This is the first installment in a new category of post called Q&A. When I receive interesting questions, I’ll post the answers here on my blog. Got a question? Fire away!
No. McLuhan’s electronic media were all variously complex devices of electronic components: oscillators and electron valves (vacuum tubes and transistors) modulating and adjusting waves of current which were analogous to sound patterns, light patterns, etc. They instantaneously transmitted the energies raw reality transduced into the charge in a conductor. That’s what Morse discovered crossing the ocean back from Europe at the end of a trip he had embarked upon to distract himself from his sorrows. While traveling in America, he received a letter too-late, warning of his wife’s sudden sickness and returned home to find he had missed her funeral and burial. During dinner, onboard a ship called the …
Kimberley Noble is a multiple-award-winning journalist for investigative and feature stories that explored the how things really work in corporate Canada’s corridors of power. She was former long-time staff writer for The Globe and Mail and Maclean’s Magazine, and won the National Newspaper Awards for Business Reporting for her coverage of both the Edper Group (the forerunner of the conglomerate now known as Brookfield) and of the big money behind the Canada-U.S. softwood lumber dispute. She was also nominated for two additional NNAs for series about executive compensation and white-collar crime; among other awards were a business writing prize for an investigative profile of Frank Stronach and a Professional Writers Association of Canada feature writing award for an analytical story about sentencing of Garth Drabinsky.
At present she is teaching Media Studies at the University of Guelph-Humber and was …
The third installment of my very own Media Ecology course. The rest of this post contains the full shooting script with embedded slides, and so can be considered a more boring print-form of the video.
Hi! I’m Clinton, and this is Media Ecology for the Online Community as Classroom. Today we are going to take a deep dive into two monumental books by Swiss architectural historian Siegfried Giedion, because in this series we are opting to take the long-way home to our title subject, situating computers and cyberspace as just one more development of the ever-evolving ground upon which—and, increasingly, within which—human communities gather.…
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, …
In the cozy town of Picton, Ontario lays a treasure trove of books. The accrual of two life-times of annotations makes this personal library one of the world’s most important resources for insight on media and our modern environment. Inheritor Andrew McLuhan has started The McLuhan Institute to carry on the work of diligently cataloguing and analyzing this vast store of wisdom. Go to http://themcluhaninstitute.com to see all the ways you can follow along, help support, and be a part of this great human endeavour!
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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 …
Here’s the second video in my Media Ecology in the OCaC series! What follows is the shooting script and slides, and so can be read instead of watched if you are in a hurry.
Hello, and welcome back to Media Ecology for the Online Community as Classroom. This episode is called Words Words Words. So eventually want to talk about computers and the internet in light of media ecology. And to do that, we to build on the O.G. of Media Ecology, the self-described intellectual thug Marshall McLuhan. However, McLuhan famously, definitively, intrinsically, had no concepts. To ascribe “concepts” to him would be to undermine him completely. In lieu of concepts, he offered “percepts”, his way of sensing the modern electric environment. So, in order to explain McLuhan I need to retrace his life story and his learning so as …
I’ve decided to start a YouTube series on Media Ecology, based on my simultaneous research into Marshall McLuhan and the history of personal computing. I call it Media Ecology for the Online Community as Classroom in recognition of McLuhan’s insight that education was moving outside of schools in the information age. We are all now hunters, seeking out good information as though tracking down prey.
I hope this introductory episode sets the scene for a romp through the hidden layers of our very environment!
The rest of this post contains the text of my script and the presentation slides.
Hello! And welcome to Media Ecology for the online community as classroom. Today, right now, Billions of minds are being tethered together, all willy nilly. Billions of individuals are shaping and being shaped by one other at a rapidity with which …
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. …
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.
