Marshall McLuhan

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

But in fact, alongside Innis, McLuhan drew on an eclectic mix of thinkers, including Lewis Mumford, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and McLuhan’s good friends Wyndham Lewis and the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter. For insights into McLuhan’s intellectual biography, see Marchand, Marshall McLuhan; Gordon, Marshall McLuhan; Theall, Virtual Marshall McLuhan; Stamps, Unthinking Modernity; Horrocks, Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality. 22. Theall, Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 30. 23. McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 252, 31; McLuhan, Understanding Media, 3. 24. At several points in his writing, McLuhan described this electronic nervous system in explicitly cybernetic terms. “By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms,” he wrote in Understanding Media.

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According to Stern, the show was designed to lead viewers from “overload to spiritual meditation.”19 In the final moments, the audience was to experience the mystical unity that ostensibly bound together USCO’s members. Comprehensive Designers: Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller By the mid-1960s, USCO’s performances marked the cutting edge of countercultural art. USCO had built multimedia backdrops for talks by Timothy Leary (whose Millbrook, New York, mansion received regular visits from USCO members) and Marshall McLuhan. In 1966 they supplied multimedia designs for Murray the K’s World—a huge discotheque created within an abandoned airplane hangar—that appeared on the cover of Life magazine.

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For this wing of the counterculture, the technological and intellectual output of American research culture held enormous appeal. Although they rejected the military-industrial complex as a whole, as well as the political process that brought it into being, hippies from Manhattan to HaightAshbury read Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan. Introduction [ 5 ] Through their writings, young Americans encountered a cybernetic vision of the world, one in which material reality could be imagined as an information system. To a generation that had grown up in a world beset by massive armies and by the threat of nuclear holocaust, the cybernetic notion of the globe as a single, interlinked pattern of information was deeply comforting: in the invisible play of information, many thought they could see the possibility of global harmony.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection
by Michael Harris
Published 6 Aug 2014

“We don’t educate people as others wished”: Max Chafkin, “Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather of Free Online Education, Changes Course,” Fast Company, accessed December 2, 2013, http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb. “school was an invention of the printing press”: Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993), 10. Marshall McLuhan argues that whenever we amplify: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (Berkeley, Calif.: Ginkgo Press, 2003), 63–70. “Welcome to a world through glass”: “What It Does—Google Glass,” accessed September 5, 2013, http://www.google.com/glass/start/what-it-does/. “the brightness and glory of the Emerald City”: Baum, Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 88.

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In fact, the only significant change: Michelle Rotermann, “Sexual Behaviour and Condom Use of 15- to 24-Year-Olds in 2003 and 2009/2010,” Statistics Canada, Health Reports 23, no. 1 (March 2012), accessed January 16, 2014, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-003-x/2012001/article/11632-eng.htm. “The knight departing for new adventures”: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Knopf, 1953), 658. Mobile users check their PlentyofFish: Markus Frind, interview with author, July 31, 2013. Marshall McLuhan, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, writes about the garden of senses: Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 21. PlentyofFish is especially solicitous: Markus Frind, interview with author, July 31, 2013. Chapter 9: How to Absent Oneself Ah, where have they gone”: Milan Kundera, Slowness, trans.

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• • • • • We may never comprehend just what was subsumed beneath the influence of Gutenberg’s machine because the change was so total that it even became the screen through which we view the world. The gains the press yielded are mammoth and essential to our lives. But we forget: Every revolution in communication technology—from papyrus to the printing press to Twitter—is as much an opportunity to be drawn away from something as it is to be drawn toward something. Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media that “a new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace.” The successful new medium actively subjugates the older ones. It “never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.” So the dismantling of magazine and newspaper offices, the vast fields of lost writers and editors now blogging and bitching from cafés around the world, are not just employment casualties; they’re a symptom of a more profound wreckage.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick
Published 1 Mar 2011

♦ “THE OTHER EMINENT CATHOLIC-ELECTRONIC PROPHET”: Frank Kermode, “Free Fall,” New York Review of Books 10, no. 5 (14 March 1968). ♦ “HORSES AS AUTOMOBILES WITHOUT WHEELS”: Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 12. ♦ “LANGUAGE IN FACT BEARS THE SAME RELATIONSHIP”: Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan (New York: Viking, 1971), 100. ♦ “FOR THIS INVENTION WILL PRODUCE FORGETFULNESS”: Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Fairfield, Iowa: First World Library, 2008), 275a. ♦ “TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF MANUSCRIPT CULTURE”: Marshall McLuhan, “Culture Without Literacy,” in Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., Essential McLuhan (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 305. ♦ “THIS MIRACULOUS REBOUNDING OF THE VOICE”: Pliny the Elder, The Historie of the World, vol. 2, trans.

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Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, England, 1066-1307 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 202. ♦ “OH! ALL YE WHO SHALL HAVE HEARD”: Ibid. ♦ “I CANNOT HELP FEELING”: Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 275d. ♦ “WE ARE IN OUR CENTURY ‘WINDING THE TAPE BACKWARD’ ”: Marshall McLuhan, “Media and Cultural Change,” in Essential McLuhan, 92. ♦ “THE LARGER THE NUMBER OF SENSES INVOLVED”: Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan, 3. ♦ “ACOUSTIC SPACE IS ORGANIC”: Playboy interview, March 1969, in Essential McLuhan, 240. ♦ “MEN LIVED UPON GROSS EXPERIENCE”: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall, and Civill, (1651; repr., London: George Routledge and Sons, 1886), 299

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EPILOGUE ♦ “IT WAS INEVITABLE THAT MEANING”: Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 119. ♦ “WE ARE TODAY AS FAR INTO THE ELECTRIC AGE”: Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 1. ♦ “TODAY … WE HAVE EXTENDED OUR CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEMS”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 3. ♦ “WHAT WHISPERS ARE THESE”: Walt Whitman, “Years of the Modern,” Leaves of Grass (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1919), 272. ♦ THEOLOGIANS BEGAN SPEAKING OF A SHARED MIND: For example, “Two beings, or two millions—any number thus placed ‘in communication’—all possess one mind.”

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman and Jeff Riggenbach Ph.
Published 1 Apr 2013

He accurately foresaw that the young would inherit a frantically all-consuming media culture of glitz, gossip, and greed.” —Camille Paglia “A brillant, powerful and important book. This is an indictment that Postman has laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World “He starts where Marshall McLuhan left off, constructing his arguments with the resources of a scholar and the wit of a raconteur.” —The Christian Science Monitor “This comes along at exactly the right moment.... We must confront the challenge of his prophetic vision.” —Jonathan Kozol ABOUT THE AUTHORS For the last third of the twentieth century, Neil Postman was one of America’s foremost social critics and education and communications theorists, and his ideas and accessibility won him an international following.

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This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas. As the influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television. If all of this sounds suspiciously like Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, the medium is the message, I will not disavow the association (although it is fashionable to do so among respectable scholars who, were it not for McLuhan, would today be mute). I met McLuhan thirty years ago when I was a graduate student and he an unknown English professor. I believed then, as I believe now, that he spoke in the tradition of Orwell and Huxley—that is, as a prophesier, and I have remained steadfast to his teaching that the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.

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In particular, I want to conclude by making three points that may serve as a defense against certain counterarguments that careful readers may have already formed. The first is that at no point do I care to claim that changes in media bring about changes in the structure of people’s minds or changes in their cognitive capacities. There are some who make this claim, or come close to it (for example, Jerome Bruner, Jack Goody, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Julian Jaynes, and Eric Havelock). 7 I am inclined to think they are right, but my argument does not require it. Therefore, I will not burden myself with arguing the possibility, for example, that oral people are less developed intellectually, in some Piagetian sense, than writing people, or that “television” people are less developed intellectually than either.

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America
by Giles Slade
Published 14 Apr 2006

But even as these professionals were inventing the means to exploit obsolescence, a number of articulate American critics began to see this manipulation of the public as the very epitome of what was wrong with our culture and its economic system. The former journalist Vance Packard raised the issue powerfully in his debut book, The Hidden Persuaders, in 1957, which revealed how advertisers relied on motivational research to manipulate potential buyers. Others, including Norman Cousins, John Kenneth Galbraith, Marshall McLuhan, Archibald MacLeish, and Victor Papanek, would follow Packard’s lead in pointing out how the media create artificia needs within vulnerable consumers.The sheer volume of print Americans have devoted to this topic since 1927 demonstrates that obsolescence has become a touchstone of the American consciousness.

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Weeks before Germany capitulated, the United Nations Conference had convened in San Francisco, to enormous international interest and enthusiasm. Around the world, there was renewed determination to create an international forum stronger and more effective than the League of Nations had been between the wars. Decades before Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “global village,” Cousins clearly understood the planetary implications of the previous years of confli t: “The world has at last become a geographic unit, if we measure geographic units not according to absolute size, but according to access and proximity. All peoples are members of this related group . . .

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American planes and bombs, science and technology, kept the nation and the world safe, and at the same time provided a constantly increasing level of comfort to more and more Americans. The launch of Sputnik in October 1957, at a moment of economic recession, was a propaganda coup of the highest order for the Soviets. It challenged head-on two of the most basic premises of American ideology: technological superiority and the economic prosperity it supposedly fostered. As Marshall McLuhan would later observe, “The firs sputnik . . . was a witty taunting of the capitalist world by means of a new kind of technological image or icon.”16 The fact that the United States’own Vanguard satellite exploded on the launch pad two months later only deepened America’s moment of self-doubt and readied the country for a period of genuine self-criticism.

The Googlization of Everything:
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
Published 1 Jan 2010

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 7. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic, July 2008, 56–63. 8. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965); Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Routledge, 2008). 9. Jamais Cascio, “Get Smart,” Atlantic, July 2009, 94–100. 10. Lester Ward, Dynamic Sociology (New York: D.

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Andrew Shapiro, The Control Revolution: How the Internet Is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know (New York: PublicAffairs, 1999), 6–7. Also see Gladys Ganley, Unglued Empire: The Soviet Experience with Communications Technologies (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1996). 11. Richard Oliver, What Is Transparency? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 27. 12. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Routledge, 2008); Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Elizabeth L.

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Exhausted by trying to rebuild the classical Greek agora, we have set about trying to build a better coffeehouse.52 It’s no surprise, then, that as soon as the Internet entered public consciousness in the 1990s, cultural and communication theorists started asking whether it would enable the generation of a “global public sphere,” or, in the words of Yochai Benkler, a “networked public sphere.”53 Influenced perhaps too much by Marshall McLuhan’s model of a global village, scholars, journalists, and activists drove Habermasian terms into mainstream discussions of Internet policy and its political potential.54 Alas, the public sphere is not the best model to idealize when we think globally and dream democratically. Habermas’s public sphere is as temporally and geographically specific as Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” and has been similarly misapplied to disparate experiences that don’t correspond to the specific historical situation examined by the original work.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

In spite of being toolmakers of our digital future, Michael and Xochi Birch aren’t prescient. And the truth about the Battery—whether or not it has had a chance to get its jeans on—is that the well-meaning but deluded Birches have unintentionally created one of the least diverse and most exclusive places on earth. The twentieth-century media guru Marshall McLuhan, who, in contrast with the Birches, was distinguished by his prescience, famously said that the “medium is the message.” But on Battery Street in downtown San Francisco, it’s the building that is the message. Rather than an unclub, the Battery is an untruth. It offers a deeply troubling message about the gaping inequalities and injustices of our new networked society.

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Take, for example, the issue of network privacy, the most persistently corrosive aspect of the “big data” world that the Internet is inventing. If San Francisco is “dystopia by the Bay,” then the Internet is rapidly becoming dystopia on the network. “We are fans of the village pub where everyone knows everyone,” Michael Birch says. But our networked society—envisioned by Marshall McLuhan as a “global village” in which we return to the oral tradition of the preliterate age—has already become that claustrophobic village pub, a frighteningly transparent community where there are no longer either secrets or anonymity. Everyone, from the National Security Agency to Silicon Valley data companies, does indeed seem to know everything about us already.

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In an “Internet of Everything” shadowed by the constant surveillance of an increasingly intelligent network—in a future of smart cars, smart clothing, smart cities, and smart intelligence networks—I’m afraid that the Battery members may be the only people who will be able to afford to escape living in a brightly lit village where nothing is ever hidden or forgotten and where, as data expert Julia Angwin argues, online privacy is already becoming a “luxury good.”23 Winston Churchill was right. We do indeed shape our buildings and thereafter they have the power to shape us. Marshall McLuhan put it slightly differently, but with even more relevance to our networked age. Riffing off Churchill’s 1944 speech, the Canadian media visionary said that “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”24 McLuhan died in 1980, nine years before a young English physicist named Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller
by Alec Nevala-Lee
Published 1 Aug 2022

“I am your disciple”: RBF, “McLuhan, Marshall,” in SD, 10229. Fuller drank copiously: Wigley, Buckminster Fuller Inc., 284. “the glorious Bucky”: From the Library of Buckminster Fuller, 80. industry of the future: Marshall McLuhan to RBF, August 11, 1963, and RBF to McLuhan, August 25, 1963, B122-F6. “technology as creator”: McLuhan to RBF, September 17, 1964, in Marshall McLuhan, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, ed. Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987), 309. “a necessity”: Ibid. “McLuhan has never”: RBF, “McLuhan, Marshall,” in SD, 10229. “the message only”: RBF, “Revolution in Wombland,” in Earth, Inc., 103.

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He had trouble following the discussions—he had begun to suffer from the partial deafness that would plague him for the rest of his life, despite a series of hearing aids—and was more comfortable lecturing into the night, but he was still treated as a celebrity. The guests included the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, the British economist Barbara Ward, and an exceptional figure who connected with Fuller on the first day. Hearing someone call his name, Fuller turned to see Marshall McLuhan, who was brandishing Nine Chains and No More Secondhand God. “I am your disciple,” McLuhan reportedly said. “I’ve joined your conspiracy.” They quickly hit it off. Both stood out on the dance floor, and McLuhan, who recalled that Fuller drank copiously, inscribed a copy of his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy to “the glorious Bucky who provides us all with a foretaste of the extension of consciousness that is near in this Electric Age.”

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If they would just understand that the earth is really a sphere with a limited amount of surface, resources, and everything else, then they would behave better. After realizing that no image of the entire earth had ever been released by NASA, Brand distributed buttons printed with a simple question: “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” He sent them to public intellectuals, including Marshall McLuhan, and the only one to reply was Fuller, who pointed out that it was possible only to see half the earth at once. Brand was encouraged. He was planning an education fair for the Portola Institute, a nonprofit founded by Dick Raymond that consulted on computer and music classes for high schools, and he invited Fuller to attend what he described as an event on “powerful tools technology.”

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands
by Eric Topol
Published 6 Jan 2015

September 20, 2013, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518906/why-medicine-will-be-more-like-walmart/. 3. E. Brynjolfsson and A. McAfee, The Second Machine Age (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014), p. 96. 4. “Essay: The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy, March 1969, accessed August 12, 2014, Next Nature, http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/. 5. “The Package” (Seinfeld), in Wikipedia, accessed August 12, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Package_(Seinfeld). 6. D. L. Frosch et al., “Authoritarian Physicians and Patients’ Fear of Being Labeled ‘Difficult’ Among Key Obstacles to Shared Decision Making,” Health Affairs 31, no. 5 (2012): 1030–1038. 7.

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—ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON AND ANDREW MCAFEE, The Second Machine Age3 “Every aspect of Western mechanical culture was shaped by print technology, but the modern age is the age of the electric media . . . electronic media constitutes a break boundary between fragmented Gutenberg man and integral man.” —MARSHALL MCLUHAN, 19664 Way back in 1996, the Seinfeld TV show told the story of the “difficult” patient.5 Elaine Benes, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, developed a skin rash, but doctors kept refusing to see her. The problem was that her doctor had called her “difficult” after an appointment four years earlier, when she had not wanted to change into a gown to get a mole examined.

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No longer was reading only for the elite, such as the high priests. By making books and all forms of printed materials available to ordinary people, the world was democratized in an unprecedented fashion. Knowledge was disseminated widely like never before. Movable type enabled the culture to change far more than at any other time in human history. Marshall McLuhan, “the metaphysician of media,” was asked in 1969 about Gutenberg and why he thought practically every aspect of modern life is a direct consequence of the printing press.4 He said that, first, the mechanization of book printing was the blueprint of all mechanization to follow. Typography became the first uniformly repeatable commodity, and led to Henry Ford, the first assembly line, and the first mass production.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

But as memory shifts from the individual mind to the machine’s shared database, what happens to that unique “cohesion” that gives rise to personal knowledge, selfhood’s core? THE MEDIUM IS McLUHAN July 18, 2011 ONE OF MY FAVORITE YouTube videos is a clip from a 1968 Canadian TV show featuring a debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan. The two men, both icons of the sixties, could hardly be more different. Leaning forward in his chair, Mailer is pugnacious, animated, engaged. McLuhan, abstracted and smiling wanly, seems to be on autopilot. He speaks in canned riddles. “The planet is no longer nature,” he announces, to Mailer’s uncomprehending stare; “it’s now the content of an art work.”

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“The planet is no longer nature,” he announces, to Mailer’s uncomprehending stare; “it’s now the content of an art work.” Watching McLuhan (who would have turned one hundred this week), you can’t quite decide whether he was a genius or just had a screw loose. Both impressions, it turns out, are justified. As the novelist Douglas Coupland argued in his recent biography, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, McLuhan’s mind was probably situated at the mild end of the autism spectrum. He also suffered from a couple of major cerebral traumas. In 1960, he had a stroke so severe that he was given his last rites. In 1967, just a few months before the Mailer debate, surgeons removed a tumor the size of a small apple from the base of his brain.

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Speaking to college students in 1956, Robert Frost said, “I am always pleased when I see someone making motions like this—like a metronome. Seeing the music measured. Measure always reassures me. Measure in love, in government, measure in selfishness, measure in unselfishness.” Measure in measurement, too, would seem advisable. SMARTPHONES ARE HOT October 21, 2014 THE LIGHTBULB, MARSHALL MCLUHAN wrote, is an example of a medium without content. Walk into a dark room and hit the light switch, and the bulb generates a new environment even though the bulb transmits no information. The idea of a medium without content is hard to grasp. It doesn’t make sense in the context of our assumptions about media.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

That’s why it’s useful—particularly in a rapidly changing media environment—to look at corporations as if they were forms of media: programs, written by people at a particular moment in history in order to accomplish specific goals. Once we have a handle on the corporate program, we’ll have a much easier time understanding what happened when we plugged it into the digital economy, as well as what to do about it. Marshall McLuhan, the godfather of media theory, liked to evaluate any medium or technology by asking four related questions about it.1 The “tetrad,” as he called it—really an updated version of Aristotle’s four “causes”—went like this: What does the medium enhance or amplify? What does the medium make obsolete?

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Or in today’s parlance, while the founders of Amazon and Uber should be allowed to keep the money they make, they shouldn’t be able to develop platform monopolies that disconnect workers from the resources they need to do their jobs or from earning an ownership stake in the platform itself. The ability to create and exchange value must remain distributed and available—a free market. Early twentieth-century English writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton—and, later, a young Marshall McLuhan—saw in distributism a definitive answer to the failures of both capitalism and state socialism.6, 7, 8 They looked to that same brief moment in the late Middle Ages we’ve been exploring, when the market was in ascendance and former peasants were making and trading things, as the best example of the ideal economic system.

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Matt Bruenig, “This One Weird Trick Actually Cuts Child Poverty in Half,” demos.org, July 21, 2014. 64. Dylan Matthews, “A Guaranteed Income for Every American Would Eliminate Poverty—And It Wouldn’t Destroy the Economy,” vox.com, July 23, 2014. 65. Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015). Chapter Two: The Growth Trap 1. Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). 2. For the best historical explanation of the negative effect of chartered commerce and corporatism on the marketplace, see Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). 3.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “digital amnesia”: Rebecca Seal, “Is Your Smartphone Ruining Your Memory? A Special Report on the Rise of ‘Digital Amnesia,’ ” Observer, July 3, 2022, theguardian.com/​global/​2022/​jul/​03/​is-your-smartphone-ruining-your-memory-the-rise-of-digital-amenesia. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT As Marshall McLuhan predicted: “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy, Mar. 1969, redacted and edited by Phillip Rogaway, web.cs.ucdavis.edu/​~rogaway/​classes/​188/​spring07/​mcluhan.pdf. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “drive us down rabbit holes”: Tristan Harris, “Our Brains Are No Match for Our Technology,” The New York Times, Dec. 5, 2019, nytimes.com/​2019/​12/​05/​opinion/​digital-technology-brain.html.

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Remember how the Arab Spring was ignited by the desperate act of an impoverished Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, after continual harassment from local authorities who refused to give him a permit to sell his wares, confiscated his goods, and publicly humiliated him. * * * — As Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman have pointed out, new information technologies create new environments that reformat how we apprehend the world; in McLuhan’s famous words, “the medium is the message.” Johannes Gutenberg did not invent the printing press—movable type, using pieces of ceramic, was pioneered in China in the eleventh century—but his magical printing machine, which began cranking out Bibles around 1452, unleashed a great wave of change.

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We are also becoming addicted to the little dopamine hits we get when a stranger “likes” something we posted, and feel spikes of irritation or worse when we are trolled. While the internet was meant to connect people across cultures and vocations, it has grown into an ever-expanding Borgesian maze that is endlessly subdivided into tiny, soundproofed filter bubbles, where we are only in touch with like-minded folks who share our prejudices and interests. As Marshall McLuhan predicted in 1969, emerging electronic technology had a decentralizing effect, and promoted “discontinuity and diversity and division”; in fact, the hallmarks of the new “global village” were less “uniformity and tranquility” than “conflict and discord.” Gone are the days when most Americans got their news from Walter Cronkite and watched the same hit TV shows like The Andy Griffith Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, had common reference points, and more or less inhabited a shared (or at least contiguous) reality.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

His second wife was Ann London, whose father managed a luxury hotel in San Francisco, and as young socialites they regularly appeared in Herb Caen’s gossip columns in the Chronicle. San Francisco was a breath of fresh air for Stern, who had completely struck out in New York, where the art community ignored him. He had been reading an early manuscript of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, which he had borrowed from the poet M. C. Richards, who had gotten it from the composer John Cage. The notion that it was the medium rather than the content that defined society fascinated him, and he was intent on moving away from his poetry of words to create collages of dynamic objects, images, light, and sound.

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The shape of that epoch was still unexplored: “We will see what has been entered with the publication of the first hazy image from the moon of our Earth—glowing disk, mandala of unity, inescapably ourself,” Brand wrote. Where did this come from? Most likely it was a mixture of what he had learned from his time in Oregon on the Warm Springs Reservation, reading Marshall McLuhan—and quite possibly the draft text of an inauguration speech that would be given by President Johnson in January of 1965. Brand had read an early copy in Udall’s office, and he had underlined this passage: Think of our world as it looks from that rocket that is heading toward Mars. It is like a child’s globe, hanging in space, the continent stuck to its side like colored maps.

