This is the beginning of a series explaining the road-not-taken in the academic field of literary criticism. The result has been the academic dominance of critical theory and a century of post-modernism (or Baudrillardian Simulation, or Orwellian historical revision, or however else you might put it).

Thee Thy, Though Thumb

The missing ingredient in all contemporary media analysis is appreciation for analogical proportionality. The reason this factor has been lacking, I think, is the catch-22 of requiring the faculty in order to develop it further. The difficulty is like that of Tom Thumb were he to hitch a ride with Jack up the beanstalk on a mission to educate the giants on the apples and the oranges: implicit barriers between a whole stack of several differing orders of magnitude must be overcome merely to put any modern situation into fluent …

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, …

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

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!…

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 …