Author: Clinton (Page 7 of 8)

The importance of this essay by Architectural Historian Siegfried Giedion in the history of media ecology is well laid-out on the McLuhan’s New Sciences blog. Transcribed from the April 1944 issue of Architecture and Engineer Magazine and reproduced here in full.

WE HAVE TO MAKE ORDER

… A Faculty of Interrelations

By SIEGFRIED GIEDION

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, …

The answer may surprise you!…

I loaded up Windows 3.1 in order to run a 1995 interactive CD-ROM called Understanding McLuhan and there was an interview section featuring Camille Paglia! I searched some excerpts and apparently this interview has never been posted online before. So unless you bought this CD two decades ago, you haven’t read this! Pretty cool, eh?

Q: Could you tell us a little about your intellectual connection to Marshall McLuhan?

A: My name is Camille Paglia. I am Professor of Humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and I am the author of two books: Sexual Personae and Sex, Art and the American Culture. I consider Marshall McLuhan one of the great masters of my college years. I was in college in 1964 to 1968, at the very high point of the ‘60s revolution. Marshall McLuhan was assigned in …

On June 29th, 2019, I delivered the above presentation to the Media Ecology Association at their 20th Annual Convention in Toronto, on the U of T campus, based on this paper. Learn more about the convention at mediaethics.ca. Attempts to move the paper toward a more finalized form have resulted in sprawling additions which will require much work, however I hope the draft below suffices to entertain curiosity piqued by the video. 🙂 – Clinton, 08/02/19

This paper is undergoing a significant re-write, not least to address some typos and add more sources. Please consider it a draft in its present form. – Clinton, 02/21/19

Cyberspace is a fictional sensory environment with a traceable history. It is formally defined — much like the Euclidean space which Wyndham Lewis feared losing, and which Marshall McLuhan announced obsolete thirty years later. …

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!…