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Udall, with the prompting and assistance of Sharon Francis, had sent letters recommending that the Sierra Club consider publishing Brand’s Indian book, arguing that the Indians had a great deal to teach whites about conservation. * * * Brand had made a particularly good connection to the Native American Church in meeting Hola Tso, a church vice president, who invited him to participate in an all-night ritual. “There is not really so much irony . . . in my contemplating Marshall McLuhan’s super-up-to-date Understanding Media in a windblown ponderosa forest several hours before participating in an Indian peyote meeting,” Brand wrote. “Indians munch peyote, sing, and listen more attentively to the voice that print culture’s din has made nearly inaudible.” The Native American Church ceremony was more devout than anything he had ever encountered.

1968: The Year That Rocked the World
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 30 Dec 2003

With new tools such as communication satellites and inexpensive erasable videotape, television was making everyone very aware of what everyone else was doing, and it was thrilling because for the first time in human experience the important, distant events of the day were immediate. It will never be new again. “Global village” is a sixties term invented by Marshall McLuhan. The shrinking of the globe will never be so shocking in the same way that we will never again feel the thrill of the first moon shots or the first broadcasts from outer space. We now live in a world in which we await a new breakthrough every day. If another 1968 generation is ever produced, its movements will all have Web sites, carefully monitored by law enforcement, while they are e-mailing one another for updates.

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Suddenly a Prague student who had never seen the rest of the world, bearded and in Texasski jeans too stiff and too blue, felt part of a liberating world youth movement. CHAPTER 3 A DREAD UNFURLING OF THE BUSHY EYEBROW Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND QUENTIN FIORE, The Medium Is the Massage, 1967 LIKE AN UNNOTICED TREE falling in the forest, if there is a march or a sit-in and it is not covered by the press, did it happen? From Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis to Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, there was wide disagreement on tactics within the civil rights movement, but they all agreed that an event needed to attract the news media.

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It is a rare politician who can get away with answers like that, but in 1968, with the rest of the world turned so earnest, Canadians were laughing. Trudeau, with his lack of political experience, would say that the voters had put him up to running as a kind of joke. And now they “are stuck with me.” Fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan described Trudeau’s face as a “corporate tribal mask.” “Nobody can penetrate it,” McLuhan said. “He has no personal point of view on anything.” On social issues, however, his position was clear. Despite a reputation for womanizing, he took strong stands on women’s issues, including liberalizing abortion laws, and he was also an outspoken advocate of rights for homosexuals.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future
by Hal Niedzviecki
Published 15 Mar 2015

We lived within and for and through the present day—allowing the reality of its known unknown into our everyday lives the same way we integrated the rituals and patterns of gathering food or mourning the dead into the story we told each other, the ongoing story that made sense of how the tribe lived and survived. In this way, “people,” theorized Marshall McLuhan, “were drawn together into a tribal mesh” and partook of “the collective unconscious.” Before past and future abstraction, McLuhan saw us as “audio-tactile,” living “in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine.”5 By “audio-tactile” he meant that people understood what was happening around them by feel and sense, rather than by some arbitrary divide of days into years, months, weeks, minutes, and seconds.

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The Times, notably, highlighted “the transmission of thought, the vital impulse of matter” as the telegraph’s great achievement, as if the telegraph had somehow erased the alphabet and tapped directly into the simultaneity of the thought process.22 Now we are no more than a hundred and twenty years from the time Marshall McLuhan would write of a new global consciousness; the “village” he envisioned would be a triumphant return to the unified audio-tactile consciousness of the tribal prehistoric, only without the blinders, without the limits, without the obsfucation of magic. “Today,” enthused the great 1960s philosopher, “we have extended our central nervous systems in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.

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But for many of us, even those of us actively involved in pursuing future and transferring more and more of life into captured information, in some hidden part of the brain, a plate is still a circle and death is still the known unknown to be feared and placated. The old modes linger. We have not yet, and may never, end our longstanding relationship to the magic that once overshadowed almost everything in human life. The process is slow and confusing. “Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer,” remarked Marshall McLuhan in 1967. We look at what Ariel Garten is selling and wonder: Is it magic or information? Is it story or science? (It is both and neither.) The time of the permanent future is not the triumph of knowledge over magic, of logic over feeling. It is the triumph of information. Magic—the narrative of the perpetual unknown—lingers in the crannies of our consciousness.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

Maria Araujo and Daniel Davila, ‘Machine learning improves oil and gas monitoring’, www.talkingiotinenergy.com, 9 June 2017. 18 Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction (Penguin Books, 2016). O’Neil also has an excellent blog at www.mathbabe.org detailing similar instances. Chapter 2: The Global Village 1 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962). 2 Eric Norden, ‘The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan’, Playboy, March 1969. 3 James Madison, ‘Federalist No. 10 – The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection’, 23 November 1787. 4 Thomas Hawk, ‘How to unleash the wisdom of crowds’, www.theconversation.com, 9 February 2016. 5 See especially the following authors: Zeynep Tufekci, Eli Pariser and Evgeny Morozov.

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Political leaders are evolving to the new medium of information – hence the rise of populists who promise emotional, immediate and total answers. But warring tribes of anchorless, confused citizens is a precursor to totalitarianism. BACK IN THE 1960S, celebrity academic and cryptic cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted that the coming age of electronic communications would lead to the breakdown of established structures and identities. The consequence, he asserted, would be a return to a more tribal society. He famously called this seamless web of information ‘the global village’.1 People at the time celebrated this idea.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization
by Alexander R. Galloway
Published 1 Apr 2004

Control the “.” and you control access.”13 Since the root servers are at the top, they have ultimate control over the existence (but not necessarily the content) of each lesser branch. Without the foundational support of the root servers, all lesser branches of the DNS network become unusable. Such a reality should shatter our image of the Internet as a vast, uncontrollable meshwork. Any networked relation will have multiple, nested protocols. To steal an insight from Marshall McLuhan, the content of every new protocol is always another protocol. Take, for example, a typical transaction on the World Wide Web. A Web page containing text and graphics (themselves protocological artifacts) is marked up in the HTML protocol. The protocol known as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) encapsulates this HTML object and allows it to be served by an Internet host.

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The provocative but tantalizingly thin Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World from architect Branden Hookway, looks at how cybernetic bodies permeate twentieth-century life. Other important theorists from the field of computer and media studies who have influenced me include Vannevar Bush, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, and Alan Turing. I am also inspired by Lovink’s new school of media theory known as Net criticism. This loose international grouping of critics and practitioners has grown up with the Internet and includes the pioneering work of Hakim Bey Introduction 18 and Critical Art Ensemble, as well as newer material from Timothy Druckrey, Marina Gržinić, Lev Manovich, Sadie Plant, and many others.

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Wiener also writes that the “control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is known as feedback” (p. 24). 83. Wiener, Cybernetics, p. 26. 84. Many others have followed in Wiener’s footsteps. In 1960 J. C. R. Licklider, an early theorist and researcher of computer networks, wrote about what he called the “man-machine symbiosis.” Marshall McLuhan also claimed that technology itself is nothing but an extension of man’s nervous system. Computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart considered technology to be simply an augmentation of the human faculties. For relevant texts by Licklider and Engelbart, see Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (New York: Norton, 2001).

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents
by Lisa Gitelman
Published 26 Mar 2014

I do not wish to render the past narrowly in terms of or service to the present any more than I would deny that present “adventures” with technology—as Jacques Derrida puts it—promote “a sort of future anterior,” enriching our sense of the past.25 In what follows I have aimed to open the question of digital text—or to allow readers to open that question—in what I hope are original and productive ways, inspired in part by the work of Matthew Kirschenbaum, Richard Harper, and David Levy, among numerous others.26 Readers may find in the end that this book hops toward digital media and then refuses to land there, or at least refuses to plant a proper flag on arrival. Chapter 4 concerns a digital format for documents—the portable document format or pdf file—but it is a peculiarly backward-­looking format, characterized by what Marshall McLuhan might have called an acute rearview-­mirror-­ism.27 (“Warning: Objects in mirror . . .”) A second, related argument advanced here is that the broad categories that have become proper to the history of communication and that increasingly have a bearing on popular discourse are insufficient and perhaps even hazardous to our thinking.28 I refer in particular to the concept of “print culture,” and one aim of what follows is to discourage its use.

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Demand XEROGRAPHERS OF THE MIND 91 was high everywhere: when Baker Library installed its Xerox 914 in 1964, it made 25,000 copies in the first three months, “twice as many as had been expected.”26 America’s great circulating libraries had long promoted the secular “devotions of self-­realization that embody freedom in liberal democracy,”27 in the form of selecting, borrowing, and reading books, and now those devotions were being joined by the practice of xerographically excerpting books. Anyone can “make his own book,” Marshall McLuhan pronounced, and make it out of other books.28 Copying—as few scholars have admitted publicly—would become a surrogate for reading, displacing knowledge: you can read something and have it in mind, or you can Xerox something and have it at hand.29 Ultimately Ellsberg had copies or partial copies of the history squirreled away with different friends.

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Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2008); Richard H. R. Harper, Inside the imf: An Ethnography of Documents, Technology, and Organisational Action (San Diego, CA: Academic, 1998); Levy, Scrolling Forward. The rearview mirror is a figure from Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam, 1967). “Objects in the mirror . . .” is a more recent catchphrase. The argument is advanced as well, incidentally, to correct myself for using such categories in the past. Michael Winship first disparaged “print culture” to me, and I remain grateful that, on reflection, I have accepted his irritation as my own.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
by Clive Thompson
Published 11 Sep 2013

Consider an experiment conducted by MadV: Some of my writing appeared previously in “Clive Thompson on How YouTube Changes the Way We Think,” Wired, October 2011, accessed March 23, 2013, www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-01/st_thompson. We’re in the transitional moment: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, critical ed. (1964; Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003), 19–20; Eric Norden, “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy, March 1969, reprinted in Next Nature, December 24, 2009, accessed March 23, 2013, www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/. “You can describe in words how to swing a golf club”: Clive Thompson, “The Know-It-All Machine,” Lingua Franca, September 2001, accessed March 23, 2013, linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/print/0109/cover.html.

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Neither prediction was quite right, of course, yet neither was quite wrong. The one thing that both apocalyptics and utopians understand and agree upon is that every new technology pushes us toward new forms of behavior while nudging us away from older, familiar ones. Harold Innis—the lesser-known but arguably more interesting intellectual midwife of Marshall McLuhan—called this the bias of a new tool. Living with new technologies means understanding how they bias everyday life. What are the central biases of today’s digital tools? There are many, but I see three big ones that have a huge impact on our cognition. First, they allow for prodigious external memory: smartphones, hard drives, cameras, and sensors routinely record more information than any tool before them.

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To see where things are headed, it would be best to pay attention to these seemingly trivial or even crude amateur experiments, because it’s often in the realm of the amateur where the truly new is possible; amateurs are exempt from the commercial pressures that have locked professional TV, film, and industrial video into its narrow palette of genres and shots. Mind you, it’s also true that today’s amateurs probably aren’t experimenting aggressively enough. Most are still trying to mimic the language of traditional video, producing material that apes the form and content of TV and movies. We’re in the transitional moment that, as Marshall McLuhan points out, occurs at the beginning of every new medium. At first, we have no idea what to do with it—so we tend to repeat the style of the last major media. When printing first made it possible to mass-produce novels, authors tended to recycle the older tropes of letter writing, mock-heroic poetry, and nonfiction.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

One level above that, an aggregator of those aggregators (Kayak, Orbitz) can show you which aggregator is doing this the best. Don’t focus on the content, experts like O’Reilly insisted, but the platform on which everyone posts the content. And if there are already a bunch of platforms, become the platform of platforms. “The medium is the message” became the business mantra for The Mindset, while Marshall McLuhan himself earned a posthumous place on the Wired masthead as the magazine’s “patron saint.” According to Peter Thiel, any new business idea should be 10x better than what’s already out there—literally, an order of magnitude better. Borrowing from his former Stanford philosophy teacher, René Girard, Thiel believes that “competition is for losers .”

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And just in time. We are living in the midst of a myriad of feedback loops, making it tough to figure out who is doing what to whom. We are the parents of our technologies, but we are also its users and respondents. As John Culkin, one of the fathers of media theory, explained in an article about Marshall McLuhan, “We become what we behold . We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” While that’s easy to see with straightforward technologies, such as automobiles which shaped suburban living, it’s a little trickier with cybernetic ones. Each cycle is another feedback loop in which both we and our machines change, iterate, and adjust.

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Chapter 12: Cybernetic Karma 159   cybernetics : Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: Wiley, 1948). 160   “a kind of vaccination” : Nora Bateson, Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns (Charmouth, UK: Triarchy Press, 2016), 198–99. 161   butterfly flapping : Edward Lorenz, speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC, December 29, 1972, transcribed in Edward Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993). 162   “anyone may publish” : Ken Jordan and Randall J. Packer, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). 162   “We become what we behold” : J. M. Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan,” Saturday Review, March 18, 1967, 51–53, 71–72. 164   I wrote my dissertation : Douglas Rushkoff, “Monopoly Moneys,” PhD diss., Utrecht University, 2012. 164   the more frequently retail traders transacted : Dalbar, Inc., “Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior 2011” (Boston: Dalbar, Inc., 2011). 165   The stock shot upwards : Eric Lam and Lu Wang, “Steely Meme-Stock Short Sellers Stare Down $4.5 Billion Loss,” Bloomberg , June 3, 2021, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2021 -06 -03 /defiant -meme -stock -short -sellers -stare -down -4 -5 -billion -loss. 166   A platform like TikTok : Shelly Banjo and Shawn Wen, “A Push-Up Contest on TikTok Exposed a Great Cyber-Espionage Threat,” Bloomberg , May 13, 2021, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2021 -05 -13 /how -tiktok -works -and -does -it -share -data -with -china. 167   “They all know the algorithms” : Taylor Lorenz, Kellen Browning, and Sheera Frenkel, “TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally,” New York Times , June 21, 2020, https:// www .nytimes .com /2020 /06 /21 /style /tiktok -trump -rally -tulsa .html. 167   formed a union : Zoe Schiffer, “Exclusive: Google Workers across the Globe Announce International Union Alliance to Hold Alphabet Accountable,” Verge , January 25, 2021, https:// www .theverge .com /2021 /1 /25 /22243138 /google -union -alphabet -workers -europe -announce -global -alliance. 167   “sometimes the boss is the best organizer” : Kate Conger, “Hundreds of Google Employees Unionize, Culminating Years of Activism,” New York Times , January 4, 2021, https:// www .nytimes .com /2021 /01 /04 /technology /google -employees -union .html. 169   an open letter about the frightening potential : Wikimedia, “Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence,” https:// en .wikipedia .org /wiki /Open _Letter _on _Artificial _Intelligence, accessed August 10, 2021. 170   “Things are getting … currently doing” : Cat Clifford, “Billionaire Tech Titan Mark Cuban on AI: ‘It Scares the S— Out of Me,’ ” CNBC , July 25, 2017, https:// www .cnbc .com /2017 /07 /25 /mark -cuban -on -ai -it -scares -me .html. 170   “Is the country going to turn” : Evan Osnos, “Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich,” New Yorker , January 22, 2017, https:// www .newyorker .com /magazine /2017 /01 /30 /doomsday -prep -for -the -super -rich. 170   Employees protested : Peter Kafka, “Google Wants out of the Creepy Military Robot Business,” Vox , March 17, 2016, https:// www .vox .com /2016 /3 /17 /11587060 /google -wants -out -of -the -creepy -military -robot -business. 170   four thousand Googlers : Kate Conger, “Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract,” Gizmodo , May 14, 2018, https:// gizmodo .com /google -employees -resign -in -protest -against -pentagon -con -1825729300. 171   “the one who becomes the leader” : Associated Press, “Putin: Leader in Artificial Intelligence Will Rule World,” CNBC , September 4, 2017, https:// www .cnbc .com /2017 /09 /04 /putin -leader -in -artificial -intelligence -will -rule -world .html. 171   “I think the danger of AI” : Elon Musk Answers Your Questions!

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking
by Mark Bauerlein
Published 7 Sep 2011

The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

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< Douglas Rushkoff > they call me cyberboy Originally published in Time Digital (1996). DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF is the author of best-selling books on media and society, including Media Virus!: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture (1994) and Coercion: Why We Listen to What They Say (1999), winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award for Best Media Book. He made the PBS Frontline documentaries Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and Digital Nation. He teaches at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and in Graduate Media Studies at The New School. His website is http://rushkoff.com. NOT SO LONG AGO, I could freak people out by talking about cyberculture.

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It has broken down the doors of perception. Now, we’re adopting split focus as a cognitive booster rocket, the upgrade we need to survive in our multilayered new spaces. How else can we cope with an era of unprecedented simultaneity, a place we’ve hurtled into without any “way of getting our bearings,” as Marshall McLuhan noted in 1967.8 Multitasking is the answer, the sword in the stone. Why not do two (or more) things per moment when before you would have done one? “It’s a multitasking world out there. Your news should be the same. CNN Pipeline—multiple simultaneous news streams straight to your desktop.” I am watching this ad on a huge screen at the Detroit airport one May evening after my flight home is canceled.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
by Franklin Foer
Published 31 Aug 2017

If some of these sentiments sound familiar, it is because they have echoed in dozens of Apple commercials over the years. In a way, this was a theory of radical individualism and self-reliance—a forerunner of Silicon Valley libertarianism. But Brand had studied the works of such thinkers as Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Wiener, and Marshall McLuhan. All of his intellectual heroes wrote about the importance of looking at systems and networks. This was where the notion of the Whole Earth came in. Brand wanted his readers to think ecologically, to see how everything relates to everything else, to understand their place in the web of life.

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Brand could express this sentiment only in gusts of rhetoric that would never survive rigorous analysis, except for the force with which they were exhaled: “Ever since there were two organisms, life has been a matter of coevolution, life growing ever more richly on life. . . . We can ask what kinds of dependency we prefer, but that’s our only choice.” However eloquently expressed, such thoughts weren’t entirely original. Brand borrowed heavily from others, especially Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian academic turned pop icon. Unlike his stuffy colleagues, McLuhan engaged with the culture as it was lived in the sixties—not the work of modernist novelists and action painters, but television, radio, and movies. He was lithe and gnomic, a strangely appealing fixture on TV talk shows, not to mention a perfectly deadpan actor in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.

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“Those magnificent men with their flying machines”: Stewart Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972. “When computers become available to everybody”: Brand, “Spacewar.” injected an important new phrase into the lexicon: Stewart Brand, II Cybernetic Frontiers (Random House, 1974). “Ever since there were two organisms”: Turner, 121. “Today, after more than a century”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (McGraw-Hill, 1964), 3. “desert of classified data”: Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., Essential McLuhan (Basic Books, 1995), 92. “Today computers hold out the promise”: McLuhan, 80. “Life will be happier for the on-line individual”: Isaacson, 261. “Hope in life comes from the interconnections”: Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (HarperCollins, 1999), 209.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

Thinking about changing modes of communication as environments has a long pedigree, and a uniquely Canadian connection to boot. Many Canadians may not be aware of our country’s important legacy around the study of communications technologies associated with the Toronto School of Communications, and in particular with University of Toronto alumni Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. (This family of theorizing is also known as “media ecology,” and adherents of it have formed a large professional network called the Media Ecology Association.) Innis and McLuhan both drew attention in their different ways to the material qualities of different modes of communication and how these material qualities affect the nature and quality of communications.

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According to one survey study, for some journalists “Twitter has become so normalized that tweets were deemed equally newsworthy as headlines appearing to be from the AP wire.”160 Then there are the physical characteristics of digital interactions that affect the nature of discourse, a topic in which Marshall McLuhan would be right at home. Hidden behind screens with relative anonymity, lacking the physical and other cues that come from face-to-face interaction, users are less inhibited online than off. Their utterances are more likely to be emotionally charged and stripped of the usual decorum that comes from speaking in front of intended recipients.

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Virtual, ethereal, weightless, clean, futuristic: these and other terms like them are what first come to mind for most people when they think of digital technologies. But the reality is far different. As long as I’ve studied information and communications technologies, I’ve been fascinated by its often overlooked but vast and inescapable physical infrastructure. No doubt my fascination is thanks to the influence of media ecologists like Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, whose contributions to the field were distinguished by their appreciation of communications technologies’ material qualities. I’ve studied undersea fibre optic cables, toured landing stations off the east coast of Africa, and descended into the depths of a mountain-encased data centre that once served as a nuclear fallout shelter in Stockholm, Sweden.

Future Shock
by Alvin Toffler
Published 1 Jun 1984

No one ought to have the nerve to pontificate on our present worries without reading it." R. Buckminster Fuller: "Cogent ... brilliant ... I hope vast numbers will read Toffler's book." Betty Friedan: "Brilliant and true ... Should be read by anyone with the responsibility of leading or participating in movements for change in America today." Marshall McLuhan: "FUTURE SHOCK ... is 'where it's at.'" Robert Rimmer, author of The Harrad Experiment: "A magnificent job ... Must reading." John Diebold: "For those who want to understand the social and psychological implications of the technological revolution, this is an incomparable book." WALL STREET JOURNAL: "Explosive ...

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Attractive male and female "guides," similarly nude under their veils, offer each guest a stereophonic headset, a see-through mask, and, from time to time, balloons, kaleidoscopes, tambourines, plastic pillows, mirrors, pieces of crystal, marshmallows, slides and slide projectors. Folk and rock music, interspersed with snatches of television commercials, street noises and a lecture by or about Marshall McLuhan fill the ears. As the music grows more excited, guests and guides begin to dance on the platforms and the carpeted white walkways that connect them. Bubbles drift down from machines in the ceiling. Hostesses float through, spraying a variety of fragrances into the air. Lights change color and random images wrap themselves around the walls, guests and guides.

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Thus, anyone who has attempted to buy a car lately, as I have, soon finds that the task of learning about the various brands, lines, models and options (even within a fixed price range) requires days of shopping and reading. In short, the auto industry may soon reach the point at which its technology can economically produce more diversity than the consumer needs or wants. Yet we are only beginning the march toward destandardization of our material culture. Marshall McLuhan has noted that "Even today, most United States automobiles are, in a sense, custom-produced. Figuring all possible combinations of styles, options and colors available on a certain new family sports car, for example, a computer expert came up with 25,000,000 different versions of it for a buyer ...

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan
Published 30 Apr 2018

CHAPTER THREE HISTORY The First Wave WHEN THE FEDERAL AUTHORITIES CAME down hard on Timothy Leary in the mid-1960s, hitting him with a thirty-year sentence for attempting to bring a small amount of marijuana over the border at Laredo, Texas, in 1966,* the embattled former psychology professor turned to Marshall McLuhan for some advice. The country was in the throes of a moral panic about LSD, inspired in no small part by Leary’s own promotion of psychedelic drugs as a means of personal and cultural transformation and by his recommendation to America’s youth that they “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Dated and goofy as those words sound to our ears, there was a moment when they were treated as a credible threat to the social order, an invitation to America’s children not only to take mind-altering drugs but to reject the path laid out for them by their parents and their government—including the path taking young men to Vietnam.

