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 …
With over 300,000 YouTube subscribers, Fredrik Knudsen has well-earned his success as a documentary film maker. His carefully researched, thoughtfully produced series Down the Rabbit Hole sets a high bar for interesting, respectful, and honest explorations of some of the strangest psychologies and stories that have emerged in our modern world. From early 20th century history straight through to contemporary internet scenes and dramatics, Fredrik’s videos aren’t just entertaining as hell, but are important case studies ripe with teachable moments and cautions for staying sane in a hyper-connected world.
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!…
On the 26th of October I attended a symposium at St. Michael’s College on the University of Toronto Campus called Reading Frankenstein: Then, Now, Next. The day was divided into those three parts, regarding the past, present, and future context of the novel to society. Here are my rough notes pertaining to the Now and Next portions of the day.…
In Grade 11 I took my first programming class. Although I had played around with Logo in elementary school, and had created many complicated DOS Batch files, this was my introduction to all the formal elements of modern computer programming. We learned Turing, an educational object-oriented language developed at the University of Toronto. I wrote a multiplayer Tron/Snake-style game which would send each players key-presses back and forth across the network, but it often got out of sync resulting in the screens of both players looking different and perhaps both thinking they had won or lost. My final class project was a graphical implementation of Battleship. In Grade 12 we learned Java, an language with plenty of actual real-world usage.…
On September 21, 2018 I attended the Many McLuhans Symposium at the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library in Toronto! Here is a journey through my takeaway from the event, told through excerpts and interviews, featuring many wonderful academics, McLuhan family members, and enthusiasts in the scene.
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Professor Paul Levinson, PHD, teaches Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City and is the author of many books, including The Digital McLuhan. In this ground-breaking episode we delve deep into McLuhanalia, the historical implications of modern events, and the social effects of technology. An absolute must-see!
A broad conversation on Social Media with Don Talton, automation expert, media psychology grad student, and creator of the SafeNews media rating service. We talk history of the net, privacy and cultural problems, and the 2016 Election with lots of great context!
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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.
