After Marshall McLuhan’s passing in 1980, educator and lifetime New Yorker Neil Postman became the central figure in the field which has come to be known as Media Ecology.
Through his work both in founding Media Ecology as a graduate program and in authoring many of its key texts, such as Amusing Ourselves to Death, Technopoly, and Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century Postman taught generations growing up late in the age of television—during the early rise of microcomputers—to use enlightenment values in carefully and consciously assessing the potentials and morality of modern technology through consideration of his six questions, which are:
1. What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?
2. Whose problem is it?
3. Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?
Human being can be considered from two inextricably interwoven perspectives: Human nature and the human condition. Think of it as nature vs. nurture, except what is nurturing our being is the total physical environment all together.
Since post-modern theories of Social Constructionism focuses only on the content of media as environmentally-constitutive, it fails to present a relatable account of the contemporary human condition for a growing number of people. That is where Media Ecology comes in.
Creating and internalizing a fuller view of our material, technological world allows all human being—human beings—to become clearer and more relatable by relief. People as products of their environment become distinct and empathetic as we internalize the total environment as backdrop and see how it differently shapes all of us.
Only once we see the physical world for what it is can we put …
Continuing my extraction of interviews from the 1995 Understand McLuhan interactive CD-ROM, I’m very happy to share an interview with Robert K. Logan, former University of Toronto physics professor, communications theorist, author and collaborator with Marshall McLuhan. His defense of his colleague and friend, McLuhan Misunderstood: Setting the Record Straight, is an invaluable essay providing essential context for reading and empathizing with the “guru of the electronic age”. Nobody can better provide a “hard science”-informed bridge to the enigmatic, artistic McLuhan than Bob Logan.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with Marshall McLuhan?
A: Well, I would like to talk about my relationship with Marshall McLuhan, because it was a great privilege to have known this man and to have been able to have collaborated with him. I was first introduced to him by …
Beneath the well-popularized myths of giants like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, computing has fast-moving, highly-technical story involving very many people and places. And in 1984, Howard Rheingold—who had been the embedded writer documenting and communicating the work of the Xerox PARC team as they developed the GUI, Ethernet, and Object Oriented Programming paradigms—saw the very-real possibility of that story going unrecorded, and lost to history. His book Tools for Thought became the definitive work documenting the history of computer development, and was a key resource of mine for creative Silicon and Charybdis. His later books, like The Virtual Community and Virtual Reality, further cemented Howard Rheingold status as the key writer and test-subject for the largest technological shift in history. He was editor of The Whole Earth Catalogue, testified for the ACLU against the 1996 Communications Decency Act, …
I had a great visit today to the research library at The McLuhan Institute, run by Andrew McLuhan and stocked with his father Eric’s vast collection of materials. It’s an extra-acadamic resource for studying media, containing many historical and current books (presently being catalogued) marked-up and annotated by Eric McLuhan, tying them into and updating the legacy of Marshall McLuhan’s media work. I found lots of interesting things penciled in the books I flipped through.
For instance, in Virtual Reality by Howard Rheingold I found some underlines Eric made in this paragraph of page 16.
Imagine a wraparound television with three-dimensional programs, including three-dimensional sound, and solid objects that you can pick up and manipulate, even feel with your fingers and hands. Imagine immersing yourself in an artificial world and actively exploring it, rather than peering in at it
I loaded up Windows 3.1 in order to run a 1995 interactive CD-ROM called Understanding McLuhan and there was an interview section full of interviews! Here is second never-before-posted-online interview, this time with McLuhan’s student and translator, and long-time director of the McLuhan Center at UofT, Derrick de Kerckhove. Unless you bought this CD two decades ago, you haven’t read this!
Q: What influence has McLuhan had on you? Was there a flash when you realized the importance this man would have in your life or in the work that you would do?
A: Yes, the influence of McLuhan on me, and I am saying on me, not just my work, was pretty radical. Very strong, and very continuous. And it happened in stages, deepening stages. The first time was just coming into his room for the first class …
The internet exploded in the 90s from an obscure academic network into a world-changing total-environment, the ramifications of which we are still trying to understand. In that time, Thom Stark was living in the San Francisco Bay Area, reporting from the ground on the developing network technologies which undergird all of our modern communications. His website, StarkRealities.com, contains his nearly 100 columns from these formative years covering everything from technologies like Bluetooth, Wifi, IPv4 vs. IPv6, to social concerns regarding “netiquette”, privacy, spam, misleading marketing practices, and government regulation. They make up, for all intents and purposes, a comprehensive history text which never underestimates the reader. His work is a clear demonstration of how everything old is new again, for want of larger cultural absorption of what was, for early adopters, common knowledge.
Read the SCOTUS decision regarding corporate goals …
From the middle of Canada came Marshall McLuhan: a Winnipigeon. So too hails film editor Richard Altman, whose recently released McLuhan Unclaimed series of videos ought to give you something to think about for the next ten years as you think to play it in the background of your down-time. Altman deftly distills hundreds of hours of audio and video footage into a tight, psychedelic montage of meaning which can be jumped into at any point, for any duration, to give your brain something meaty to chew on. If you want to take a deep-plunge into what media ecology is all about, Altman’s McLuhan Unclaimed series is the best crash-course going; think of it as the acoustic, surreal complement to my more linear, visual, prosaic work. It’s nice to have company in the anti-environment, and in this episode we …
When you walk into a proper study, you are confronted by an overwhelming surface of book-spines, all displaying more titles, all at once, than you can consciously read. And yet, you can soak them in rather quickly. They are mostly non-fiction. They are all related to a few topics which are gone into in-depth and overlap like a gradient.
It is clear that the owner has spent several decades amassing this collection, and now sits in this room like the focal point of the concave surface which these books converge into. Through methodical reading, through the gentle weaving of a tapestry of associations and resonances (and some connections), these books have provided a lever out into space, onto which the reader has gradually migrated the interiority of their being. They have, over much applied experience, developed a point of view …
In my last post, I gave a response to a question that had been asked by a viewer regarding my MEA presentation. The question came in two parts, the first part being “about the relation between the simultaneity of the computer (due to electric speed up) and the linear one-thing-at a-time structure of the CPU.” In the second part, it was clarified to be a question of whether the computer is “electric” in the sense McLuhan meant in using the term. I interpreted it to be about how McLuhan saw electric media of his day, vs. its nature today. My response began definitively, “No…”
Hello World! My concerns, fellow netizens, are about how cyberspace has affected our sense of embodiment and existence in our physical world. I study and tutor on Marshall McLuhan, and develop my ideas in what I am calling a Full Stack Media Ecology.
My earnest questioning began in 2014. Answers finally manifested in 2017 with my video documentary series Silicon & Charybdis.
In March 2024 I released a book-length culmination of my work the past decade titled Cheating at Peekaboo Against a Bad Faith Adversary detailing how the work of Jean Piaget was used to hijack early childhood development in kids like TempleOS creator Terry A. Davis.
Read more about the complementarity between media ecology and developmental psychology here in Who You Callin’ a Robot?
In June of 2019 I “Toppled the Pillars of Cyberspace” in Toronto at the 20th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention. Watch or read my presentation and paper to get to know more about how this all started.
I’ve also presented twice at LibrePlanet for the Free Software Foundation. My 2023 talk on the Long History of Metrics Before and After Cybernetics presents a sprawling overview of how mechanical calculation and optimization took over our world, inspired by Marshall McLuhan.