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Dated and goofy as those words sound to our ears, there was a moment when they were treated as a credible threat to the social order, an invitation to America’s children not only to take mind-altering drugs but to reject the path laid out for them by their parents and their government—including the path taking young men to Vietnam. Also in 1966, Leary was called before a committee of the U.S. Senate to defend his notorious slogan, which he gamely if not very persuasively attempted to do. In the midst of the national storm raging around him—a storm, it should be said, he quite enjoyed—Leary met with Marshall McLuhan over lunch at the Plaza hotel in New York, the LSD guru betting that the media guru might have some tips on how best to handle the public and the press. “Dreary Senate hearing and courtrooms are not the platforms for your message, Tim,” McLuhan advised, in a conversation that Leary recounts in Flashbacks, one of his many autobiographies.

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The ex-professor, who for the occasion had traded in his Brooks Brothers for white robes and love beads (and flowers in his graying hair), implored the throng of tripping “hippies”—the term popularized that year by the local newspaper columnist Herb Caen—to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” The slogan—which he at first said he had thought up in the shower but years later claimed was “given to him” by Marshall McLuhan—would cling to Leary for the rest of his life, earning him the contempt of parents and politicians the world over. But Leary’s story only gets weirder, and sadder. Soon after his departure from Cambridge, the government, alarmed at his growing influence on the country’s youth, launched a campaign of harassment that culminated in the 1966 bust in Laredo; he was driving his family to Mexico on vacation, when a border search of his car turned up a small quantity of marijuana.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
by Eli Pariser
Published 11 May 2011

And to my community of family and friends, who fill my bubble with intelligence, humor, and love. INTRODUCTION A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. —Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. —Marshall McLuhan, media theorist Few people noticed the post that appeared on Google’s corporate blog on December 4, 2009. It didn’t beg for attention—no sweeping pronouncements, no Silicon Valley hype, just a few paragraphs of text sandwiched between a weekly roundup of top search terms and an update about Google’s finance software.

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This book wouldn’t be the same—and wouldn’t be much—without a large team of (sometimes unwitting) collaborators. What follows is my best attempt to credit those who contributed directly. But there’s an even larger number whose scholarship or writing or philosophy gave structure to my thoughts or forced me to think in a new way: Larry Lessig, Neil Postman, Cass Sunstein, Marshall McLuhan, Marvin Minsky, and Michael Schudson come to mind as a start. What’s good in this book owes a lot to this broad cadre of thinkers. The errors, of course, are all mine. The Filter Bubble began as a sketched fragment of text jotted down in the first days of 2010. Elyse Cheney, my literary agent, gave me the confidence to see it as a book.

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The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. NOTES Introduction 1 “A squirrel dying”: David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 296. 1 “thereafter our tools shape us”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). 1 “Personalized search for everyone”: Google Blog, Dec. 4, 2009, accessed Dec. 19, 2010, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html. 2 Google would use fifty-seven signals: Author interview with confidential source. 6 Wall Street Journal study: Julia Angwin, “The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets,” Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2010, accessed Dec. 19, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703940904575395073512989404.html. 6 “Yahoo”: Although the official trademark is Yahoo!

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

As the historian of writing Barry Powell argues . . . Barry B. Powell, Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization, Wiley-Blackwell: Malden, MA, 2012, p. 12. 4. The ease of associative linking with hypertext . . . Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2011, p. 455. 5. It shows us how much our inherited standards of punctuation . . . Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2011, p. 455. 6. ‘The more I read,’ Frederick Douglass wrote in 1845 . . . Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Literary Classics of the United States: New York, 1994, p. 42. 7.

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A couple of ordinary sentences can be of enormous economic value, as demonstrated by Snapchat’s loss of $1.3 billion stock value after a single tweet by Kylie Jenner. It shows us how much our inherited standards of punctuation, rubrication and letterform are a legacy of the early modern reinvention of the book as, in Marshall McLuhan’s words, the ‘first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly line, and the first mass-production’.5 It also upsets centred hierarchies of writing, where all texts ultimately refer to and are legitimized by a single, sacred text such as a bible or constitution. On a distributed network of writing, there is no single centre.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

Harold Innis, Political Economy in the Modern State (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1946), Empire and Communications (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), and The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951). 11. See Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., Essential McLuhan (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999, intro. Lewis H. Lapham); Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967); and Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1962). Another classic in this tradition is Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: Quill, 1978).

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In the mid-twentieth century, he wrote long studies on the importance of communication in shaping the course of human history.10 Innis argued that modes of communication and communication technologies were of central importance in understanding human development and that they had profound intrinsic biases. Marshall McLuhan was an acolyte of Innis, though this Canadian English professor altered Innis’s arguments. McLuhan is best known for his notion that the “medium is the message,” that the nature of media content derives from the structure and technology of the medium. The dominant media technology defines a society, he said, changing the very way we think and the way that human societies operate.11 His work was very influential on innumerable thinkers, including Neil Postman, who argued that television had an innate bias toward superficiality.12 “Every intellectual technology,” as Nicholas Carr puts it, “embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work.”

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

How can we account for the diversity of logics and practices promoted by digital tools without having to resort to explanations that revolve around terms like “the Net”? “The Net” is a term that should appear on the last—not first!—page of our books about digital technologies; it cannot explain itself. Like Marshall McLuhan before him, Carr wants to score, rank, and compare different media and come up with some kind of quasi-scientific pecking order for them (McLuhan went as far as to calculate sense ratios for each medium that he “studied”). This very medium-centric approach overlooks the diversity of actual practices enabled by each medium.

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Much like with rational-choice theory, what many fellow scholars believe to be rather problematic scholarship is presented as universally admired and entirely uncontroversial. To use Eisenstein as our guide to “the Internet” is to commit to a very particular way of thinking about digital matters. Drawing heavily on the work of Marshall McLuhan, Eisenstein argues that the importance of printing in triggering all the subsequent social transformations had not yet been sufficiently credited (hence she dubbed it the “Unacknowledged Revolution”). But while trying to do justice to the role of the printing press in history, Eisenstein embraces a rather limiting view of print media, overemphasizing what she believes to be the inherent qualities of this technology: fixity (i.e., its ability to preserve texts that might otherwise get lost or badly damaged), ease of dissemination, and the tendency toward standardization.

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The authors’ key insight is that the new electronic systems that mediate access to such forms—from online databases to search engines—are anything but the unproblematic and highly predictable purveyors of information that we often take them to be. These platforms actually transform and modify the information they carry; it’s one of the few cases in which Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that the medium is the message is actually worth heeding, at least partially, for it forces us to confront the information infrastructure that gets us the information we want. There is a certain shallow attitude toward such infrastructure—an attitude that French philosopher Bruno Latour calls “double click”—that treats communication and the production of knowledge as relatively uncomplicated and frictionless affairs that could happen without mediators like databases and search engines.

The Unicorn's Secret
by Steven Levy
Published 6 Oct 2016

The living room was perfect for holding court—it was two steps lower than the rest of the apartment, and had window seats on the big bay windows overlooking Thirty-fifth Street; typically one would find people spread out on a bunch of cushions spread in an oval, with Ira sitting on the window seat, at the oval’s crown, expounding on consciousness, Marshall McLuhan, or LSD. (“Ira was almost a medium in the way that when a television is on, everybody in the room will pay attention to it,” recalls one Einhorn friend.) There was also a spacious kitchen, a huge bathroom—its substantial tub pleased Ira, who took at least one bath a day—and a hallway that led to two bedrooms.

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In the sixties, Jim Sorrels was a psychologist working in a Palo Alto mental health clinic who saw how Ira Einhorn’s verbal presentation drew maximum impact in that intense era. “Usual social convention has people sitting at slightly oblique angles to each other,” says Sorrels. “With Ira, most likely, he would take a position seated directly in front of you in a lotus posture. And the eyes would just lock in, and it didn’t matter whether you were talking about Marshall McLuhan or your own life, but the contact, the engagement, was complete. You almost never made small talk with Ira. He came with the parentheses: This man is not made for small talk.” Author William Irwin Thompson agrees with that assessment, though not with the same enthusiasm as Sorrels. He met Einhorn at a seminar at Esalen, and was simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the Unicorn.

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But when registration started, 750 students clamored to get in and new courses had to be opened on the spot. Ira Einhorn quickly became, according to an article by Ralph Keyes in The Nation, “the new hero in today’s Free University.” Keyes saw Einhorn as a long-haired, bearded, education crusader with a daffodil behind one ear. His first course was called “The World of Marshall McLuhan,” but the three-page syllabus covered the full range of his interests; Bob Brand referred to it as “Introduction to Hippiedom.” Keyes wrote that “Einhorn’s courses are easily the most popular in the Free University. His teaching tools range from candles and incense to rock ’n roll and free-word association.… [His ‘McLuhan’ course] actually rose in participation from 60 to 75, more people attending the last class than the room would hold.”

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 13 May 2013

Its central thesis is that the instructions encoded in the software that effectively run the Internet shape and constrain what is communicated just as laws and regulations do. Although Lessig did not emphasize it, that thesis is part of a larger tradition of theorizing about communications technology associated most prominently with Canadian academics Marshall McLuhan (“the medium is the message”) and Harold Innis (“the bias of communications”). According to this tradition, communications technologies are rarely neutral and their material properties – the wires, cables, machines themselves, and so forth – have direct societal impacts. Think about this for a moment.

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Born as an experimental research network in universities, what used to be called the “Internet” has mushroomed, more by accident than design, to become the information and communications operating system for planet Earth. A mixed common-pool resource that cuts across political jurisdictions and the public and private sectors, cyberspace has become, as Marshall McLuhan foresaw, “our central nervous system in a global embrace.” This unprecedented global network produces a remarkable stream of innovations and social goods. Deep wells of knowledge, translated into multiple languages, are now instantly accessible to people around the world. H.G. Wells’s description of a world encyclopaedia, written less than eighty years ago, is no longer the stuff of science fiction.

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He was also the principal author of the Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Man (1940), which was later superseded by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. H.G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1901). 2 “our central nervous system in a global embrace”: The quotation is from Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, page 3: “Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” 3 “Internet Freedom in a Suitcase”: The phrase refers to the so-called Internet-in-a-suitcase project that was developed by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative, and funded by the U.S.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

I can date my own serious exposure to it to 1966, when the composer John Cage invited me and four or five other young arts people to join him for a series of dinners—an ongoing seminar about media, communications, art, music, and philosophy that focused on Cage’s interest in the ideas of Wiener, Claude Shannon, and Marshall McLuhan, all of whom had currency in the New York art circles in which I was then moving. In particular, Cage had picked up on McLuhan’s idea that by inventing electronic technologies we had externalized our central nervous system—that is, our minds—and that we now had to presume that “there’s only one mind, the one we all share.”

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While Lois and the team did the heavy lifting on the final mechanicals for WEC, Stewart and I sat together in a corner for two days, reading, underlining, and annotating the same paperback copy of Cybernetics that Cage had handed to me the year before, and debating Wiener’s ideas. Inspired by this set of ideas, I began to develop a theme, a mantra of sorts, that has informed my endeavors since: “new technologies = new perceptions.” Inspired by communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, architect-designer Buckminster Fuller, futurist John McHale, and cultural anthropologists Edward T. “Ned” Hall and Edmund Carpenter, I started reading avidly in the fields of information theory, cybernetics, and systems theory. McLuhan suggested I read biologist J. Z. Young’s Doubt and Certainty in Science, in which he said that we create tools and we mold ourselves through our use of them.

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The event was consistent with HUO’s mission of bringing together art and science: “The curator is no longer understood simply as the person who fills a space with objects,” he says, “but also as the person who brings different cultural spheres into contact, invents new display features, and makes junctions that allow unexpected encounters and results.” In the introduction to the second edition of his book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan noted the ability of art to “anticipate future social and technological developments.” Art is “an early alarm system,” pointing us to new developments in times ahead and allowing us “to prepare to cope with them. . . . Art as a radar environment takes on the function of indispensable perceptual training.”

Possiplex
by Ted Nelson
Published 2 Jan 2010

We stayed up late and played audio episodes from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” When I said I wanted to smash the educational system, Marvin said, ‘You can’t eliminate the schools, what else is going to keep them out of the churches? What would Marshall McLuhan have said? ca. spring 1979 It's now a standard rhetorical question posed to students: "What would Marshall McLuhan have thought about hypertext?" Only I (and Ron Baecker) know. I had followed Marshall McLuhan since 1957, when I first heard about him from my professor Zellig Harris, when I took a reading course with him at the University of Pennsylvania. Harris had recommended McLuhan's magazine Explorations, which I read at the U.Pa library and found very inspiring.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 21 Mar 2013

When there is a direct communication with the senses, on the other hand, the difference becomes a lot clearer. Like a fluorescent lightbulb, which will perceptibly flicker at 60 hertz along with the alternating current of the house, digital technologies are almost perceptibly on/off. They create an environment, regardless of the content they are expressing. This is what Marshall McLuhan meant by “the medium is the message.” A lightbulb creates an environment, even though it has no content. Even without a slide or movie through which to project an image onto the wall, the light itself creates an environment where things can happen that otherwise wouldn’t. It is an environment of light.

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By the time the story is posted to the Web, stocks are actually lower, and the agencies are hard at work searching for a housing report or consumer index that may explain the new trend, making the news services appear to be chasing their own tails. This doesn’t mean pattern recognition is futile. It only shows how easy it is to draw connections where there are none, or where the linkage is tenuous at best. Even Marshall McLuhan realized that a world characterized by electronic media would be fraught with chaos and best navigated through pattern recognition. This is not limited to the way we watch media but is experienced in the way we watch and make choices in areas such as business, society, and war. Rapid churn on the business landscape has become the new status quo, as giants like Kodak fall and upstarts like Facebook become more valuable than oil companies.

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But this approach is still a carryover from the days of broadcast media and easy, top-down control of communications. Back in the era of television and other electronic communications technologies, a “global media” meant satellite television capable of broadcasting video of the Olympics across the globe. This was the electronically mediated world Marshall McLuhan described as the “global village”; he was satirizing the hippy values so many thought would emerge from a world brought together by their TV sets, and in his way warning us about the impact of globalism, global markets, and global superpowers on our lives and cultures. With the rise of digital media, however, we see the possibility for a reversal of this trend.

Collaborative Futures
by Mike Linksvayer , Michael Mandiberg and Mushon Zer-Aviv
Published 24 Aug 2010

Anybody can now become both author and publisher. Take any books on any subject and custom-make your own book by simply xeroxing a chapter from this one, a chapter from that one—instant steal! As new technologies come into play, people become less and less convinced of the importance of self expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort.“ —Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the MESSAGE This book was wri en in a collaborative Book Sprint by six core authors over a five-day period in January 2010. The six starting authors each come from different perspectives, as are the contributors who were adding to this living body of text. Six months later a new group of collaborators convened in New York City, while several of the first group also contributed simultaneously from NYC, Berlin and San Francisco.

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And it is this thought, this form-of-life, that, abandoning naked life to ‘Man’ and to the ‘Citizen,’ who c lothe it temporarily and represent it with their ‘rights,’ must bec ome the guiding c onc ept and the unitary c enter of the c oming politic s.” —Giorgio Agamben, Mea ns without End: Notes on Politics. [University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London: 2000] 25 What this book is… To begin looking at those futures, we look back to others who have looked into the future. Marshall McLuhan’s quote above, from “The Medium is the MESSAGE” give us our first clue about all of these assumptions we are making. We are talking about media, we are talking about freedom, we are talking about technologies, and we are talking about culture. McLuhan’s prophetic u erance, several decades before the photocopier fueled the punk cut-up design aesthetic, or the profusion of home-brew zines, is still unmet.

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing)
by Douglas R. Dechow
Published 2 Jul 2015

Then instead of populating them with his own art, he made his life’s work the struggle to give us as much freedom of structure as he could, so we can express, interconnect and begin to capture better the ways we experience thought in our minds. Or at least that was, I think, the vision before other people’s ideas and interests pointed the Internet’s evolution in the directions it took. PS: Marshall McLuhan, who, to the best of my knowledge, wasn’t familiar with Artaud’s theories, had this to say regarding computers in his 1964 book Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man:Our very word “grasp” or “apprehension” points to the process of getting at one thing through another, of handling and sensing many facets at a time through more than one sense at a time.

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Ted Nelson: A Critical (and Critically Incomplete) Bibliography Henry Lowood1 (1)Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA, USA Henry Lowood Email: lowood@stanford.edu 16.1 Introduction Devoting time to serious bibliographical matters as a tribute to Ted Nelson may seem like a quaintly out-of-tune and bookish, if not totally misguided project. It is easy to pigeon-hole Ted’s work as belonging to a generation of adventurous and creative writers and editors active during the 1960s who began to find that traditional print media constrained the expression of their ideas. Marshall McLuhan and the Whole Earth Catalog come to mind. Indeed, Literary Machines opens with the declaration that it is “a hypertext, or nonsequential piece of writing.” Each reader of this book has confronted the difficulties imposed by non-linear writing on the linear medium of print. And yet, there is no way around the fact that most of Ted’s work has been published on paper.

Team Human
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 22 Jan 2019

The digital media environment expresses itself in the physical environment Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, Greening the Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 40. National governments were declared extinct John Perry Barlow, “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” Wired, February 8, 1996. We are not advancing toward some new, totally inclusive global society, but retreating back to nativism Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Even 9/11 was a simultaneously experienced, global event Jean-Marie Colombani, “Nous Sommes Tous Américains,” Le Monde, September 12, 2001. At the height of the television media era, an American president Ronald Reagan, “Tear Down This Wall!”

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Online task systems pay people pennies per task to do things that computers can’t yet do Eric Limer, “My Brief and Curious Life as a Mechanical Turk,” Gizmodo, October 28, 2014. 55. We shape our technologies at the moment of conception, but from that point forward they shape us John Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan,” Saturday Review, March 18, 1967. they make decisions just as racist and prejudicial as the humans whose decisions they were fed Ellora Thadaney Israni, “When an Algorithm Helps Send You to Prison,” New York Times, October 26, 2017. But the criteria and processes they use are deemed too commercially sensitive to be revealed Ian Sample, “AI Watchdog Needed to Regulate Automated Decision-Making, Say Experts,” Guardian, January 27, 2017.

Player One
by Douglas Coupland
Published 30 Jun 2011

Zeises DOUGLAS COUPLAND Douglas Coupland is the international bestselling author of Generation X, and eleven other novels, including The Gum Thief, Hey Nostradamus!, All Families Are Psychotic, and Generation A, which was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His nonfiction books include Marshall McLuhan, Polaroids from the Dead, Terry: The Life of Terry Fox, and Souvenir of Canada. His books have been translated into thirty-five languages and published around the world. He is also a visual artist and sculptor, furniture designer and screenwriter. He lives in Vancouver, B.C. ALSO BY DOUGLAS COUPLAND Fiction Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture Shampoo Planet Life After God Microserfs Girlfriend in a Coma Miss Wyoming All Families Are Psychotic Hey Nostradamus!

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ALSO BY DOUGLAS COUPLAND Fiction Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture Shampoo Planet Life After God Microserfs Girlfriend in a Coma Miss Wyoming All Families Are Psychotic Hey Nostradamus! Eleanor Rigby JPod The Gum Thief Generation A Nonfiction Polaroids from the Dead City of Glass Souvenir of Canada Souvenir of Canada 2 Terry Marshall McLuhan

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
Published 6 Jun 2016

It’s a dream come true for our insatiable human appetite: rivers of uninterrupted betterment. At the heart of this new regime of constant flux is ever tinier specks of computation. We are currently entering the third phase of computing, the Flows. The initial age of computing borrowed from the industrial age. As Marshall McLuhan observed, the first version of a new medium imitates the medium it replaces. The first commercial computers employed the metaphor of the office. Our screens had a “desktop” and “folders” and “files.” They were hierarchically ordered, like much of the industrial age that the computer was overthrowing.

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Priced at $25,000: Angelo Young, “Industrial Robots Could Be 16% Less Costly to Employ Than People by 2025,” International Business Times, February 11, 2015. all but seven minutes of a typical flight: John Markoff, “Planes Without Pilots,” New York Times, April 6, 2015. 3: FLOWING steady flow of household replenishables: “List of Online Grocers,” Wikipedia, accessed August 18, 2015. new medium imitates the medium it replaces: Marshall McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970). top ten music videos: “List of Most Viewed YouTube Videos,” Wikipedia, accessed August 18, 2015. about $2.26 per download: “Did Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ Honesty Box Actually Damage the Music Industry?,” NME, October 15, 2012. create a chorus from it: Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir, “Lux Aurumque,” March 21, 2010.

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has $3 billion in circulation: “Bitcoin Network,” Bitcoin Charts, accessed June 24, 2015. 100,000 vendors accepting the coins: Wouter Vonk, “Bitcoin and BitPay in 2014,” BitPay blog, February 4, 2015. Six times an hour: Colin Dean, “How Many Bitcoin Are Mined Per Day?,” Bitcoin Stack Exchange, March 28, 2013. Knowledge-Based Trust: Hal Hodson, “Google Wants to Rank Websites Based on Facts Not Links,” New Scientist, February 28, 2015. tools are extensions of our selves: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). down only 14 minutes in 2014: Brandon Butler, “Which Cloud Providers Had the Best Uptime Last Year?,” Network World, January 12, 2015. app onto their phones called FireChat: Noam Cohen, “Hong Kong Protests Propel FireChat Phone-to-Phone App,” New York Times, October 5, 2014. 6: SHARING “new modern-day sort of communists”: Michael Kanellos, “Gates Taking a Seat in Your Den,” CNET, January 5, 2005.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King
Published 5 May 2016

In most of the developed world, it is likely that you would not be able to get a professional job today without a LinkedIn profile or an online network you can leverage. Marshall McLuhan is credited with a great quote that aptly describes the world that the generation born post-PC and -Internet find themselves in today: “I don’t know who discovered water, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fish…” Marshall McLuhan, 1966 speech Let’s think about this generation born into a world of technology. A generation that has such a different worldview of technology that Jordan Greenhall24 calls them the “Omega” generation—the last generation. Applying the Marshall McLuhan attribution, these kids who were born after 2000 don’t see technology around them as new; to them, it is just like air or water.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

Nellie Bowles, “A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley,” The New York Times, October 26, 2018. 26. Author interview with Harris, 2017. 27. Rana Foroohar, “The Coming Corporate Crackdown,” Time, June 3, 2013. 28. Wikipedia, s.v. “Marshall McLuhan,” last modified May 9, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Marshall_McLuhan. 29. Bianca Bosker, “The Binge Breaker,” The Atlantic, November 2016. 30. Author interviews with Harris, 2017, 2018. 31. Kevin Webb, “The FTC Will Investigate Whether a Multibillion-Dollar Business Model Is Getting Kids Hooked on Gambling Through Video Games,” Business Insider, November 28, 2018. 32.

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If the enduring image representing the industrial revolution was that clanging, smoke-belching locomotive roaring over the countryside, the information age is represented by the sleek, slender iPhone, probably the loveliest mass market product ever made. But wait: It’s not only beautiful; it also does all this great stuff. Has anything ever felt quite so good in the hand, offered so much to the eye, and so enlivened the passions and quickened the mind? Canadian communications theorist and philosopher Marshall McLuhan once observed that every new wave of technology contains all the previous waves within it,28 and so the smartphone is the telephone, the camera, the movie, the phonograph, the radio, and so much more, all in one. And all of it thanks to computer chips that forever pack more and more power into less and less space—and now, with quantum computing, will operate on hyperdrive.

