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The Best Book Never Written on Amiga Computers

March 5, 2022 / / 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much Apple and Microsoft have sucked up all the air in the room regarding the history of microcomputers. Docudramas, biographies, and news stories exalt the dominance of the two major corporations creating our PC environments.

What culture needs is the larger picture, the fuller story of the way these machines entered into our world. I remembered a series of articles I had read over a decade ago regarding the history of Amiga Computers. Just like the mythos around Woz and Jobs in the garage, wiring up the first Apple machines, the story of the Amiga is charged with wonder and marvels.

I rediscovered those articles today, and discovered that the series has tripled in length since I first read them. Since they’re spread throughout the site, I’ve compiled the “chapters”, as it were, …

Ambient Music Arrives Too Late

December 10, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I’m listening to Klaus Schulze and he’s really good at creepy ambient stuff.

I feel like, had technology been around to allow the production of this sort of music, it would have been perfectly on-time 50 years earlier. That’s a mismatch between the artistic aspiration and the faculties of the time to meet the requirements. Maybe painting and stage-play was then at where this music arrives later.

We have to consider the time-fractured sensorium, owing technological disparities, as a player in the defeat over the holistic human individual and their own coherent emotional expression. This is the trauma of the bomb, and the post-war ear.

Jackhammers and machines created Jazz with all its discontinuities out of environmental impetus. Le Corbusier called the staggered skyline of Manhattan “hot jazz in stone.” But perhaps ambient music was something ideal to counteract all …

McLuhan and Art as Occult Gnostic Initiation

October 22, 2021 / / 0 Comments

VoegelinView, the website for the Eric Voegelin Society, is running a 4-part special series on the correspondences of Marshall McLuhan and the German-American political philosopher. The series is written by Cameron McEwen of the McLuhan’s New Sciences blog.

Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics (1952) posits a continuity of form between the ancient Gnostic beliefs and contemporary political movements. A year after the release of The Mechanical Bride (1951), McLuhan had, shall we say, a “breakthrough” into the nature of the poetic techniques he had been studying from Romantic poetry, through Symbolism, into the Modern styles as a process of psychology. A useful adumbration of his scholarly “perspective” on this development can be found in Through The Vanishing Point (1968), by McLuhan and Harley Parker:

Concern with the processes in the arts led some nineteenth-century aestheticians to consider that

…

Media Shamanhood

October 7, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I was asked by the Maniphesto Media Academy to give a talk on Marshall McLuhan, and decided to take the opportunity to be as radical as possible in re-writing the book!

I want to re-record this with a pre-written script, so as to avoid all the umming and stuttering, so please provide as much feedback, corrections, and opinions as you can to help me make this a solid introduction to Media Ecology!…

Henry Luce reads Fortune

TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE

September 16, 2021 / / 0 Comments
or
The Psychopathology of ‘Time’ and ‘Life’
or
The Ballet Luce
by Marshall McLuhan, 1947

It would seem a very good time to take stock of the performance of this trio now that Mr. Luce has begun to think seriously of adding a fourth star to his stable. The fourth member is to be definitely high-brow, if it appears. And in passing from glorified spot-news (Time) to nursery entertainment (Life) to managerial grand opera (Fortune) to high-brow criticism, Mr. Luce must still have an eye on Der Verlag Ullstein from whose activities and methods his own are so largely derivative. Thus Ullstein Querschnitt printed Pirandello, Proust, Cocteau, Woolf, Mann, and others in their original languages, and aimed to be “a monthly for the literary gourmet” and for “the intellectually indulgent, the well read, the …

Steve Jobs tripping balls on LSD, commanding fields of wheat

Product Designers are the new Ad Men

June 8, 2021 / / 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 / / 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 …

Movie Poster for A Glitch in the Matrix

Stitched Into the Matrix: A Review

March 7, 2021 / / 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 / / 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 / / 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 …

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