From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture
by Theodore Roszak
Published 31 Aug 1986

They had heard lights; they to tilt the music; they had seen the colored had sampled the dope. Nothing did more the counterculture toward a naive technophilia than this seductive trio of delights. If the high tech of the western world could offer so great a spiritual treasure, then Here, Fuller, liac the I why not more? suspect, is the reason why Buckminster Marshall McLuhan, and the other technophi- Utopians struck such a responsive chord countercultural prepared prepared an it in Acid and rock had young. audience among for their message, and an especially persuasive way that un- dercut the cerebral levels. For the psychedelics are a powerful, even a shattering experience.

In the Flow
by Boris Groys
Published 16 Feb 2016

As Nietzsche wrote in his famous ‘God is dead’ passage, we have lost the spectator of our souls, and because of that, the soul itself. After Nietzsche and during the whole epoch of mechanical reproduction, we heard a lot about this demise of subjectivity. We heard from Heidegger that die Sprache spricht (‘the language speaks’), rather than the individual who is using the language. We have heard from Marshall McLuhan that the message of the medium undermines, subverts and shifts every individual message transmitted through this medium. Later, Derridian deconstruction and Deleuzian machines of desire rid us of our last illusions concerning the possibility of stabilizing an individual message. Mastery over communication is revealed by modern media theory as a subjective illusion.

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And there are some indications that it can be successful in the long run: The Internet and other contemporary means of communication offer – at least potentially – the possibility of avoiding censorship and exclusion and making everyone’s particular message universally accessible. However, we are all well aware today of the fate to which any subjective message, particular viewpoint, or individual idea is necessarily subject once it is brought into circulation through the media of communication. We know already from Marshall McLuhan that the message of the medium undermines, subverts and shifts every individual message using this medium. We know from Heidegger that die Sprache spricht – the language says more than the individual using the language. These formulations undermine the subjectivity of the speaker, of the sender of the message, even if the hermeneutical subjectivity of the listener, reader, receiver of the information seems to be left relatively intact.

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter
by Steven Johnson
Published 5 Apr 2006

Today's popular culture may not be showing us the righteous path. But it is making us smarter. PART ONE * * The student of media s o o n co mes to exp ect the new m edia o f any period whateve r to b e cla ssed as pseudo by those who acqu ired the patte rns of ea rlie r media, whateve r they may happen to be. -MARSHALL McLuHAN GAMES You CAN ' T GET much more conventional than the con­ ventional wisdom that kids today would be better off spend­ ing more time reading books, and less time zoning out in front of their video games. The latest edition of Dr. Spock­ "revised and fully expanded for a new century" as the cover reports-has this to say of video games : "The best that can be said of them is that they may help promote eye-hand co­ ordination in children .

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The Wall Street Journal, November 13, 1998. page 12 "The entertainment industry has pushed ": Parents Tele­ vision Council . (The passage was found in the past at the Coun­ cil's website, http://www.parentstv.orgl.) page 1 2 "The television sitcom is emblematic": Suzanne Fields, "Janet and a Shameless Culture," The Washington Times, Febru­ ary 2, 2004. page 15 "The student of media soon comes to expect": Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1 994) , p. 199. page 17 "The best that can be said of them " : Benj amin Spock and Steven J. Parker, D r. Spock 5 Baby and Child Care (New York: Pocket Books, 1 998) , p. 625 . page 18 " People who read for pleasure " : Andrew Solomon, "The Closing of the American Book," The New York Times, July 10, 2004.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem
by Joan Didion
Published 1 Jan 1968

After lunch they do ballet exercises to Beatles records, and after that they sit around on the bare floor beneath a photomural of Cypress Point and discuss their reading: Gandhi on Nonviolence, Louis Fischer’s Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Jerome Frank’s Breaking the Thought Barrier, Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, Krishnamurti’s The First and Last Freedom and Think on These Things, C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite, Huxley’s Ends and Means, and Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. On the fifth day, they meet as usual but spend the afternoon in total silence, which involves not only not talking but also not reading, not writing, and not smoking. Even on discussion days, this silence is invoked for regular twenty-minute or hour intervals, a regimen described by one student as “invaluable for clearing your mind of personal hangups” and by Miss Baez as “just about the most important thing about the school.”

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Until a couple of years ago Chet Helms never did much besides hitchhiking, but now he runs the Avalon Ballroom and flies over the Pole to check out the London scene and says things like “Just for the sake of clarity I’d like to categorize the aspects of primitive religion as I see it.” Right now he is talking about Marshall McLuhan and how the printed word is finished, out, over. “The East Village Other is one of the few papers in America whose books are in the black,” he says. “I know that from reading Barron’s!” A new group is supposed to play in the Panhandle today but they are having trouble with the amplifier and I sit in the sun listening to a couple of little girls, maybe seventeen years old.

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony
by David G. W. Birch
Published 14 Apr 2020

In those far-off days, however, the reason for knocking out an enemy’s IT infrastructure was so that you could send in your tank columns or paratroopers. There were cyber aspects to war, but that was it. Now we are in a cyberwar and, in Ferguson’s terms, it is a war between networks (Ferguson 2017).39 The Canadian father of media theory, Marshall McLuhan, saw this coming just as he saw everything else coming. Way back in 1970, when the same Cold War that I fought in was well under way, he observed that ‘World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation’. If you think this sounds overly dramatic, you are wrong.

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We took the means for deferred payments (the settlement of debts) and turned them into stores of value that could be traded. These, in turn, became a medium of exchange: asset claims moved from memory to clay tablets to coins. Today, we are no longer in the clan village of the ancient past or the urban anonymity of the recent past. We are in Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’, where the digitization of the world allows us to be connected to everyone, everywhere and all the time. Instead of memory, we have social media, mobile phones and shared ledgers. This is why Weatherford has predicted the intermediary of money will soon no longer be needed: we no longer need to remember.

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System
by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost
Published 9 Jan 2009

The screen image is not drawn all at once, but in individual scan lines, each of which is created as the electron gun slews from side to side across the screen. After each line, the beam is turned off and the gun resets its position at the start of the next line. It continues this process for as many scan lines as the TV image requires. Then it turns off again and resets to its initial position at the start of the screen. As Marshall McLuhan mused, “The scanning finger of the TV screen is at once the transcending of mechanism and a throwback to the world of the scribe.”2 Modern computer systems offer a facility for transcending the TV’s electronic finger. They have a frame buffer, a space in memory to which the programmer can write graphics information for one entire screen draw.

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Original site offline, see http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.dailyradar.com/features/showbiz_ feature_page_84_1.html. Loftus, Geoffrey R., and Elizabeth F. Loftus. Mind at Play: The Psychology of Video Games. New York: Basic Books, 1983. McLuhan, Marshall. “Printing and Social Change.” Vol. 1 of Marshall McLuhan Unbound. Corte Madera, Calif.: Gingko Press, 2005. Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Montfort, Nick. “An Atari VCS Curriculum.” Grand Text Auto, 6 July 2004. http:// grandtextauto.org/2004/06/06/an-atari-vcs-curriculum/.

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory
by Andrew J. Bacevich
Published 7 Jan 2020

Thomas Friedman, Longitudes and Attitudes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 3; “Globalization: The Super Story,” https://genius.com/Thomas-friedman-globalization-the-super-story-annotated. 4. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (Thousand Oaks, California, 1992), 8. 5. The phrase is attributed to Marshall McLuhan, reflecting in 1968 on the proliferation of electronic media. “Today electronics and automation make mandatory,” he wrote, “that everybody adjust to the vast global environment as if it were his little home town.” Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (New York, 1968), 12. 6. William Graham Sumner, The Forgotten Man and Other Essays (New Haven, Connecticut, 1879 [rpt. 1919]), 215. 7.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Published 21 Nov 2017

All of this preceded Ivan’s work, but none of it involved synthesizing an interactive alternate world of unlimited variations that compensated for head motion (to create the illusion that it was stationary, outside of the person), so for me, Ivan built the first headset that counts as a VR device. Ivan’s work was hidden in plain sight. He didn’t have the flamboyance of a Marshall McLuhan, but he probably had more influence on the future of media than anyone else working in the 1960s. You had to read past the surface, since he presented his work with deceptively dry affect. I love recalling the first passes of computer science because then you can see how the whole of computation is an act of invention.

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Similarly, it used to take a lot of people to spy on a lot of people, as was the case with the monumental Stasi spying and manipulation empire in the East German state. But it has become possible for small numbers of people to spy on everyone else, and also to block most others from doing the same, since digital networks aren’t as equitable as advertised. 7.   In honor of Marshall McLuhan, a celebrity intellectual who thrived in the 1960s. He pioneered the study of media. 8.   William Bricken, onetime principal scientist at the University of Washington’s Human Interface Technology Lab, the VR lab started by Tom Furness and birthplace of the first virtual Seattle, has undertaken an exploration of postsymbolic approaches to mathematics.

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Joy, Bill juggling Kalman filter Kapor, Mitch karate Kay, Alan Kelly, Kevin Kemp, Jack Khan, Ali Akbar Kickstarter Kim, David Kim, Scott Kinect Kinect Hacks King, Stephen kitchen design Klein Bottle Knitting Factory Knuth, Don Kollin, Joel Kotik, Gordy Krueger, Myron Kuiper Belt Kurzweil, Ray Kyoto Prize LaBerge, Stephen Langer, Susanne language translation Lanier, Ellery (father) death of death of Lilly and dome and mysticism and PhD studies and science writing and teaching career and Lanier, first wife divorce from Lanier, Lena Lanier, Lilibell (daughter,) Lanier, Lilly (mother) death of laser procedure on retina lasers Lasko, Ann latency Lawnmower Man, The (film) Learning Company Leary, Timothy Lectiones Mathematicae LEEP Lennon, John Lennon, Sean Leonard, Brett Levitt, David Levy, Steven libertarians licensing light pen lightweight optics limerence links, one- vs. two-way Linn, Roger LISP Lissajous patterns “Little Albert” experiment lobster avatar Los Alamos Los Angeles LSD Lucas, George lucid dreaming Lumière brothers Macedonians machine learning “Machine Stops, The” (Forster) machine vision Macintosh computers operating system MacIntyre, Blair Macromedia Macromind magazine stands magic magical thinking magicians magic window magnetic fields malware Manchurian Candidate, The (film) Mandala mapping marijuana markets Mars Marxism mass media Mateevitsi, Victor mathematics video games and Mathews, Max Matrix films Matsushita Mattel MAX design tool MAX visual programming tool McDowall, Ian McFerrin, Bobby McGreevy, Mike McGrew, Dale McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan ramp McMillen, Keith MDMA (Ecstasy) measurement medicine. See also surgical simulation mega-octopus Mekas brothers memory memory palaces Menke, Joseph Menlo Park Metropolis magazine Mexican-Americans Mexico Michael (gorilla) MicroCosm project micro- or nanopayments Microsoft Microsoft Research Faculty Summit Midas, King military contracts mind control Minecraft Minority Report (film) Minsky, Margaret Minsky, Marvin MIT Media Lab Mitchelson, Marvin mixed reality term coined mobile phones, cheap Möbius-Orwellian tech talk modeless computation modes molecules Molici, Dave Mondo 2000 magazine monitors Monk, Thelonius Montessori school Monty Python Moog, Bob Moog synthesizer Moondust (computer game) Moore’s Law Moravec, Hans Morley, Ruth Morrow, Charlie Mortgage-backed securities motion capture suits motion parallax motion sensing motor cortex mouse, computer MSNBC Mu, Queen multiperson experiences multiperson organizationas multitouch designs multiview display Muppets music royalties and musical instruments musicians music technology music videos Musk, Elon mystery mysticism MythBusters Mythical Man-Month, The (Brooks) Naimark, Michael Naked Lunch (Burroughs?)

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
by Satyajit Das
Published 14 Oct 2011

Each dollar spent may generate bonus points toward a prize or air miles. Cards related to an entity like a university, return a percentage of the spending on the card to the affinity group. In developing countries, a credit card is frequently a sought after symbol of Western modernity, signifying sophistication and progress. Consumers agreed with Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist: “Money is a poor man’s credit card.” Nobody wanted to be poor. Credit cards are now even objets d’art. Specialists in numismatics (the study of money) and exonumia (the study of money-like objects) collect old paper merchant cards, metal tokens once used as merchant credit cards and early credit cards made of celluloid plastic, fiber, and paper.

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When asked what happened to his fortune, the soccer star George Best responded: “I spent 90 percent of my money on women, drink and fast cars. The rest I wasted!” Slowly, the world awoke to the realization that it had wasted a staggering amount of wealth that did not exist in the first place. 6. Money Honey The scholar Marshall McLuhan elliptically noted that “the medium is the message.” The medium is newspapers, books, television, and increasingly the Internet. The message now was money. Banker Walter Wriston anticipated it: “Information about money has become almost as important as money itself.”1 Once, newspapers gave more space to sport than financial news.

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Individual lives and business activities are increasingly molded by money. Banks and financiers have become dominant forces in the world. The interplay of the real world and its endless monetary reflection now drives economies and cities. News about money is everywhere and deeply embedded in popular culture. It is a fragile construction that echoes Marshall McLuhan: “All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.” In 1999, with the American economy in the grip of a speculative mania, Wired, the magazine that exemplified the dot.com era, envisioned ultra prosperity. By 2020, average household income in the United States would triple to $150,000, and families would be served by their very own household chefs.24 The Dow would be at least 50,000, probably on its way to 100,000.

Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security
by Daniel J. Solove
Published 28 Jun 2011

A Google search You’ll be redirected to your search results, at a URL something like this: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=best+hospital+ for+treatment+of+pancreatic+cancer&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq= &gs_rfai=&fp=59568d73ba32e248 If you look closely, you’ll see your search terms in the URL. All searches you enter will produce URLs with your search terms. URLs seem to be much more revealing than mere location information. They capture the substance of how a person is searching the Internet. In many circumstances, to adapt media scholar Marshall McLuhan’s famous maxim, the envelope is the content.11 160 The Patriot Act and Privacy? Envelope or Content? Before the Patriot Act, the question as to whether IP addresses and URLs were envelope or content information was unresolved. The U.S. Supreme Court hadn’t looked at the question under the Fourth Amendment.

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Rev. 1417, 1453–55 (2009). But for a defense of the distinction, see Orin S. Kerr, A User’s Guide to the Stored Communications Act and a Legislator’s Guide to Amending It, 72 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1208, 1229 n.142 (2004). 11. I am referring to McLuhan’s famous phrase “the medium is the message.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 7 (1964). 12. 18 U.S.C. § 3127(3) (amended 2001). 13. 18 U.S.C. § 3127(3), amended by USA PATRIOT Act, Pub. L. No. 107-56, § 216(c) (2001). 14. Kerr, Patriot Act, supra, at 638. 15. 18 U.S.C. § 3127(3). 16. USA PATRIOT Act § 215 (codified at 50 U.S.C. §1861(a)(1)). 17.

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia
by Andrew Lih
Published 5 Jul 2010

Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth. Whether or not one believes this as literal truth, the Internet is perhaps “un-dispersing” humanity’s languages by reconstituting them under one virtual roof at Wikipedia. Marshall McLuhan once noted this aspect, saying, “Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the ‘Tower of Babel’ by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation.”48 Most Wikipedia stories in the press tend to cover the English edition, but choose almost any other language and the story gets even more interesting and the effects more profound.

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Wikipedia has come so far that inclusion implies societal validation of a concept. 44. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/ 2003-November/008153.html. 45. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_war. Notes_233 46. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Three_revert _rule _enforcement. 47. Gdansk, from Wikipedia, 19 September 2007, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php ?title=Gda%C5%84sk& oldid=158792453. Chapter 6. WIKIPEDIA GOES INTERNATIONAL 48. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, the MIT Press (October 20, 1994). 49. http://osdir.com/ml/science.linguistics.wikipedia.international/2002-02/msg00018 .html. 50. http://osdir.com/ml/science.linguistics.wikipedia.international/2002-02/msg00037 .html. 51. http://osdir.com/ml/science.linguistics.wikipedia.international/2002-02/msg00038 .html . 52. http://www.ojr.org/japan/internet/1061505583.php . 53. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaDE .htm. 54. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions/Sighted_versions. 55. http://toolserver.org/~aka/cgi -bin/reviewcnt.cgi?

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up
by Philip N. Howard
Published 27 Apr 2015

These days, if you want to have a profile in modern politics, you have to be online. Corporate affairs are now largely managed over digital networks, and some corporations have their own proprietary networks. Now, new innovations in fashion and design diffuse over Instagram and Pinterest. Political power has often shifted along with technical innovation. Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan taught us that it wasn’t just new weapons that shifted political power centers.10 New media and communication created great opportunities for cultural dominance, turning the limited rule of particular political leaders into decades of social control by generations of ruling elites. Major concentrations in the control of public infrastructure have a label in political history—we call them empires.

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James Ball, “Meet the Seven People Who Hold the Keys to Worldwide Internet Security,” Guardian, February 28, 2014, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/28/seven-people-keys-worldwide-internet-security-web; “Internet Society,” accessed June 16, 2014, http://www.internetsociety.org/; “ICANN,” accessed June 16, 2014, https://www.icann.org/. 10. Harold Adams Innis, Empire and Communications (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). 11. “Twitter Saves Lives in Mexico,” Americas Quarterly, accessed September 10, 2014, http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/2576. 12. “Bloqueos,” Google Maps, accessed June 16, 2014, https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?

Social Life of Information
by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
Published 2 Feb 2000

Newspapers, for example, appear to be freighted with news that they carry out to readers. But, as we suggested in chapter 1, news is not some naturally occurring object that journalists pick up and stick on paper. It is made and shaped by journalists in the context of the medium and the audience. There's no need to go as far as Marshall McLuhan's claim that the "medium is the message" to see that the medium is not an indifferent carrier here. 17 The newspaper, then, is rather like the librarynot simply a collection of news, but a selection and a reflection. And the selection process doesn't just "gather news," but weaves and shapes, developing stories in accordance with available space and Page 186 priorities.

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Indeed, one of the essential distinctions between a performance and a document is that the latter can be revisited. In the excitement and immediacy of the 'Net's fluidity, it's easy to miss the social significance of this aspect of fixity. Harold Innis, an early communication theorist (and an important influence on Marshall McLuhan) suggested that communications technologies tend to favor one of two contrasting characteristics: "time binding" or "space binding."54 Some, that is, tend to immutability (preserving communications across time); others to mobility (delivering communications across ever greater spaces). Society's attention generally follows the latest shift in technology.

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency
by Ian Demartino
Published 2 Feb 2016

The following year, both Amazon and eBay were launched, and the rest is history. And yet, people were theorizing about the logistics of the Internet economy well before any of those events took place. While it could be argued that these questions can be traced to Nikola Tesla’s discussion of global wireless “central nervous centers,” it is ultimately Marshall McLuhan who should be credited. In his 1964 book Understanding Media, McLuhan described an interconnected and interactive form of media that sounds shockingly similar to the Internet and, one might argue, virtual reality. Earlier, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, he had coined the term “global village,” which is still used to describe the Internet today.

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See also: Coinbase, Bitcoin Exchanges] Cryptocurrency 2.0 Projects: Bit/BlackHalo, 66 Counterparty, 273, 300 Distributed Automated Corporations (DACs), 69, 324 Factom, 302 iNation, 323 Maidsafe, 302 Mastercoin (see Omni) Omni, 274, 301 OpenBazaar, 67 Storj, 71 Tether, 302 D Dark Web, 95 David Zimbeck, 310 Deep Web, 95 Digital money pioneers: David Chaum, 25 Douglas Jackson, 28 Hal Finney, 36 Nick Szabo, 30 Wei Dai, 33 Dorian Nakamoto, 37 Dread Pirate Roberts, 103 E-G GAW Miners, 148 H Halsey Minor, 239 Homero Joshua Garza, 148 I Investment and Lending Services: BTCJam, 65, 228 Bitcoinwisdom, 211 Uphold, 69, 238 J Jeb McCaleb, 119 Josh Garza; See: Homero Joshua Garza K Kevin Kelly, 11 Key Generation Software: Bit32.org, 19 L Local Wallets: Armory, 22 Bitcoin Core, 22 Lighthouse, 46 M Mark Karpeles, 119 Markus Bot, 127 Marshall McLuhan, 8 Microtransactions, 262 Mining software: CGminer, 190 BFGMiner, 190 Mt. Gox, 118 N Nathan Wosnack, 179 Nick Sullivan, 266 O Online payment systems: PayPal, 28, 173 M-Pesa, 259 P Patrick Byrne, 236 Phil Vadala, 159 Pool Mining, 189 Pre-Bitcoin Digital Currencies: bit gold, 33 Digicash, 25 E-gold, 28 Linden Dollars, 174 Pre-mine, 198 Privacy Tools: TailsOS, 90 Pretty Good Privacy, 9, 10 Private Key, 4 ProTip, 266 Proof of stake, 220 Proof of work, 23, 31 Public Key, 4 Public-Key Encryption, 11 R Remittance, 247 Ross Ulbricht, 103 S Silk Road, The, 95 Shaun Bridges, 106 Stuart Fraser, 157 Solo Mining, 189 T-Z Trading Indicators: Fibonacci Retracements, 214 Moving Average, 213 Moving Average Convergence Difference, 213 On-Balance Volume, 214 Relative Strength Index, 214 Web Wallets: Coinbase, 17 Circle, 17 Coinkite, 19 BitGo, 19 BitGold, 241 (see also: Precursors) Blockchain.info, 80 Rebit.ph, 255 Willy Bot, 127 Zen Miner, 148

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community
by Marc J. Dunkelman
Published 3 Aug 2014

Like its predecessors, Third Wave society, which was only beginning to come clear in the 1970s and 80s, engendered its own unique framework. The issue wasn’t just that new technologies like the fax machine were driving the information age, or that changes in the way we interacted were laying the foundation for what Marshall McLuhan had termed, contemporaneously, a “global village.”10 The Tofflers argued that certain distinctions that defined Second Wave society—between home and work, between consumer and producer, between mass production and specific customization—were being breached. Elements of life that simply looked like aberrations from the norm in Second Wave society, such as life in the suburbs, a broad aversion to naked bigotry, “no fault” divorces, longer lifespans—the list could go on—actually represented constituent parts of the Third Wave.

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Bowling Alone, like The Lonely Crowd and Habits of the Heart before it, was steeped in academic literature about the fragile state of American community. The Lexus and the Olive Tree, on the other hand, was designed to explain the transformation of the global economy in the aftermath of the Cold War. Friedman’s argument was grounded in a long history of social and economic scholarship. As far back as the 1970s, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan had predicted that geographic distances would be closed by new electronic media. The kinds of bonds once limited to local communities, the Canadian had argued, would eventually be shared across a much broader landscape.2 The advances described in The Lexus and the Olive Tree make clear that McLuhan got a lot of the story right.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator
by Maria Ressa
Published 19 Oct 2022

In the West, those revolutions had triggered a debate about whether Facebook and Twitter had spawned them.7 But regardless of where the academics came down on the question, clearly the internet, and social media specifically, had been a critical factor in igniting long-standing grievances, breaking down people’s fears, enhancing their courage, and fast-tracking protests that might otherwise have taken months and years to organize. The result had been the downfall of dictatorships. The medium that carries the message shapes and defines the message itself, I told the students, invoking the media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s seminal work, “The Medium Is the Message.”8 Social media’s instantaneous nature had accelerated the speed at which the revolutions had taken place. Authoritarian governments couldn’t keep up or control the messaging because those protest movements were modeled on the networks of the web: loose, nonhierarchical, leaderless.

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See, e.g., William Saletan, “Springtime for Twitter: Is the Internet Driving the Revolutions of the Arab Spring?,” Slate, July 18, 2011, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/07/springtime_for_twitter.html; and D. Hill, “Op-Ed: The Arab Spring Is Not the Facebook Revolution,” Ottawa Citizen, November 16, 2011. 8.Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium Is the Message,” 1964, https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf. 9.Suw Charman Anderson, “The Role of Dopamine in Social Media,” ComputerWeekly.Com, November 26, 2009. 10.Jack Fuller, What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism (London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 46. 11.Suzanne Choney, “Facebook Use Can Lower Grades by 20%, Study Says,” NBC News, September 7, 2010, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39038581. 12.This rolled out in the United States to select users in August 2015.

Magic Internet Money: A Book About Bitcoin
by Jesse Berger
Published 14 Sep 2020

The dubious track record of some of its shamefully departed intermediaries should motivate all users to make every effort to understand the cumbersome nature of private keys. Like anything worthwhile, locking down your personal Bitcoin bank requires some resolve, but this low hurdle is the only appreciable factor limiting anyone’s pursuit and enjoyment of genuine monetary autonomy. 11.5.1 Dark Mode: Tools of the Trade “The medium is the message.” Marshal McLuhan, Pioneer of Media Theory At its brightest peaks, Bitcoin opens gateways that foster growth and progress, but in its shadowy valleys, it burrows tunnels that tolerate crime and indecency. A prime example of just such a hazard is darknet markets, which are anonymous, Internet-based black markets that sell or broker transactions for drugs, weapons, stolen credit cards, forged documents, and other illicit products.

Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Nov 2010

For more up-to-date information, see http://rushkoff.com/program. About the Author Winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff has written a dozen best-selling books on media and society, including Cyberia, Media Virus, Coercion (winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award), Get Back in the Box, and Life Inc. He has made the PBS “Frontline” documentaries Digital Nation, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. A columnist for The Daily Beast and Arthur Magazine, his articles have been regularly published in The New York Times and Discover, among many other publications.

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
by Christopher Lasch
Published 1 Jan 1978

As the workings of the modern economy and the modern social order become increasingly inaccessible to everyday intelligence art and philosophy abdicate the task of explaining them to the allegedly objective " " " " , * In Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel written "somewhat in the telegraphic schizo" phrenic manner of tales (i.e., in deliberate disregard of the conventional sense of time), Kurt Vonnegut make;, a passing observation that illustrates the eclecticism with which the modern sensitivity approaches the culture of the past. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time." The fragmentizing impact of the mass media according to Marshall McLuhan, makes all civilizations contemporary with our own. " , " " It is interesting to compare these cheerful expressions of the contemporary sensibility with the contention of two Marxist critics ofliteraturc William Phillips , and Philip Rahv, that the critical sense is necessarily rooted in the historical sense the sense of continuity.

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Nixon, Six Crises (New York: Doubleday, 1962), pp. 251, 277, , 353-58; Bruce Mazlish, In Search cf Nixon (New York: Basic Books, 1972), _ 81 pp. 72-73. Watergate J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (New York: 91 title essay, pp. 86-111. Kurt Vonnegut }t., Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Delacorte Press, 1969), , pp. 19-76; Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951), p. 3; William Phillips and Philip Rahv "Some Aspects of Lit, " erary Criticism, Science and Society 1 (1937): 213; Litowitz and Newman Borderline Personality and the Theatre of the Absurd p. 275. Viking, 1976), especially p. 297, for Nixon's talk with Haldeman, 20 March " 1973. 82 , , , " , 91 new left street theater Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973). , his own personality."

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future
by John Brockman
Published 18 Jan 2011

Beyond that, there are numerous brilliant thinkers, researchers, and inventors who would never contemplate writing a book. They, too, now have the opportunity to become one of the world’s teachers. Their efforts, conveyed vividly from their own mouths, will bring knowledge, understanding, passion, and inspiration to millions. When Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message,” he meant, among other things, that every new medium spawns its own unexpected units of communication. In addition to the Web page, the blog, and the tweet, we are witnessing the rise of riveting online talks, long enough to inform and explain, short enough for mass impact.

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I send out manuscripts and mail, buy things, listen to music, read books, hunt up information and news. The Internet is a great stew of opinion and facts. It is an encyclopedic marvel that has transformed my world. It has also undoubtedly transformed the way I think. But if we humans are the sex organs of our technologies, reproducing them, expanding their domains and functionality—as Marshall McLuhan said—then perhaps I should turn the question upside down. Because of my reliance on the Internet, the number of hours each day I spend in its electronic embrace, have I begun to think like the Internet? Do I have an Internet mind that has been transformed by my proximity to this network of networks?

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
by William Poundstone
Published 18 Sep 2006

“This, of course, involves not only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the theater, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior.” These words were written by Shannon’s former employer Warren Weaver. Weaver’s essay presented information theory as a humanistic discipline—perhaps misleadingly so. Strongly influenced by Shannon, media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the term “information age” in Understanding Media (1964). Oracular as some of his pronouncements were, McLuhan spoke loud and clear with that concise coinage. It captured the way the electronic media (still analog in the 1960s) were changing the world. It implied, more presciently than McLuhan could have known, that Claude Shannon was a prime mover in that revolution.

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Other theorists such as Norbert Wiener and Peter Elias took up this theme. It was time, Elias acidly wrote, to stop publishing papers with titles like “Information Theory, Photosynthesis, and Religion.” To Shannon, Wiener, and Elias, the question of information theory’s relevance was more narrowly defined than it was for Marshall McLuhan. Does information theory have deep relevance to any field outside of communications? The answer, it appeared, is yes. That is what a physicist named John Kelly described, in a paper he titled “Information Theory and Gambling.” John Kelly, Jr. IN 1894 THE CITY FATHERS of Corsicana, Texas, were drilling a new well.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)
by Benjamin Peters
Published 2 Jun 2016

Why was there no Soviet Internet? Over the next eight years, the question drew me to archives and interviews in Moscow and Kiev. After spending a year exhausting the available leads, literature, and FOIA requests available from New York, I traveled to begin archival work in Moscow, although initially this proved a dead end. Marshall McLuhan once quipped that the first thing a visitor needs to know about Russia is that there are no phonebooks.2 His point is that a foreigner in Russia needs to have contacts already in place. (Or as the Finns say: in Finland, everything works and nothing can be arranged. In Russia, nothing works but everything can be arranged.)

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Initially a companion program for developing the optimization and economic management software behind the OGAS (All-State Automated System) Project. Notes Prologue 1. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 392 n. 318. 2. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 3. Slava Gerovitch, “InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union Did Not Build a Nationwide Computer Network,” History and Technology 24 (4) (December 2008): 335–350. 4. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917), in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed.

Bit Rot
by Douglas Coupland
Published 4 Oct 2016

It also describes the way my brain has been feeling since 2000, as I shed older and weaker neurons and connections and create and enhance new and unexpected ones. Some of the stories in this compendium come from the novel Generation A (2007), and I really scared myself when I was writing them. They flowed directly from spending two years deeply immersed in the writings of Marshall McLuhan, and they explore how language, literacy and numeracy feed the technologies we make, and then how those technologies feed back into language. In the novel these stories were integrated into the larger narrative and made a certain sense, but I think the stories work far better extracted from it.

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Soon I’d adopted all of the present-day viewing tendencies most of us share: binge viewing, laptop viewing, torrenting, series addictions, digital video recording, Netflix and guilty-pleasure viewing (Come Dine with Me Canada—I can’t get enough of that show). But also, amid these shifts, it’s been interesting to watch the evolution of TV as a new art form. Marshall McLuhan predicted this. When a new technology obsolesces an old one, it frees the newly obsolete medium to become an art form. Enter The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire and all the shows that are basically movies that run for fifty hours and act as a paradise for talented actors. Perhaps this shift to long-format TV has generated the biggest change in creative culture in the past decades.

Age of Anger: A History of the Present
by Pankaj Mishra
Published 26 Jan 2017

The early twentieth century produced many such myths and leaders across Europe; and in The Revolt of the Masses (1930), José Ortega y Gasset voiced a paternalist liberal’s complaint against the arrival of ‘raving, frenetic, exorbitant politics that claims to replace all knowledge’. It is now the fate of many more countries to suffer the avalanches of bitter know-nothingism, or myths, that the Spanish philosopher feared. Marshalling large armies of trolls and twitter bots against various ‘enemies’ of the people, the contemporary demagogues seem as aware as Marshall McLuhan that digital communications help create and consolidate new mythologies of unity and community. Yet the despotisms of our age of individualism are soft rather than hard – democratic rather than totalitarian – and they emerge as much from below as from the strongmen on top. Today’s raving, frenetic, exorbitant politics – an extravagantly rhetorical idealism about nation, race and culture – is often the product of people unconnected to political parties or movements.

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Early in the twentieth century, communications technology was still confined to the telegraph, the telephone and the cinema; but Max Weber warned that, combined with the pressure of work and opaque political and economic forces, it would push modern individuals away from public life and into a ‘subjectivist culture’ – or what he called ‘sterile excitation’. In 1969, Marshall McLuhan claimed that the era of literacy had ended with the advent of radio and television; their multi-sensory experience in a ‘global village’ had returned humankind to tribal structures of feeling and ‘we begin again to live a myth’. Today’s colossal exodus of human lives into cyberspace is even more dramatically transforming old notions of time, space, knowledge, values, identities and social relations.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together
by Thomas W. Malone
Published 14 May 2018

And, as we’ll see in later chapters, an increasing amount of the actual writing may be done by machines, not people. It’s not as if we’ll never again read long textual documents written by a single person, but they may someday become as rare as handmade sweaters are today. WHAT WILL ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT MACHINES LOOK LIKE? (HINT: NOTHING) As philosopher Marshall McLuhan noted, we often first understand new technologies by comparing them to old ones.10 For instance, the first cars were called horseless carriages, and that’s what they looked like, too. They were designed like traditional carriages, with running boards and all, just without any horses in front.

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UIST 2011: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. New York: ACM Press, http:doi.acm.org/10.1145/2047196.2047202. © 2011 Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Reprinted by permission. 9. Simple English Wikipedia, accessed October 21, 2017, https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. 10. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 11. James H. Hines, Thomas W. Malone, Paulo Gonçalves, George Herman, John Quimby, Mary Murphy-Hoye, James Rice, James Patten, and Hiroshi Ishii, “Construction by Replacement: A New Approach to Simulation Modeling,” System Dynamics Review 27, no. 1 (July 28, 2010): 64–90, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sdr.437/abstract, doi:10.1002/sdr.437. 12.

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent
by Douglas Coupland
Published 29 Sep 2014

Atomic energy; Velcro; search engines … they all would have been invented one way or another. The next society-changing technology is currently hurtling at us like a meteor, and there’s zilch we can do to stop it. This notion that humans exist only to propagate ever-newer technologies, that we are merely what Marshall McLuhan called “the sex organs of technology,” is called technological determinism. Depressing. Or is technological determinism nonsense? Maybe we can control what we invent and when we invent it. Since 1925, Bell Labs has generated seven Nobel prizes and changed the course of humanity with stunning regularity.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Published 15 Mar 2009

Brown’s view was that “government may not always be the first to know about important new ideas, but it should not be the last.” Thus every few weeks I got to spend a day hosting the likes of organizational guru Peter Drucker, futurist Herman Kahn, farmer-poet Wendell Berry, and media celebrator Marshall McLuhan. In 1977, two years after Asilomar, the California legislature was threatening to regulate recombinant DNA research in the state, so James Watson, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA and director of the renowned Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, came to visit. Watson had been an early supporter of the moratorium on recombinant DNA research and had helped to organize Asilomar.

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There is harm to undo in this place. Earth as a whole is the most ambitious and necessary restoration project of all. Live-linked footnotes for this chapter, along with updates, additions, and illustrations, may be found online at www.sbnotes.com. • 9 • Planet Craft After Sputnik, there is no nature, only art. —Marshall McLuhan Whether it’s called managing the commons, natural-infrastructure maintenance, tending the wild, niche construction, ecosystem engineering, mega-gardening, or intentional Gaia, humanity is now stuck with a planet stewardship role. Paul Crutzen, the atmospheric chemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on ozone depletion, coined a word that has resonated.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

As the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, noted in a speech in August 2009 in the city of Wuxi, “Internet + Internet of Things = Wisdom of the Earth.” The Smart City Operating System Those skilled in war are able to subdue the enemy’s army without battle. They capture his cities without assaulting them and overthrow the state without protracted operations. SUN TZU In 1964, Marshall McLuhan presciently predicted that by “means of electric media … all previous technologies … including cities …[would] be translated into information systems.” It might have taken fifty years, but his forecast was spot-on. The Internet of Things has the full potential to transform cities into living, breathing ecosystems of ambient intelligence and connected sensors, vastly improving the quality of life for their inhabitants.

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The challenges we face are significant and mounting. It’s not just about hacked bank accounts or stolen private photographs. Nor is it merely about maintaining control and privacy over the multitude of devices in our lives. It is about safeguarding our technological future and understanding what’s coming next. As Marshall McLuhan reminds us, “It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.” The hacks of tomorrow will affect our cars, GPS systems, implantable medical devices, televisions, elevators, smart meters, baby monitors, assembly lines, and personal-care bots.

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Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, A “Kill Chain” Analysis of the 2013 Target Data Breach, Majority Staff Report for Chairman Rockefeller, March 26, 2014. 73 Once there, attackers installed: Kim Zetter, “The Malware That Duped Target Has Been Found,” Wired, Jan. 16, 2014. 74 Worse, it was possible: Sean Gallagher, “Vulnerabilities Give Hackers Ability to Open Prison Cells from Afar,” Ars Technica, Nov. 7, 2011; Shaun Waterman, “Prisons Bureau Alerted to Hacking into Lockups,” Washington Times, Nov. 6, 2011. 75 In mid-2013: Kim Zetter, “Prison Computer ‘Glitch’ Blamed for Opening Cell Doors in Maximum-Security Wing,” Wired, Aug. 16, 2013. 76 While the chamber had successfully: Siobhan Gorman, “China Hackers Hit U.S. Chamber,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 21, 2011. 77 As the Chinese premier: Goodman, “Power of Moore’s Law in a World of Geotechnology.” 78 “means of electric media”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Routledge, 2001), rev. ed. 79 “Fitbit for the city”: Elizabeth Dwoskin, “They’re Tracking When You Turn Off the Lights,” Wall Street Journal, October 20, 2014. 80 Better sensors in our streetlights: “Outdoor Lighting,” Echelon, https:/​/​www.​echelon.​com/​applications/​street-​lighting/. 81 Using a wireless traffic-detection system: Mark Prigg, “New York’s Traffic Lights HACKED,” Mail Online, April 30, 2014. 82 If smart meters: Erica Naone, “Hacking the Smart Grid,” MIT Technology Review, Aug. 2, 2010. 83 A hacker using the same exploit: Reuters, “ ‘Smart’ Technology Could Make Utilities More Vulnerable to Hackers,” Raw Story, July 16, 2014.

The Rough Guide to Toronto
by Helen Lovekin and Phil Lee
Published 29 Apr 2006

Over the ensuing decades the university was browbeaten by theological colleges that considered a secular university to be immoral, but by the turn of the twentieth century the University of Toronto had made a name for itself, ultimately becoming one of North America’s most prestigious educational institutions. It was here that insulin was discovered in 1921, and here that Marshall McLuhan, who taught at the university, wrote his seminal The Medium is the Massage. 77 UPTOWN TORON TO | 78  University of Toronto The Soldiers’ Tower King’s College Circle Hart House Circle leads into the much larger King’s College Circle, where an assortment of university buildings flanks a large field.

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And I was walking through these places, beside the traffic circle at Yonge and Bloor, down the proposed Federal Avenue to Union Station. Lyle was right. These were real places. They could have existed. I mean, the Bloor Street viaduct and this building here are just a hint of what could have been done here. In 1965 Stan Bevington and Wayne Clifford took over a back-lane carriage house space where Marshall McLuhan had lectured and founded Coach House Press, which became the incubator for all that was new and adventurous in Canadian literature. In addition to publishing the early works of Atwood and Ondaatje, whose In the Skin of a Lion is perhaps the definitive Toronto novel – Coach House began a tradition of giving talented new writers their first break: Paul Quarrington, Susan Swan and anthologist Alberto Manguel are just three examples.

Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age
by Michael Wolff
Published 22 Jun 2015

The devices themselves mean that digital media executives become as reliant—or more reliant—on writers, actors, directors, and producers as on programmers. 13 MORE BOXES “Digital convergence” turns out not so much to be about bringing computing to your television but about bringing more television to your television. Accept that the medium is the message (in Douglas Coupland’s succinct explanation of Marshall McLuhan’s still opaque aphorism—more than half a century later still opaque: “The ostensible content of all electronic media is insignificant; it is the medium itself that has the greater impact on the environment, a fact bolstered by the now medically undeniable fact that the technologies we use every day begin, after a while, to alter the way our brains work, and hence the way we experience the world”), but what is the medium?

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 16 Nov 2010

The movement was spearheaded by right-wing blogs and various groups on social networking sites (many of them featuring extremely graphic posters—or “political Molotov cocktails,” as Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times described them—suggesting Muslims are threatening Switzerland, including one that showed minarets rising from the Swiss flag like missiles), and even peace-loving Swiss voters could not resist succumbing to the populist networked discourse. Never underestimate the power of Twitter and Photoshop in the hands of people mobilized by prejudice. While Internet enthusiasts like to quote the optimistic global village reductionism of Marshall McLuhan, whom Wired magazine has chosen as its patron saint, few of them have much use for McLuhan’s darker reductionism, like this gem from 1964: “That Hitler came into political existence at all is directly owing to radio and the public-address system.” As usual, McLuhan was overstating the case, but we certainly do not want to discover that our overly optimistic rhetoric about the freedom to connect has deprived us of the ability to fix the inevitable negative consequences that such freedom produces.

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“While each communication technology does have its own individual properties, especially regarding which of the human senses it privileges and which ones it ignores,” writes Susan Douglas, a scholar of communications at the University of Michigan, “the economic and political system in which the device is embedded almost always trumps technological possibilities and imperatives.” And yet this rarely prevents an army of technology experts from claiming that they have cracked that logic and understood what radio, television, or the Internet is all about; the social forces surrounding it are thus deemed mostly irrelevant and can be easily disregarded. Marshall McLuhan, the first pop philosopher, believed that television had a logic: Unlike print, it urges viewers to fill in the gaps in what it is they’re seeing, stimulates more senses, and, overall, nudges us closer to the original tribal condition (a new equilibrium that McLuhan clearly favored). The problem is that while McLuhan was chasing the inner logic of television, he might have missed how it could be appropriated by corporate America and produce social effects much more obvious (and uglier) than changes in some obscure sense-ratios that McLuhan so meticulously calculated for each medium.

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History
by Thomas Rid
Published 27 Jun 2016

So more production meant more jobs. The control systems she foresaw were different. Her machines didn’t even have human-machine interfaces; “cybernated machines don’t even have control panels,” she said, munching on a handmade ham sandwich. “Cybernated machines run themselves, and people are superfluous.”69 Even Marshall McLuhan was smitten by cybernation. The widely popular media theorist is best known for the idea of a “global village,” of the world contracted into a small place by electrical information links. In November 1964, at the height of his fame, McLuhan presented a paper in Washington, DC, at a symposium on the social impact of cybernetics sponsored by three of the city’s largest universities.

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The quote is from Martin Luther King Jr., “Negros-Whites Together,” New York Amsterdam News, August 15, 1964, 18. 67.James Boggs, “The Negro and Cybernation,” in Hilton, Evolving Society, 172. 68.Hannah Arendt, “On the Human Condition,” in Hilton, Evolving Society, 219. 69.“Cyberculture and Girls,” New Yorker, July 4, 1964, 21–22. 70.Marshall McLuhan, “Cybernation and Culture,” in The Social Impact of Cybernetics, ed. Charles R. Dechert (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 98–99. 71.John Diebold, “Goals to Match Our Means,” in Dechert, Social Impact of Cybernetics, 4. 72.Curtis Gerald, Computers and the Art of Computation (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1972), 319. 73.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
by Tim Wu
Published 14 May 2016

CHAPTER 12 THE GREAT REFUSAL In the spring of 1966, a forty-six-year-old former Harvard instructor named Timothy Leary, wearing a jacket, a tie, and a distant look, strode up the red-carpeted steps of the Plaza Hotel on New York’s Fifth Avenue and into the Oak Room for lunch. Waiting for him was a man Leary knew only by reputation: another academic, Marshall McLuhan, almost a decade older, graying a bit, but not yet wearing the mustache that would become his signature in the 1970s. To their respective followings both men sitting in the ornate oak-paneled restaurant were “gurus,” a word just come into currency in the West. McLuhan was a scholar of the media from the University of Toronto who’d become famous thanks to his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which was full of intriguing pronouncements somehow both bold and enigmatic at once (example: “The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium”).

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Whether Apple was truly serving its users and business model and only incidentally exploiting Google’s Achilles’ heel is a matter of debate. But there is no doubt that the sentiment of revolt against the shabbiness of the mobile web was coming from an even deeper and broader place. Writing in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan described the media as “technological extensions of man”; in the 2010s it had become more obvious than ever that technologies like the smartphone are not merely extensions but technological prosthetics, enhancements of our own capacities, which, by virtue of being constantly attached to us or present on our bodies, become a part of us.

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science
by Norman Doidge
Published 15 Mar 2007

Robertson and Redmond O’Connell have had promising results using brain exercises to treat attention deficit disorder, and if that can be done, we have reason to hope that mere traits can be treated as well. Most people think that the dangers created by the media are a result of content. But Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian who founded media studies in the 1950s and predicted the Internet twenty years before it was invented, was the first to intuit that the media change our brains irrespective of content, and he famously said, “The medium is the message.” McLuhan was arguing that each medium reorganizes our mind and brain in its own unique way and that the consequences of these reorganizations are far more significant than the effects of the content or “message.”

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Casanova and M. Ptito, eds., Progress in Brain Research, Vol. 134. San Diego, CA: Elsevier Science, 427–45. •Someone…memorizing Homer’s Iliad, might blindfold himself to recruit operators: Such manipulation of senses and the brain is not so uncommon. The anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, who worked with Marshall McLuhan (discussed in appendix 1), observed that “every culture has a sensory profile, and native cultures, for example, to maximize sound will minimize sight. So the dancer is often blinded, deliberately. Or, you may find, they will deliberately turn sound into a textile thing, so they will plug their ears when they sing.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America
by Sarah Kendzior
Published 24 Apr 2015

Keller’s aversion to social media is common among media’s old guard, who believe it has eroded standards of ethics and behavior. Outlets like The Atlantic regularly run pieces such as “Is Google making us stupid?” or “Is Facebook making us lonely?” (According to researchers, it is not.) “The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously said. In the digital age, condemning the medium is often shorthand for condemning not only the message but the messenger—and her right to speak. Twitter, which is extremely popular among young African Americans, functions as a public gathering space for marginalized groups to rally under common causes—one of which is countering cruel and inaccurate portrayals of them found in mainstream media.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Dec 2009

To understand the full impact of the empathic surge brought on by monotheism and the world’s axial movements, we need to understand how script cognition differs from oral cognition. Both forms of communication allow human beings to tell their story, but the narratives they tell have the unmistakable mark of the communication media being used. That’s because modes of communication help create the very consciousness that they also manage. As the late Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed, “The medium is the message.” Oral consciousness relies on hearing, while script consciousness relies on sight. This difference alone accounts for the profound change in human consciousness that distinguishes a written culture from an oral one. Hearing is the most internalizing of the senses.

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The electrical metaphors would outlive the Romantic era and provide a bridge between that period and the Age of Psychological Consciousness that rode alongside the Second Industrial Revolution for most of the twentieth century. Nathaniel Hawthorne foresaw the late-twentieth century idea of the world as a global brain and central nervous system—the Age of Psychological Consciousness—popularized by Marshall McLuhan and the communications theorists of the Internet generation. He asked himself:Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!

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Respondents also said they empathized with her strength to persevere, remake her life, and transcend her situation. Princess Diana’s death and funeral brought 40 percent of the human race together at a single moment to grieve, empathize, and share their feelings with one another.10 To paraphrase the late Canadian philosopher of communications Marshall McLuhan, the global electronic embrace has “outed” the central nervous system of billions of human beings and transformed the world into a global village—at least partially and for brief moments of time. The ability to extend individual empathy across national cultures, continents, oceans, and other traditional divides is enormous, with profound implications for the humanization of the human race.

Game Over Press Start to Continue
by David Sheff and Andy Eddy
Published 1 Jan 1993

[They] … are extensions of social man and of the body politic.… As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the action and the reaction of whole populations in a single dynamic image.… The games of a people reveal a great deal about them. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man Most people think video games are kids’ stuff, and it is true that in “Super Mario Bros. 3,” mushrooms give super strength, enemies have names such as Morton Koopa, Jr., and a pudgy, suspendered hero jumps on the heads of Little Goombas. Yet behind “Super Mario Bros. 3,” a video game played on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), is a business that is very grown-up indeed.

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It was a misguided criticism, however; MIT was not researching the effects of video games, but of new fields such as “constructivism,” based on the Piagetian thesis that knowledge is built by the learner, not supplied by the teacher. It may well be that Nintendo games of the future will apply this principle—build knowledge by creating—and still be as much fun as the current generation of games. Marshall McLuhan once said that anyone who tries to make a distinction between entertainment and education doesn’t know the first thing about either. There is no reason why Nintendo’s popularity with kids cannot be exploited for higher ends. In a New York Times piece on education, Morgan Newman, cofounder of a multimedia publishing company, AND Communications, was quoted as saying, “We think that quite probably what’s going on with the crisis in education out there is that kids are often just bored.

Track Changes
by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Published 1 May 2016

None of this should be very surprising given Barth’s interest in literary experimentalism of all sorts, not to mention the foundational conceit in his Cold War fable Giles Goat-Boy (1966) that the manuscript of the novel had been compiled from reels of mainframe computer storage tape—certainly one of the earliest instances of a computer having any kind of voice or role in serious fiction outside of science fiction. No less notable is the story of Hugh Kenner himself, Barth’s interlocutor in the dialogue above. Kenner was a critic of the first rank, a distinguished scholar who studied under Marshall McLuhan and then devoted a career to Ezra Pound and other major figures of British and American literary modernism. He also, however, maintained a longtime interest in computer-generated poetry, wrote columns and reviews for Byte magazine, and in 1984 published a user’s guide to the Heath/Zenith Z-100 computer, a competitor to the IBM PC noted at the time for its color graphics.

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Acland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 329–343. 2. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, ed. Nicholas Frankel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 51. 3. The claim about James’s dependence on the sound of the typewriter originates with his amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, has been repeated by Marshall McLuhan, and is confirmed by his biographer Leon Edel. See Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim, 100–101. 4. Michael R. Williams, “A Preview of Things to Come: Some Remarks on the First Generation of Computers,” in The First Computers: History and Architecture, ed. Raúl Rojas and Ulf Hashagen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 3. 5.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning
by Justin E. H. Smith
Published 22 Mar 2022

Lynn, “The Big Tech Extortion Racket: How Google, Amazon, and Facebook Control Our Lives,” Harper’s Magazine, September, 2020. https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/the-big-tech-extortion-racket/ Stefano Mancuso, The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior, New York: Atria Books, 2017. Robert McFarlane, “The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web,” The New Yorker, August 7, 2016. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 [1964]. Luigi F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq.,” in Richard Taylor (ed.), Scientific Memoirs, selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Learned Societies, London: Richard and John Taylor, 1843.

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-To-Peer Debates
by John Logie
Published 29 Dec 2006

Pa r l orPr e s s wwwww. p a r l or p r e s s . c om Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion Pa r l orPr e s s wwwww. p a r l or p r e s s . c om When a new technology strikes a society, the most natural reaction is to clutch at the immediately preceding period for familiar and comforting images. . . . What is called progress and advanced thinking is nearly always of the rear-view mirror variety. —Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage Pa r l orPr e s s wwwww. p a r l or p r e s s . c om 1 Introduction The Cat Is Out of the Bag In the Spring of 2000 I was completing a shopping trip to Costco, a “warehouse club” located in a Minneapolis suburb, when I got an unexpected lesson in the burgeoning popularity of Napster, the peerto-peer file-transfer program developed by Shawn Fanning in 1998.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know
by Richard Watson
Published 5 Nov 2013

But if it’s like this now imagine what it could be like when communication gets even faster thanks to predictive technologies, voice-to-machine interfaces and implanted communication devices. This is an accelerated, metallic, automated and extrovert future full of digital interruptions. A world of sensory overload totally lacking in the kind of stillness and quiet necessary to understand not only ideas, but ourselves. “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” Marshall McLuhan, Canadian educator and philosopher No doubt we’ll get better at quickly filtering and processing information. Our thinking will become fast, fluid and flexible, but what would be lost as a result? It could be that the cost we’ll pay for such easy connectivity and communication will include a loss of rigorous, focused and reflective thinking.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle
by Jamie Woodcock
Published 17 Jun 2019

Coming home after work to play videogames provides that escape for millions of workers every day. For a moment, each is no longer a worker, but free to explore new worlds outside the drudgery of capitalism. Videogames provide a space of experimentation, of discovery, but also recovery from capitalist work. In a way, Marshall McLuhan makes a similar claim, arguing that “art and games enable us to stand aside from the material pressure of routine and convention, observing and questioning. Games as popular art forms offer to all an immediate means of participation in the full life of a society, such as no single role of job can offer to any man.”22 It is clear that games have historically played important social roles.

Alone Together
by Sherry Turkle
Published 11 Jan 2011

For her, the hurt of no response follows from what she calls the “formality” of instant messenging. In her circle, instant messages are sent in the evening, when one is working on homework on a laptop or desktop. This presumed social and technical setting compels a certain gravitas. Mandy’s case rests on an argument in the spirit of Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message: if you are at your computer, the medium is formal, and so is the message. If you are running around, shopping, or having a coffee, and you swipe a few keys on your phone to send a text, the medium is informal, and so is the message, no matter how much you may have edited the content.

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Hal Niedzviecki, “Facebook in a Crowd,” New York Times, October 24, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/magazine/26lives-t.html (accessed July 27, 2010). 23 From Winston Churchill’s remarks to the English Architectural Association in 1924, available at the International Centre for Facilities website at www.icf-cebe.com/quotes/quotes.html (accessed August 10, 2010). Churchill’s comment is, of course, very similar to the spirit of Marshall McLuhan. See, for example, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). CHAPTER 1: NEAREST NEIGHBORS 1 Weizenbaum had written the program a decade earlier. See Joseph Weizenbaum, “ELIZA—a Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine,” Communications of the ACM, vol. 9, no. 1 (January 1966): 36-45. 2 See Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (San Francisco: W.

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
by Robert Wright
Published 1 Jan 1994

And Teilhard de Chardin, in particular, stressed a comparable tendency in human history: the evolution, over the millennia, of ever more vast and complex social structures. His extrapolations from this trend were prescient. Writing at the middle of this century, he dwelt on telecommunications, and the globalization it abets, before these subjects were all the rage. (Marshall McLuhan, coiner of “global village,” had read Teilhard.) With his concept of the “noosphere,” the “thinking envelope of the Earth,” Teilhard even anticipated in a vague way the Internet—more than a decade before the invention of the microchip. Can the trends rightly noted by Bergson and Teilhard—basic tendencies in biological evolution and in the technological and social evolution of the human species—be explained in scientific, physical terms?

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By the end of the nineteenth century, there were magazines such as Popular Science—rough equivalents of the Discovery Channel. This parallel between media is often lost in the course of cosmic media theorizing. The emphasis, instead, is placed on the supposedly determinative differences among media. Marshall McLuhan, for example, said that “the medium is the message”—that different media have different intrinsic, culture-shaping properties. Thus the phonetic alphabet was said to be a “hot” medium (though ideographic script, oddly, was “cool”), and TV was said to be “cool” (though movies were “hot”). What did McLuhan mean by “cool” and “hot”?

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
by Robert Wright
Published 28 Dec 2010

And Teilhard de Chardin, in particular, stressed a comparable tendency in human history: the evolution, over the millennia, of ever more vast and complex social structures. His extrapolations from this trend were prescient. Writing at the middle of this century, he dwelt on telecommunications, and the globalization it abets, before these subjects were all the rage. (Marshall McLuhan, coiner of “global village,” had read Teilhard.) With his concept of the “noosphere,” the “thinking envelope of the Earth,” Teilhard even anticipated in a vague way the Internet—more than a decade before the invention of the microchip. Can the trends rightly noted by Bergson and Teilhard—basic tendencies in biological evolution and in the technological and social evolution of the human species—be explained in scientific, physical terms?

…

By the end of the nineteenth century, there were magazines such as Popular Science—rough equivalents of the Discovery Channel. This parallel between media is often lost in the course of cosmic media theorizing. The emphasis, instead, is placed on the supposedly determinative differences among media. Marshall McLuhan, for example, said that “the medium is the message”—that different media have different intrinsic, culture-shaping properties. Thus the phonetic alphabet was said to be a “hot” medium (though ideographic script, oddly, was “cool”), and TV was said to be “cool” (though movies were “hot”). What did McLuhan mean by “cool” and “hot”?

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
by Adam Greenfield
Published 14 Sep 2006

One of the most attractive prospects of an ambient informatics is that information itself becomes freely available, at any place and any time. We can almost literally pull facts right out of the air, as and when needed, performing feats of knowledge and recall that people of any other era would rightly have regarded as prodigious. But we're also likely to trade away some things we already know how to do. As Marshall McLuhan taught us, in his 1964 Understanding Media, "every extension is [also] an amputation." By this he meant that when we rely on technical systems to ameliorate the burdens of everyday life, we invariably allow our organic faculties to atrophy to a corresponding degree. The faculty in question begins to erode, in a kind of willed surrender.

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth
by A. O. Scott
Published 9 Feb 2016

The consumer economy is profoundly unequal, raising barriers to entry on the basis of income and access rather than pedigree. And the story of human progress, of opening minds and increasingly cosmopolitan pleasures, is also a tale of loss, of standardization and homogenization. The modern world, accelerating toward the horizon of globalization—toward the media-saturated, wired-together village prophesied by Marshall McLuhan and others in the 1960s—reverses the biblical story of Babel. The world, according to this myth, was once divided into distinct, local cultural enclaves, each with its own integrity. People lived in possession of what T. S. Eliot, one of the great twentieth-century voices of backward-looking wishful thinking, called a unified sensibility.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
Published 31 Mar 2011

It does not matter if it is delivered over the air, via cable, or with the aid of a dish; played back from tape, digital video disc (DVD), or a digital video recorder’s (DVR) hard drive; watched on a plasma screen, an ancient console, or in the car (a particularly terrifying development for those of us who drive the freeways). Television is always the same: to watch it is to track an electronic download in real time—a narrativized progress bar with a laugh track.3 Marshall McLuhan was half right: the medium is the message, but the messages also define the medium. And what of the computer? The challenge it has mounted to television over the past decade has little to do with one machine being replaced by another—in the manner of 78s being supplanted by LPs, vinyl records by 8-tracks and cassette tapes, and compact discs (CDs) by MP3s; or videotape recorders by laser discs to be followed in turn by DVDs, video on demand, and DVRs.

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid
by Franck Frommer
Published 6 Oct 2010

It allies propaganda with illusion, the new universal rules of our show-business world. It makes it possible to favor the object over the subject, the container over the thing contained, form over content, and medium over message. We are reminded of the warnings issued by the Canadian sociologist Marshall McLuhan and the often perspicacious denunciations of the French situationist Guy Debord. The last and not least important paradox is that whereas the mastery and use of PowerPoint are now widespread and unavoidable, according to all the experts, the program is often ridiculed. Does everyone privately sense the perversity of a tool that stimulates the mind while simultaneously constraining it, that requires us to create, commands us to invent?

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 28 Sep 2014

The earliest image of a monk with glasses, 1342 What changed all of that, of course, was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the 1440s. You could fill a small library with the amount of historical scholarship that has been published documenting the impact of the printing press, the creation of what Marshall McLuhan famously called “the Gutenberg galaxy.” Literacy rates rose dramatically; subversive scientific and religious theories routed around the official channels of orthodox belief; popular amusements like the novel and printed pornography became commonplace. But Gutenberg’s great breakthrough had another, less celebrated effect: it made a massive number of people aware for the first time that they were farsighted.

Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America
by Sam Roberts
Published 22 Jan 2013

THE DEPOT YOU DIDN’T NEED A CLAIRVOYANT to predict the burgeoning value of New York Central stock, but that didn’t stop Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennie C. Claflin. Both sisters claimed the ability to see visions of future events, a distinct advantage for a Wall Street broker (and one that gave a whole new dimension to Marshall McLuhan’s maxim about the medium being the message). One investor later testified that when she asked his advice about stock purchases, Vanderbilt himself replied, “Why don’t you do as I do, and consult the spirits?” Woodhull and Claflin (whom Vanderbilt proposed to marry) apparently found their inspiration, instead, from a less evanescent source, one with a proven track record.

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything
by Steven Levy
Published 2 Feb 1994

Could an interface be designed so that ordinary people could use it? This was an unconventional question in those days, when it was rarely assumed that ordinary people would ever have reason to belly up to a computer keyboard. But Kay already was pondering ideas like people relating to a computer intimately. He found himself reading Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media and pondering its seminal koan, "The medium is the message." Then he had his flash of enlightenment, "a shock that reverberates even now," he wrote over twenty years later in The Art of Human-Computer Interaction: The computer is a medium! I had always thought of it as a tool, perhaps a vehicle-a much weaker conception.

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

Cities are created not in units of distance but in units of time. They are born or explode into suddenly frictionless pockets, and we find ever more clever patterns, forms, and purposes with which to fill them. Hawley circumscribed the sixty-minute travel radius of daily life several decades before Marchetti coined his constant, and he even preempted Marshall McLuhan, who in Understanding Media practically plagiarized him. “The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society,” McLuhan wrote, “but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure.”

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Other works by University of North Carolina professors during Kasarda’s time as a Ph.D. student include Gerhard Lenski’s Human Societies and Power and Privilege, and Hubert M. Blalock’s Causal Inferences in Nonexperimental Research. The interview with Amos Hawley was conducted at his home in March 2008. He died August 31, 2009. Marshall McLuhan’s quote is taken from the first chapter of Understanding Media. The Ed Glaeser reference is to the working paper “Did the Death of Distance Hurt Detroit and Help New York?” by Edward L. Glaeser and Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto. Jane Jacobs’s recollection of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre is taken from Cities and the Wealth of Nations.

In the Age of the Smart Machine
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 14 Apr 1988

However, literate societies continue to preserve, within their 176 KNOWLEDGE AND COMPUTER-MEDIATED WORK various subcultures, patterns of thought and feeling that bear the mark- ings of oral culture. A brief comparison of oral and written culture provides a vantage point from which to regard the transformation in the quality of knowledge engendered by computer-mediated work. The work of Milman Parry and his son Adam Parry, as well as the work of Eric Havelock, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter Ong, has been a source of powerful new insights into the fundamental characteristics that distinguish oral culture from the orientation toward the written word that thoroughly imbues literate societies. I In his re- cent work, Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong reviews several features of what he calls the "psychodynamics of orality," which help illuminate the action contexts I have described.

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Chapter Five Mastering the Electronic Text 1. Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Eric Havelock, The Greek Concept of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale 442 Notes University Press, 1967); id., Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); id., Orality and Literacy (London and New York: Methuen, 1982). 2.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher
Published 9 Jul 2018

Out comes a sheet and it looks like Wired. Eugene Mosier: More! That was the theme of the first issue in terms of getting it physically created. John Plunkett: The experience of picking up the magazine and flipping through those first pages was intended to be disorienting and disruptive. To take Marshall McLuhan’s advice and make the medium be the message. Kevin Kelly: In the first issue you have Bruce Sterling, you’ve got Stewart Brand, you’ve got Van Der Leun. I was basically taking the same subjects and the same people that I was talking about and working with at Whole Earth and I was doing it in Wired in color.

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And that recursive loop, that self-reference, is essential to technoculture: That’s what it is. This is the moment when technology—not economics, not history, not new social norms—starts driving the culture. BOOK THREE NETWORK EFFECTS We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN The Check Is in the Mail eBay’s trillion-dollar garage sale The web, suddenly accessible by ordinary people thanks to Netscape, sparked a gold rush. Almost everyone had the same big idea: to sell things on the internet. Up in Washington State, Amazon sold books. But down in Silicon Valley, something stranger and more surprising was being sold.

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
by Rick Perlstein
Published 17 Mar 2009

(“Which one?” he had quipped when asked if he would face Kennedy in 1964; thirty-year-old Teddy had just entered the Senate). As was his speech at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference, where he made a graceful, self-deprecating aside on his famous “Last Press Conference.” The media critic Marshall McLuhan opined that had Nixon displayed that same unhurried ease—“coolness” —on TV in 1960, he would now be President. With the assistance of a friendly Santa Monica newspaper that was sending out the ASNE speech in bulk as a “Freedom Doctrine for the Americas,” Nixon was settling into a reputation as the Republicans’ foreign policy guru.

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They were convinced you could learn everything you needed to know about a product, which in this case happened to be a human being, in half a minute—the speed not of thought but of emotion. Bill Bernbach intuitively grasped the same insights that were making a Canadian literature professor named Marshall McLuhan the thinker of the moment. “The medium is the message,” went his gnomic injunction. A medium did not just neutrally deliver some preexisting bundle of information into the viewer’s brain; instead, each medium—storytelling, print, radio, television—conditioned users’ very perception in its own distinct way.

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“That’s exactly what we wanted to imply,” he wrote the President. “And we also hoped someone around Goldwater would say it, not us.” Local campaign leaders told Johnson’s field chief, Larry O’Brien, that they hated the ad, that voters were turning off to LBJ. The White House was unfazed. They were thinking like Marshall McLuhan, like Bill Bernbach: the message people reported having gleaned from the ad bore no necessary relation to how it affected them where it counted—in the place consciousness didn’t touch. Four years earlier the Republicans might have been able to do something about it. Not now. The FCC in 1964 had begun implementing a Goldwaterite idea: turning over much of its mandate to police the broadcasting industry to the industry itself.

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web
by Cole Stryker
Published 14 Jun 2011

This is as universal and historic a human characteristic as the need to eat. Sharing information, no matter how trivial, solidifies societal bonds and deepens relationships. These shared points of reference make up life as much as our inside jokes at work or gossip at church. Clay Shirky has made waves in the last few years as being a kind of Marshall McLuhan for the Web 2.0 era. Throughout his two books, Cognitive Dissonance and Here Comes Everybody, Shirky provides the kind of commentary that fills one with excitement for being a part of the web right now. We’re making things happen! It’s a new stage in human social evolution! Look at all the cool stuff the Internet lets us do!

I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted
by Nick Bilton
Published 13 Sep 2010

The researchers believe the mobile phone becomes a “transitional object,” a psychological term originally applied to toddlers’ teddy bears and blankets.10 Transitional objects create familiarity and comfort and also help develop connections and bonds. The authors also see the mobile phone as a strange object that crosses the line between a commercialized product and a childhood connection. It thereby becomes an important bond between parents and children. Marshall McLuhan, the renowned media theorist who explained the cultural importance of television, believed the objects we surround ourselves with become an extension of ourselves. McLuhan said the car is an extension of our feet and that our clothes are an extension of our bodies. McLuhan also believed that media are an extension of our ability and need to communicate.

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext
by Belinda Barnet
Published 14 Jul 2013

Absent any unified expectation of technical expertise, scholars invent each day some new addmodifier – e-literacy, or numeracy, or videocy – to further fragment any nascent understanding of media. Awash in possibilities for signification, we produce still more of this still and silent writing: ‘scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr. Gibbon’, as Marshall McLuhan liked to quote. Somehow we conceive writing-out (rhetoric) and writing-forward (programming) as distinct subjects, not as they should be: sign and countersign of a single practice. For all the broad adoption of smartphones, tablets, and the heavenly Cloud, our intellectual cultures seem as far apart today as they appeared to C.

Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff
by Dinah Sanders
Published 7 Oct 2011

Instead of being bored, create something good—a happier home, a healthier you, a creative work of art, a great relationship, a beautiful tool, a positive vision of what your life could be like, or a random act of kindness. Take a step toward better. Just one step. It’s more rewarding, enjoyable, and full of potential than wallowing in a lethargic mental swamp. Symptom #37: The Edison Museum Solution #37: Moore’s Law Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning. —Marshall McLuhan, educator and philosopher Format is not the same as function While you’re upgrading your life, give your media an upgrade as well. It can be all too easy to hold onto the physical carriers for our media experiences long past our desire to engage with that content in that format again. Even if you strongly associate an album or film with a period of growth that helped make you who you are today, keeping this old copy is not what maintains the influence it had on you.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
by Cal Newport
Published 5 Jan 2016

The curmudgeons among us are vaguely uneasy about the attention people pay to their phones, and pine for the days of unhurried concentration, while the digital hipsters equate such nostalgia with Luddism and boredom, and believe that increased connection is the foundation for a utopian future. Marshall McLuhan declared that “the medium is the message,” but our current conversation on these topics seems to imply that “the medium is morality”—either you’re on board with the Facebook future or see it as our downfall. As I emphasized in this book’s introduction, I have no interest in this debate. A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it’s not a philosophical statement—it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.

The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy
by Tyler Cowen
Published 25 May 2010

We are better off for this change and it is part of a broader trend of how the production of value—including beauty, suspense, and education—is becoming increasingly interior to our minds. 4 IM, CELL PHONES, AND FACEBOOK It’s not just that we have more music, more text, more websites, and more TV for mixing our personal cultural blends. We also have new media for experiencing and expressing ourselves and for building the richness of our lives. Marshall McLuhan asserted that “the medium is the message” and later economists Harold Innis and Leonard Dudley showed how communications media shape human lives. Over the last fifteen years the rapid advance of digital technology has accelerated this process beyond expectations. Many of us are still trying to catch up, so I intend this chapter to be a simple guide to how some of the new communications media—such as instant messaging, cell phone texting, and micro-blogging—matter for the emotional side of our lives.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More
by Luke Dormehl
Published 4 Nov 2014

“But when you’re brought together through the Lovegety, you’re more at ease because you already have something in common. You already have something to talk about.”27 In other words, the technology was more than just an invisible mediator between two parties. Like the shared ownership of a Porsche, being part of the Lovegety club meant there was an automatic commonality between both parties. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the medium really was the message. Such devices don’t have to remain the sole province of bored teenagers in Tokyo’s Harajuku district, of course. In the Republic of Iceland, the Islendiga-App (“App of Icelanders”) applies similar technology to the problem of solving the issue of accidental incest in a country of 320,000, where almost everyone is distantly related to one another.

Time Travel: A History
by James Gleick
Published 26 Sep 2016

An Englishman builds a machine in guttering lamplight, a Yankee engineer awakens in medieval fields, a jaded Pennsylvania weatherman relives a single February day, a little cake summons lost time, a magic amulet transports schoolchildren to golden Babylon, torn wallpaper reveals a timely message, a boy in a DeLorean seeks his parents, a woman on a pier awaits her lover—all these, our muses, our guides, in the unending now. * * * *1 Marshall McLuhan said that in 1962. *2 “They make me feel sad.” What’s good about feeling sad? “It’s happy for deep people.” *3 Like David Tennant, to be exact. *4 “Feels more like working security than a game.” “Maybe it’s a game about working security.” *5 “—Must be a spatio-temporal hyperlink.” “—What’s that?”

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
Published 21 Jun 2023

But cities must evolve if they are to rise to this potential. New Technology, Old Idea The vision of the cyber optimists – that advances in the technology of communication would allow humanity to bridge its differences and come together as a unified whole – was not entirely original. In the 1960s, philosopher Marshall McLuhan was predicting that the connection of the world through increasingly sophisticated electronic modes of communication would eventually lead to the creation of a ‘global village’ in which everyone would share in a collective identity.7 In 1881, Scientific American predicted that technologies such as the telegraph foreshadowed ‘a day when science shall have so blended, interwoven, and unified human thoughts and interests that the feeling of universal kinship shall be, not a spasmodic outburst of occasional emotion, but constant and controlling’.8 But shifts in the technology of communication often change societies in unexpected ways.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014

Instead of deploring computers as tools of the old power structure, he argued that they could aid the shift in social consciousness if they were made more personal: “The machine, having been built, may now be turned to human ends, in order that man once more can become a creative force, renewing and creating his own life.”9 A technotribalism began to emerge. Tech gurus such as Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan became required reading in communes and dorms. By the 1980s the LSD evangelist Timothy Leary would update his famous mantra “Turn on, tune in, drop out” to proclaim instead “Turn on, boot up, jack in.”10 Richard Brautigan was the poet-in-residence in 1967 at Caltech, and that year he captured the new ethos in a poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.”11 It began: I like to think (and the sooner the better!)

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He also was a photographer, technician, and producer at a multimedia art collective called USCO, which produced events that involved acid rock music, technological wizardry, strobe lights, projected images, and performances that enlisted audience participation. Occasionally they featured talks by Marshall McLuhan, Dick Alpert, and other new age prophets. A promotional piece on the group noted that it “unites the cults of mysticism and technology as a basis for introspection and communication,” a phrase that served as a suitable credo for techno-spiritualists. Technology was a tool for expression that could expand the boundaries of creativity and, like drugs and rock, be rebellious.

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives)
by David Birch
Published 14 Jun 2017

At some point civilization reaches a point where technology takes over from memory. This is the point where the past begins in our narrative. Chapter 1 Money is a technology Money talks because money is a metaphor, a transfer, a bridge…Money is a specialist technology, like writing. — Marshall McLuhan (1964) Money is not a law of nature: it is a human invention. What is more, the kind of money that we use today is a relatively recent construct. It is in its forties and having something of a mid-life crisis. When Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of the US dollar into gold in 1971, we entered the world of fiat currency described in the introduction.

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall
by Peter Millar
Published 1 Oct 2009

The world’s cameramen had gathered at that spot simply because it was the most photogenic – most of the reporters who hurriedly jetted in over the twenty-four hours after the first crossing point was opened spoke little or no German. All they wanted were images. And tipsy West Berliners – goaded on by their presence – provided them. As Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan had prophesied a decade earlier, the medium had become the message. For those of us on the ground, swept up and carried away by the euphoria it was also difficult not to see philosophy, if not theology, in the tide of history. I could not help but recall that November 9th, 1989 was to the day exactly fifty years plus one after Kristallnacht, Joseph Goebbels’ orchestrated pogrom of violence against the Jews.

The Dark Net
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 20 Aug 2014

It would, he believed, help us to ‘make better collective decisions’. Computing in the 1960s and early 1970s was often endowed with a magical, mysterious power. Anarchists dreamt of a world in which humanity would be liberated from the drudge of labour, ‘all watched over by machines of loving grace’, while counter-cultural writers like Marshall McLuhan were predicting a ‘global village’ of connectedness as a result of modern media, and even a ‘psychic communal integration’ of all humankind. As the internet became a mainstream form of communication for millions of people there was a surge of techno-optimism. The early nineties were ablaze with utopian ideas about humanity’s imminent leap forward, spurred by connectivity and access to information.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
by Charles Leadbeater
Published 9 Dec 2010

The collective self-help of We-Think is an attempt to realise some of Illich’s ideals. Illich was not the only philosopher who provided ideas to shape the way technologies might be used. E. F. Schumacher, the author of Small Is Beautiful, argued for a society of ‘production by the masses not for the masses’. Marshall McLuhan in Understanding the Media extolled a pre-bureaucratic humanism based on a retribalisation of society. In 1968 Roland Barthes, the French literary critic, announced that only the ‘death of the author’ as the sole arbiter of the meaning of a work of art would clear the way for the ‘birth of the reader’ as a participant, actively engaged in making sense of a text.

Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity
by Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne
Published 4 Feb 2013

More important, it will trigger the proliferation of further innovations and real prosperity around the globe, in domains that today seem to be the stuff of science fiction. This page intentionally left blank Chapter Seven STRATEGIES FOR BUSINESS AND ENTREPRENEURS Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools. Marshall McLuhan, Canadian philosopher of communication theory In response to one U.S. governor’s braggadocio about massive job creation in his state during the nation’s continued employment slump, some wag responded, “Yes, I know all about his job creation; I’ve got three of those jobs.” “There’s been great progress made since the end of World War II to create a broad base of high-paying jobs, although the bulk of those positions were in unionized manufacturing companies, nearly all of which have cut back, shut down or outsourced.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

Josh Millard, in a MetaFilter Metatalk thread (“MetaFilter revenue update: holy cow, y’all!”) dated June 28, 2018, says, “Recurring contributions supporting the site are up by almost $10,000 a month and growing, erasing our current shortfall and helping move MetaFilter toward a more sustainable, independent revenue model.” The Art Spiegelman quote is a paraphrase—sort of—of Marshall McLuhan, and comes from a Chicago Tribune profile (Christopher Borrelli, “Art Spiegelman’s Art Obliterates Category,” May 25, 2013). Current ownership of Friendster is woolly: it’s owned by MOL Global, but that company was acquired by Razer Inc. 4. SHARING Something I was thinking about that didn’t quite fit in this chapter, but nevertheless speaks of the period of transition, is that before Lincoln began filming in 2011, Daniel Day-Lewis sent old limericks to his costar Sally Field, signing off “Yours, A.”

The Comedy Film Nerds Guide to Movies
by Graham Elwood and Chris Mancini
Published 31 May 2012

Anyone can put on a fat suit, but in The Nutty Professor Eddie Murphy gives Sherman Klump a heart so huge (no pun) and vulnerable that you just want to protect him, and what Murphy does with the characters at the dinner table is masterful. We want to live in comedies, admit it! A place where no one gets really hurt, our reality is heightened, we laugh at our fears, and exaggerate our triumphs. Don’t we feel vindicated in Annie Hall when Woody Allen pulls Marshall McLuhan out of nowhere to shut up that guy in line? Alvy Singer’s line says it all, “Boy, if life were only like this.” Ernest Hemingway said, “The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer,” but let’s face it, he was not the happiest guy. Yes, parody seems easy to do because everyone does it on YouTube, but it’s not.

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
by Tom Standage
Published 16 Aug 2021

At the moment, it means being dependent on a car to do almost anything, but that is widely considered a price worth paying for a bit more space and privacy, and the opportunity to own your own home. Millions of suburban dwellers have voted with their feet—or, it is more accurate to say, with their cars. 8 Car Culture The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad and incomplete in the urban compound. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN, UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, 1964 THE INVENTION OF THE TEENAGER In December 1944 Life magazine introduced its millions of American readers to the customs and culture of a group of exotic creatures, under the headline “Teen-age Girls: They Live in a Wonderful World of Their Own.” The word teen-age had been around for a few decades.

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back
by Juliet Schor , William Attwood-Charles and Mehmet Cansoy
Published 15 Mar 2020

This position is not so far from my own, although I take the view that many participants, although not necessarily all founders, had genuine, common-good motives. See also Cockayne (2016); and John (2016) on the sharing discourse. 2. See Schor (2014); and Cockayne (2016). 3. Examples include the printing press, which played an important role in the Protestant Reformation. Marshall McLuhan predicted that television was a revolutionary medium that would break down hierarchy and create a “global village.” Robots were first predicted to usher in the leisured society; see Schor (1992). Of course, new technologies also spur fear. When the telephone was introduced, people worried it would break up home life and reduce the practice of visiting friends (Fischer 1992).

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

On the one hand, the digital revolution certainly has the potential to enrich everyone’s life in the future; on the other, it is actually compounding today’s economic inequality, unemployment crisis, and cultural anomie. The World Wide Web was supposed to transform mankind into One Nation, what the twentieth-century Canadian new media guru Marshall McLuhan called, not without irony, a global village. But today’s Duality isn’t just limited to the chasm between humans and computers—it’s also an appropriate epithet for the growing gap between the rich and the poor, between the technologically overburdened and the technologically unemployed, between the analog edge and the digital center.

Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays
by Witold Rybczynski
Published 7 Sep 2015

We’re All Venetians Now It is common enough, when asking people if they’ve recently been somewhere interesting, to be told Paris, London, or New York. We find this normal—to visit a big city for pleasure. But in the past, people were more likely to go to the seaside or the mountains for a holiday; the city was for work. The fact that many people now perceive cities as primarily tourist destinations is something new. Forty years ago, Marshall McLuhan became famous for making pithy if somewhat obscure pronouncements. In hindsight, many of his theories seem dated. Does anyone really remember the difference between hot and cool media, for example, or believe that in an era of 24/7 newscasts and reality television the medium really is the message?

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life
by Colin Ellard
Published 14 May 2015

One of the best of these is his book Technological Nature: Adaptation and the Future of Human Life (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011). 22Elizabeth Thomas’s account of life with the Bush People can be found in The Harmless People (Knopf, New York, 1959). 23Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects (Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1961). 24Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001). 25The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan revolutionized our understanding of the impact of media on communication. His best-known work is Understanding Media: The extensions of man, McGraw-Hill: Toronto, 1964. Chapter 2 1Beesley quote from an interview with Fran Schechter for NOW magazine (2010, Available at: https://nowtoronto.com/art-and-books/features/art-as-organism/) 2Philip Beesley’s curriculum vitae may be found at: http://philipbeesleyarchitect.com/about/14K24_PB_CV.pdf 3One of the early and most influential accounts of rapid scene recognition may be found in Mary Potter’s landmark 1969 paper titled “Recognition Memory for a Rapid Sequence of Pictures,” published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, (1969, Volume 81, pages 10–15). 4Fritz Heider’s classic study with Marianne Simmel was published in a paper titled “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior,” in 1944 in the American Journal of Psychology (Volume 57, pages 243–259).

Emergence
by Steven Johnson

And rules they are. You can’t think of a system like the one Malda built at Slashdot as a purely representational entity, the way you think about a book or a movie. It is partly representational, of course: you read messages via the Slashdot platform, and so the components of the textual medium that Marshall McLuhan so brilliantly documented in The Gutenberg Galaxy are on display at Slashdot as well. Because you are reading words, your reception of the information behind those words differs from what it would have been had that information been conveyed via television. The medium is still the message on Slashdot—it’s just that there’s another level to the experience, a level that our critical vocabularies are only now finding words for.

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing
by Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman
Published 20 Nov 2012

Most of the submitted designs, however, were timid variations on what already exists. Undergraduate engineering students aren’t the only ones who suffer from the Earl Grey Syndrome. Outside the classroom, I’ve noticed that even professional designers frequently forgo the freedom of creation afforded by a 3D printer. Marshall McLuhan, Canadian philosopher and author, aptly described the situation, famously proclaiming “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” McLuhan’s powerful insight helps explain the design myopia that characterizes the Earl Grey Syndrome. A few decades ago, we shaped computer-aided design tools that respected manufacturing constraints that no longer exist.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

Wall Street Journal, 24 January 2014. www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304549504579316913982034286. 37 Nick Hanauer, “The Pitchforks Are Coming…for Us Plutocrats,” Politico, July/August 2014. www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html#ixzz3IuF76580. 38 John Maynard Keynes, The Means to Prosperity, Macmillan, 1933, p. 37. www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/keynes-means/keynes-means-00-h.html. 39 This is actually a popular derivation of a quote from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 183: “Not that you lied to me but that I no longer believe you has shaken me.” 10. Collateral Damage 1 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, Arrow (1926) 2004, p. 119. 2 Marshall McLuhan, “American Advertising,” Horizon, 93–94 (1947), pp. 132–41. www.unz.org/Pub/Horizon-1947oct-00132. 3 Quoted in Kevin Foster, “A Country Dying on Its Feet: Naipaul, Argentina, and Britain,” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 48 (Spring 2002), pp. 169–93. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mfs/summary/v048/48.1foster.html. 4 Daniel H.

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy
by Diane Coyle
Published 29 Oct 1998

It is, equally, both nonsense and politically unsophisticated — just so much globaloney — to embrace the opposite point of view, that there are unlimited benefits to be reaped from globalisation if only everybody would stop grumbling. The idea that what is happening to the world is globalisation has become a cliché. It dates back to Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’, and has adhered to our mental processes through all the subsequent technological changes, resurfacing again most recently as the ‘death of distance’. But it does not capture the essential nature of the transformation we are living through. Consider the fashionable argument that the degree of trade and investment and migration between nations is no greater now than it was a century ago, and therefore there is nothing special (and nothing that governments cannot handle using conventional economic policies) about what is happening now.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

Martin’s Press, 2018); Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015); Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Metropolitan Books, 2014); Joseph Turow et al., The Tradeoff Fallacy: How Marketers Are Misrepresenting American Consumers and Opening Them Up to Exploitation, report from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania (June 2015); James Joyce quoted from Finnegans Wake in Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962), 278. 14. Greetje F. Corporaal and Vili Lehdonvirta, Platform Sourcing: How Fortune 500 Firms Are Adopting Online Freelancing Platforms (Oxford Internet Institute, 2017); Lawrence F. Katz and Alan B. Krueger, “The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995–2015,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. 22667 (September 2016). 15.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese
Published 23 Apr 2018

A hammer just pounds nails, a saw just cuts wood, but a computer can mirror a billion different things from the physical world. It is fair to say that we don’t yet understand the metaphysical implications of the computer. We know that it has transformed the world in ways both subtle and dramatic; that’s obvious. But more is going on that meets the eye. As the noted professor and philosopher Marshall McLuhan said decades ago, the computer is “the most extraordinary of man’s technological clothing; it’s an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.” The computer is both new and ubiquitous at the same time, and one can only imagine what it will able to do in a century, or even a decade.

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World
by Andrew Leigh
Published 14 Sep 2018

If there is a judgement day, I’m guessing that everyone who’s ever struggled to put together a good evaluation will take the opportunity to step up and ask the Almighty: ‘So, tell me, did it work or not?’ In the Woody Allen movie Annie Hall, two characters are arguing about the views of eminent philosopher Marshall McLuhan. Suddenly McLuhan steps into the scene and tells one of them he’s absolutely wrong. The other declares: ‘Boy, if life were only like this!’ For many important questions, randomised trials are as close as we’ll come to that Annie Hall moment of truth. For those at the cutting edge of research, a central challenge is effectively melding theory with randomised evaluations, to build more accurate models of human behaviour.

The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism
by Matt Mason

There was no market for commercial radio in Europe before pirate DJs. Pirates have proved that just because the market won't do something, it doesn't mean it's a bad idea. Create a Vehicle Once pirates find a space the market has ignored, they park a new vehicle in it and begin transmitting. Sometimes this new vehicle becomes more important, or as Marshall McLuhan put it, the medium becomes the message. The platform that pirate DJs created was more important than rock 'n' roll. The idea of the “blog” had a much greater impact than the picture of Cary Grant dropping acid on Justin's Home Page. Harness Your Audience When pirates do something valuable in society, citizens support them, discussion starts, and laws change.

Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do
by Jeremy Bailenson
Published 30 Jan 2018

One lesson that clearly emerges from that history is that it takes a long time—generations—for artists to exploit all of the possibilities of a new multidisciplinary art form, and that these artistic possibilities can be influenced as much by business and technological developments as they are by conceptual breakthroughs. To paraphrase one of Marshall McLuhan’s most significant insights: people using a new medium have a difficult time breaking out of the thinking involved with the previous ones. We see this in the history of Hollywood filmmaking. Many of the early storytellers in Hollywood came from the world of the stage. Consequently, early directors essentially filmed stage shows—one camera angle in front of a proscenium arch, with few to no cuts.

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload
by Cal Newport
Published 2 Mar 2021

The literature on this philosophy is filled with fascinating examples. One of the better-known determinist books is Neil Postman’s 1985 classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death. In this short treatise, Postman argues that the format through which mass media is delivered can impact the way a culture thinks about the world. (If this reminds you of Marshall McLuhan’s famed claim that “the medium is the message,” you won’t be surprised to learn that Postman studied under McLuhan.) Postman uses this concept to argue, among other points, that the impact of the printing press is deeper than we realize. The standard narrative about this invention is that mass-produced pamphlets and books allowed information to spread faster and farther, speeding up the evolution of knowledge that culminated in the Age of Reason.

Data Action: Using Data for Public Good
by Sarah Williams
Published 14 Sep 2020

One example often used as evidence of this phenomenon is the open data movement, which was promoted by governments to help spur private innovation for the development of services that governments would typically provide.11 These type of concerns about the shifting role of technology in society are not new. In the 1980s, for example, many people were worried about the control mass media and TV broadcasting exerted over shaping society's ideologies. The term electronic colonialism—coined by Tom McPhail, a Canadian media scholar trained by Marshall McLuhan—addresses how media companies have sought to capture and control the “psychological empire” of our minds with their input, rather than just becoming empires that literally extract our data.12 I believe we are still very worried about both types of control, electronic colonization and data colonialism.

Work! Consume! Die!
by Frankie Boyle
Published 12 Oct 2011

If you want 11 million viewers on a Saturday night you’d better have some morons kick a ball between two sticks or a muscular guy outrun a fireball or hold a fucking karaoke competition. That’s just the socially acceptable options. You could stick a porno on and it would out-rate EastEnders. Television is just a distraction, really, a jangling set of keys hoisted nightly in front of our stupid, drooling faces. Marshall McLuhan said, ‘The medium is the message,’ meaning that the way TV makes us think – the shorter attention span, the dullness to sensation – is more important than its content. Railways changed the Wild West and it didn’t really matter if the trains were carrying wood or marshmallows. We don’t even retain the information.

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World
by David Sax
Published 15 Jan 2022

Debow called this E-commerce 2.0, an evolution in the way we saw digital commerce, from a top-down, superstore model to a decentralized marketplace where the small shop had access to the same sophisticated tools as national chains. As Debow and I were talking about the future, he brought up Marshall McLuhan, the mid-twentieth-century writer and philosopher, whose old house was just down the street from Debow’s in Toronto. McLuhan had spoken about two futures: one where technology reduced things down to their most basic and efficient, and one where it allowed for experiences to be even richer. There was certainly one vision of the future of commerce—the one Amazon had set forth to build—where reductionism continued exponentially, until your toilet paper arrived by drone before you even flushed, quicker and cheaper than you thought possible.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy
by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson
Published 30 May 2016

However, the reason that platforms matter today has everything to do with technology. To be clear, we’re not advocating technological determinism, which assumes that technology determines the development of social structures, economic activities, and cultural values. This idea is the essence of Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, “The medium is the message”—that the technology used to achieve something has more meaning than what you do with it. Although this notion certainly carries a grain of truth, it ignores the role that human actions and desires play in shaping how technologies develop and are used.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Published 8 Nov 2016

Classification: LCC HB615 .S3137 2016 (print) | LCC HB615 (ebook) | DDC 306.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012413 First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Introduction PART I THE REVENGE OF ANALOG THINGS Chapter 1: The Revenge of Vinyl Chapter 2: The Revenge of Paper Chapter 3: The Revenge of Film Chapter 4: The Revenge of Board Games PART II THE REVENGE OF ANALOG IDEAS Chapter 5: The Revenge of Print Chapter 6: The Revenge of Retail Chapter 7: The Revenge of Work Chapter 8: The Revenge of School Chapter 9: The Revenge of Analog, in Digital Epilogue: The Revenge of Summer Acknowledgments Selected Bibliography Index A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. —Marshall McLuhan, 1964 JACKIE TREEHORN: “New technology permits us to do very exciting things in interactive and erotic software. The wave of the future Dude, one hundred percent electronic.” THE DUDE: “Hmm . . . well, I still jerk off manually.” —The Big Lebowski, 1998 Introduction In June 2012, a new store called June Records opened its doors in Toronto’s Little Italy neighborhood, a block and a half from a house I’d just purchased with my wife.

You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall
by Colin Ellard
Published 6 Jul 2009

Just as rapid transit, especially air travel, can be perceived as having made the world a smaller place, wireless transmission of images in the form of television signals can be argued to have shrunk the world, perhaps making space disappear completely as a significant factor in our lives. But, just like rapid transit, the influence of electronic media on our perception of space is more complex than this. Spaces are connected to one another using sets of rules that have more to do with politics, power, and preference than with physics. When Marshall McLuhan, a pioneering Canadian thinker in media studies and author of the influential slogan “the medium is the message,” described the impact of new media as having converted the world into a kind of “global village,” this is precisely the kind of transformation in the use of space that he meant. Like villagers, we form allegiances, links, and unions with other individuals, but the far reach of invisible waves makes physical distance irrelevant to the formation of these connections.

The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us
by Robert H. Frank, Philip J. Cook
Published 2 May 2011

During the same period the number of people wired into the Internet worldwide grew from roughly 1 ,00012 to over 25 million.13 In mid-1994 the number of Internet users and traffic flow over the net­ work were each growing from 10 to 15 percent per month. 1 4 By forg­ ing closer communications between people, these networks push us ever closer to Marshall McLuhan's vision of the global village. The growing influence of American television, films, and other media has created international cultural and fashion networks of a more diffuse sort. And these networks, in tum, support a variety of growing international markets, each of which serves to extend the reach of the most talented performers.

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything
by David Christian
Published 21 May 2018

Chapter 11 The Anthropocene: Threshold 8 We’re no longer in the Holocene. We’re in the Anthropocene. —PAUL CRUTZEN, OUTBURST AT A CONFERENCE IN 2000 Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his paleolithic ancestors. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN, UNDERSTANDING MEDIA In the twentieth century, we humans began to transform our surroundings, our societies, and even ourselves. Without really intending to, we have introduced changes so rapid and so massive that our species has become the equivalent of a new geological force. That is why many scholars have begun to argue that planet Earth has entered a new geological age, the Anthropocene epoch, or the “era of humans.”

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves
by John Cheney-Lippold
Published 1 May 2017

Joseph Turow, The Daily You: How the Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); WikiLeaks, The Spy Files, 2011–2014, https://wikileaks.org. 11. Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson, introduction to “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa Gitelman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 3. Introduction 1. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 22. 2. Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 3. Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012). 4. Maciej Ceglowski, “What Happens Next Will Amaze You,” FREMTIDENS Internet Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 14, 2015, http://idlewords.com. 5.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another
by Matt Taibbi
Published 7 Oct 2019

If you had a radio show or a daily newspaper, you didn’t have to wind up the local Junior Anti-Sex League to torch-bearing action every week to sell copies. You made enough on classified and local ads that you could safely not indulge in fear-mongering, if you so chose. Smart people, however, understood that the instant this cash cow disappeared, the media business would change forever. No less an authority than Marshall McLuhan, in his famed book Understanding Media, wrote way back in 1964: The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold… In the Internet age, the news media has lost classified ads, and the instant relay of stock market quotes, which made empires out of services like Reuters and Bloomberg, no longer much impresses business consumers.

Culture works: the political economy of culture
by Richard Maxwell
Published 15 Jan 2001

Propelled by media machinations, sport has risen to replace work, religion, and community as the cultural “glue of collective consciousness in latter twentieth century America,” while simultaneously becoming the “most potent of global ‘idioms.’”4 Hence, this essay focuses on the popular cultural phenomenon variously described as “mediasport,” the “sports/media complex,” the “sport-business-TV nexus,” “sportainment,” or “the high-flying entertainment-media-sports industry.”5 Far from providing a comprehensive overview of the subject, this essay analyzes the relationship between contemporary sport culture and the media industry.6 Despite the growing awareness of what one writer calls the “institutional alignment of sports and media in the context of late capitalism,”7 sport continues to be fetishized by large sections of the general populace as a cultural form somehow removed from the invasive influences of late capitalism. Even the most critical of cultural commentators can slip into a whimsical romanticism whenever sport is mentioned, thereby totally ignoring its broader social and economic derivations or ramifications. Countering such naïveté, and invoking Marshal McLuhan’s dictum “fish don’t know water till beached,”8 this discussion encourages readers to think outside commonsense, uncritical, and myopic understandings of sport by highlighting two exemplars of this most evocative of late-capitalist synergies (that between sport and the commercial media), namely, News Corporation and the Olympic Games; for, the minimum requirement for becoming a productive contributor within the sport industry, an accomplished sport studies scholar, and— perhaps most important—an informed sport consumer, is the ability to discern and dissect the political economic nexus of sport-media-commerce.

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
by David Kushner
Published 2 Jan 2003

This belief has existed since ancient Greece, when Plato said, “Every man and woman should play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present.” In the fifties, the anthropologist Johan Huizinga wrote that “play … is a significant function… which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something.” He suggested a new name for the human species: “Homo Ludens,” Man the Player. Marshall McLuhan wrote in the sixties that “a society without games is one sunk in the zombie trance of the automaton… Games are 143 popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or actions of any culture… The games of a people reveal a great deal about them… [They] are a sort of artificial paradise like Disneyland or some Utopian vision by which we interpret and complete the meaning of our daily lives.”

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
by Derek Thompson
Published 7 Feb 2017

The one she truly loves is the author of the letters—the ugly Cyrano, not the handsome Christian. The play sprang to mind one evening during the research for this book. I was writing the next chapter, which is, in large part, about Cyrano’s singular gift—pleasing an audience. “The medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan said once and everybody else repeated a million times. The Internet and its social network inhabitants are forces of amplification, extending our messages to more ears and eyes. What I wanted to know was whether people change what they talk about when they think they’re addressing a large group of people, as they often do on Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter.

A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams
by Michael Pollan
Published 15 Jan 1997

Not only is the mud and slush of opinion a lot thicker now that it’s being piled on by so many different media, but our most famous philosophers (think of Jacques Derrida or Richard Rorty) are telling us that, underneath it all, there may not be any reality to recover—that it’s mud and slush all the way down. I suffer from an acute case of the contemporary malady, one that probably goes back to a time before people had coined terms like “information overload” and “media saturation” or thought to attach the word “virtual” to “reality.” I remember as a teenager reading that Marshall McLuhan had likened opening the Sunday paper to settling into a warm bath. The metaphor delivered a tiny jolt of recognition, because I too found reading—reading almost anything—to be a vaguely sensual, slightly indulgent pleasure, and one that had very little to do with the acquisition of information.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman
Published 14 Feb 2012

Our widespread inability to recognize or even acknowledge the biases of the technologies we use renders us incapable of gaining any real agency through them. We accept our iPads, Facebook accounts, and automobiles at face value—as preexisting conditions—rather than as tools with embedded biases. Marshall McLuhan exhorted us to recognize that our media affect us beyond whatever content is being transmitted through them. And while his message was itself garbled by the media through which he expressed it (the medium is the what?), it is true enough to be generalized to all technology. We are free to use any car we like to get to work—gasoline-, diesel-, electric-, or hydrogen-powered—and this sense of choice blinds us to the fundamental bias of the automobile toward distance, commuting, suburbs, and energy consumption.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

What I wonder, would the sternly moralistic Beveridge have made of a benefit system that literally and unashamedly proposes handing out money for nothing with no strings attached? It’s known as Universal Basic Income, or UBI, and is an idea gaining much traction now to the surprise of many, me included. When I was a teenage sociology student, I read a 1966 essay by Marshall McLuhan called ‘Guaranteed Income in the Electric Age’. You can probably guess the gist from the title. One day fairly soon, robots would be doing all the dirty, boring, dangerous work for us and we would receive an allowance from the state in order to not work. McLuhan was deadly serious about this.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

locations=SA. 14 Global Gender Gap report 2018, http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2018/key-findings/. 15 “Historical Background and Development Of Social Security,” Social Security Administration, https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html. 16 Tuberculosis Treatment, Mayo Clinic, https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/tuberculosis/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20351256. 17 The term “global village” was coined by Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s. 18 “The World Economic Forum, a Partner in Shaping History, 1971–2020,” p.16 http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_A_Partner_in_Shaping_History.pdf. 19 The Davos Manifesto, 1973, World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/12/davos-manifesto-1973-a-code-of-ethics-for-business-leaders/. 20 “A Friedman Doctrine—The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” Milton Friedman, The New York Times, September 1970, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html. 21 The New York Times Magazine, “What Is Fukuyama Saying?

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

locations=SA. 14 Global Gender Gap report 2018, http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2018/key-findings/. 15 “Historical Background and Development Of Social Security,” Social Security Administration, https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html. 16 Tuberculosis Treatment, Mayo Clinic, https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/tuberculosis/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20351256. 17 The term “global village” was coined by Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s. 18 “The World Economic Forum, a Partner in Shaping History, 1971–2020,” p.16 http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_A_Partner_in_Shaping_History.pdf. 19 The Davos Manifesto, 1973, World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/12/davos-manifesto-1973-a-code-of-ethics-for-business-leaders/. 20 “A Friedman Doctrine—The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” Milton Friedman, The New York Times, September 1970, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html. 21 The New York Times Magazine, “What Is Fukuyama Saying?

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

The same has happened with modern ARGs, where explainer videos have become so compelling they rack up more views than the ARGs have players (not unlike people watching others play video games on Twitch). Michael Andersen, owner of the Alternate Reality Gaming Network news site, is a fan of the trend for consuming ARGs as passive, lean-back media, or what philosopher Marshall McLuhan referred to as “cool media,” but wonders if it strips out the need for players to develop critical thinking skills: When you’re reading (or watching) a summary of an ARG? All of the assumptions and logical leaps have been wrapped up and packaged for you, tied up with a nice little bow. Everything makes sense, and you can see how it all flows together.

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Published 15 Jan 2024

Where Project Cybersyn suggested that the world run by data might be coherent and graspable, contained within a room, we now know that it is abstract and diffuse, everywhere and nowhere at once. We’re encouraged to forget the presence of algorithms. New technologies inevitably create new forms of behavior, but the behaviors are rarely those that the inventors expect. The technology has an inherent meaning of its own that eventually comes to the fore. Marshall McLuhan wrote his famous dictum “the medium is the message” in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He meant that the structure of a new medium—electric light, the telephone, television—is more important than the content that travels through it. The telephone’s ability to connect people exceeds any particular conversation.

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
by Howard Rheingold
Published 14 May 2000

Fifteen years from now, there will be a microchip in your telephone receiver with more computing power than all the technology the Defense Department can buy today. All the written knowledge in the world will be one of the items to be found in every schoolchild's pocket. The computer of the twenty-first century will be everywhere, for better or for worse, and a more appropriate prophet than Orwell for this eventuality might well be Marshall McLuhan. If McLuhan was right about the medium being the message, what will it mean when the entire environment becomes the medium? If such development does occur as predicted, it will probably turn out differently from even the wildest "computerized household" scenarios of the recent past. The possibility of accurately predicting the social impact of any new technology is questionable, to say the least.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture
by Scott Belsky
Published 1 Oct 2018

DELEGATE, ENTRUST, DEBRIEF, AND REPEAT. The problem is that, in the heat: David Marquet, “The Counterintuitive Art of Leading by Letting Go,” 99U, accessed March 23, 2018, https://99u.adobe.com/articles/43081/the-counter-intuitive-art-of-leading-by-letting-go. KNOW HOW AND WHEN TO SAY IT. “The medium is the message”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). “means that our body”: Vanessa Van Edwards, “3 Tips for Women to Improve Their Body Language at Work,” Forbes, May 21, 2013, www.forbes.com/sites/yec/2013/05/21/3-tips-for-women-to-improve-their-body-language-at-work/#7d8f65c98153.

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child
by Morgan G. Ames
Published 19 Nov 2019

In OLPC’s view, children are not just objects of teaching, but agents of change.”28 Statements such as this sound as though they give agency to children, but within this is also a sobering individualist responsibility: if change fails to materialize, it is not the fault of the schools or economic conditions or social structures or national policies or infrastructure—those have already been written off. It is the fault of the children. This model of technology-driven cultural change was fairly common in other education and development projects—and, at one point, in the social sciences more generally. In the 1960s, communication theorist Marshall McLuhan supported the idea of technological determinism, arguing that cultural change comes about because of key technologies such as writing, printing, and electronic media.29 Scholars of science and technology would, of course, challenge this story by interrogating the cultural contexts and negotiations that enable the development of these technologies and take place around each of them.30 Yet McLuhan’s sentiment lives on elsewhere.

Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Raymond Williams, a stern critic of technological determinism, lays down that: “The moment of any new technology is a moment of choice.”23 Conversely, however, for a choice to be of any meaning, it must delimit in some way the choices available after it has been made.24 The fascination in the computer underground for Marshall McLuhan’s contemplations (declared by Wired Magazine as their protective saint and Raymond Williams’ favoured target when attacking technological determinism) should be seen in this light. The influence of McLuhan among hackers must somehow be consistent with their grasping of technology as a politically contested field.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

For example, rather than entering commands on a keyboard, users could change the shape of an image displayed on a computer screen by grabbing its edges or corners with a mouse and dragging them. Shneiderman was at the top of his game and, during the 1990s, he was a regular consultant at companies like Apple, where he dispensed advice on how to efficiently design computer interfaces. Shneiderman, who considered himself to be an opponent of AI, counted among his influences Marshall McLuhan. During college, after attending a McLuhan lecture at the Ninety-Second Street Y in New York City, he had felt emboldened to pursue his own various interests, which crossed the boundaries between science and the humanities. He went home and printed a business card describing his job title as “General Eclectic” and subtitled it “Progress is not our most important product.”22 He would come to take pride in the fact that Terry Winograd had moved from the AI camp to the HCI world.

Paper: A World History
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 3 Apr 2016

The powerful block printers’ guild, which included card makers, block book makers, painters, artists, scribes, illuminators, and wood engravers, would not let typographers—the printers who used moveable type—join their guild. A certain human touch was missing in the way the letters and the words all had exactly the same spacing, they said. It was rigid and uncreative. Even twentieth-century anthropologist Marshall McLuhan, dividing history into pre-Gutenberg and post-Gutenberg, believed that the latter was more “constricted” in its thinking. Moveable-type printing ended the competition between parchment and paper. Gutenberg printed thirty-five of his two hundred Bibles on parchment, which served to show that paper worked better for printing.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again
by Johann Hari
Published 25 Jan 2022

* * * As I wandered the streets of Provincetown contemplating some of these questions, I found myself thinking back over a famous idea that I now realized I had never really understood before—one that was also mulled, in a different way, by Nicholas Carr in his book. In the 1960s, the Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan talked a lot about how the arrival of television was transforming the way we see the world. He said these changes were so deep and so profound that it was hard to really see them. When he tried to distill this down into a phrase, he explained that “the medium is the message.” What he meant, I think, was that when a new technology comes along, you think of it as like a pipe—somebody pours in information at one end, and you receive it unfiltered at the other.

What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly
Published 14 Jul 2010

The coral structure and coral animals behave as one. It grows, breathes. The waxy interior of a beehive or the twiggy architecture of a bird’s nest works the same way. Therefore a nest or a hive can best be considered a body built rather than grown. A shelter is animal technology, the animal extended. The extended human is the technium. Marshall McLuhan, among others, noted that clothes are people’s extended skin, wheels extended feet, camera and telescopes extended eyes. Our technological creations are great extrapolations of the bodies that our genes build. In this way, we can think of technology as our extended body. During the industrial age it was easy to see the world this way.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta
Published 1 Jan 2009

The fact that Google would couple such a new transparency policy with its new behavioral targeting efforts is another reminder that privacy questions will continue to hover like a Predator drone, capable of firing a missile that can destroy the trust companies require to serve as trustees for personal data. Alternatively, if the public is truly less concerned with privacy questions and more interested in trading data for, say, a subsidized service, or is more interested in the trivial, as the late scholar Neil Postman believed, then privacy will be the least of our issues. A former student of Marshall McLuhan‘s, Postman taught at NYU for more than four decades and authored a variety of important books, the best-known of which was Amusing Ourselves to Death. In that book he argued that the real threat was not the one described in 1984 but one contained in an earlier book, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

The Facebook Effect
by David Kirkpatrick
Published 19 Nov 2010

It may help us to move back toward a kind of intimacy that the ever-quickening pace of modern life has drawn us away from. At the same time, Facebook’s global scale, combined with the quantity of personal information its users entrust to it, suggests a movement toward a form of universal connectivity that is truly new in human society. The social philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan is a favorite at the company. He coined the term “the global village.” In his influential 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he predicted the development of a universal communications platform that would unite the planet. “Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness,” he wrote, “when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of society.”

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth
by Andrew Smith
Published 3 Apr 2006

A noble sentiment, but he couldn’t do it, and when the time came to leave office, he delivered a farewell address which stands as one of the most bizarre in his country’s history. In it, he warned of the creeping influence of a “military-industrial complex” – a phrase that would have sounded easier on the lips of Noam Chomsky or Marshall McLuhan, or for that matter Chairman Mao, than coming from this Republican ex-military man with little apparent taste for drama. The thing I love about this story, though, is how badly the agitators underestimated Ike. His public image was of a nice guy who was no good at politics, but people close to him say the opposite was true.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

YOUR PERSONAL AVATAR AND THE BLACK BOX OF IDENTITY Throughout history, each new form of media has enabled mankind to transcend time, space, and mortality. That—dare we say—divine ability inevitably raises anew the existential question of identity: Who are we? What does it mean to be human? How do we conceptualize ourselves? As Marshall McLuhan observed, the medium becomes the message over time. People shape and are shaped by media. Our brains adapt. Our institutions adapt. Society adapts. “Today you need an organization with endowed rights to provide you with an identity, like a bank card, a frequent flyer card, or a credit card,”18 said Carlos Moreira of WISeKey.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Jun 2009

He has written ten books, and his documentaries include Frontline’s award-winning “The Merchants of Cool” and “The Persuaders.” He teaches media studies at the New School, hosts The Media Squat on radio station WFMU, and serves on the board of directors of the Media Ecology Association, the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, and the National Association for Media Literacy Education. He has won the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology and was the first winner of the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. http://www.rushkoff.com The names and identifying personal details of some individuals have been changed to protect their anonymity.

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives
by Satyajit Das
Published 15 Nov 2006

Marty said it with immense gravitas; the financial journalists reported it verbatim. His template for success was in accord with that of Rumsfeld. ‘I think I probably said that to The Washington Post although I don’t recall precisely what I said. But I’m pretty sure it’s roughly what I say all the time.’ 6 In the 1960s a Canadian academic, Marshall McLuhan, built a reputation on his views of modern culture. He is best remembered for the pithy phrase ‘the medium is the message’. Nobody quite knew what McLuhan was getting at. In press coverage of finance and markets, the medium is the only message. McLuhan also understood the value of the secret information that everybody in financial markets covets: ‘This information is top security.

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind
Published 24 Aug 2015

Into the 2020s and beyond, we predict the emergence and adoption of a second wave of AI systems in the professions. 1 We first introduced this concept in the mid-1990s, in Richard Susskind, The Future of Law (1996). 2 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982). 3 We can anticipate a fifth stage, but it is beyond the scope of this book—this is the likely stage in the development of humanity when human beings become digitally enhanced, when machines and human beings become entwined and even indistinguishable. Some of these themes are touched on in Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence (2014). 4 Ong, Orality and Literacy, Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (2002), Luciano Floridi, The Philosophy of Information (2013), James Gleick, The Information (2011), and the works to which they refer. 5 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 31. 6 Gleick, The Information, and his discussion of Plato, who spoke of the ‘forgetfulness’ of those who do ‘not practice their memory’ (p. 30).

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster
by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
Published 1 Mar 2013

So let’s talk about the importance of focus, about specific business models, and about the stages every startup goes through as it discovers the right product and the best target market. Armed with this, you’ll be able to find the metrics that matter to you. It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame. —Marshall McLuhan Chapter 5. Analytics Frameworks Over the years we’ve seen a number of frameworks emerge that help us understand startups and the changes they undergo as they grow, find their markets, and help startups acquire customers and revenue. Each framework offers a different perspective on the startup lifecycle, and each suggests a set of metrics and areas on which to focus.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded
by Simon Winchester
Published 1 Jan 2003

This eruption was so enormous an event, and had so many worldwide implications and effects, that for humankind to be able to learn and know about it, in detail, within days or even hours of its very happening entirely changed the world's view of itself. It would not be stretching a point to suggest that the Global Village – the phrase is modern, and was coined by Marshall McLuhan in 1960, referring to the world-shrinking effects of television, even pre-satellite* – was essentially born with the worldwide apprehension of, and fascination with, the events in Java that began in the summer of 1883. And Agent Schuit's first telegram to London was one small indication of that revolution's beginnings.

Howard Rheingold
by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)
Published 26 Apr 2012

The nature of the individual psyche changed when it became possible for so many people outside the priesthood to take advantage of the collected knowledge of the culture. Literate people think differently from people in nonliterate or postliterate cultures, and they think of themselves differently. The telegraph, telephone, radio, and television, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, turned everywhere and every time into here and now. An ordinary person today with a coin and access to a telephone booth commands powers over time and space that the potentates of antiquity never dared covet. People who routinely accept such power as part of their reality think of themselves in a certain way.

The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T
by Steve Coll
Published 12 Jun 2017

The company’s intercity phone network and dominant position in the long-distance market will generate billions in annual revenues for the rest of this century and well into the next. But Charlie Brown’s entrancing vision of an unbridled AT&T racing into the technology-driven “information age,” competing with the likes of IBM and Wang and Data General and others for dominance of the “global information village” imagined by popular academic futurists such as Marshall McLuhan, John Naisbitt, and Alvin Toffler, has already been clouded by muddled realities, and there is much evidence that his company’s boundaries will continue to shrink, rather than grow, in the decades ahead. McGowan and MCI, on the other hand, lacking any guarantee of long-term profitability, once again face the possibility of financial difficulty, and while the vista is familiar to McGowan, this time there will be nothing to grab onto if he falls.

The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World
by Randall E. Stross
Published 13 Mar 2007

The modern history of communications can be divided into two separate epochs: In the first, the race was to find a means to beat the speed of a horse, and this telegraphy achieved (technically speaking, this came even before telegraphy was electrified: “visual” telegraphy using manned signal towers were built in the 1790s in France). As Marshall McLuhan observed, the telegram was the first message to outrun the messenger. In the second epoch, from the time of early telegraphy to the present-day Internet, the race has involved sending as many messages as possible from point A to point B down a single conduit. In the first decades of telegraphy, the very idea that more than one message could be sent at a time was incomprehensible to most.

Straphanger
by Taras Grescoe
Published 8 Sep 2011

The Toronto Tragedy Toronto, Ontario [The motorcar] exploded each city into a dozen seemed to become non-stop cities…. Streets, and even sidewalks, became too intense a scene for the casual interplay of growing up. As the city filled with mobile strangers, even next-door neighbours became strangers. This is the story of the motorcar, and it has not much longer to run. — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964. I’d always planned to end up in Toronto. After all, it was the city where I started. I was born at the old Women’s College Hospital, near Queen’s Park station on the Yonge-University line, in 1966. At the time, my parents were renting a top-floor flat in a house on Lytton Boulevard, a short stroller’s push from Yonge Street; an auspicious first address for a newborn, it turned out, as it had belonged to one of the inventors of Pablum (his widow spoon-fed me the vitamin-rich baby mush, which may explain why I never developed rickets).

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy
by Benjamin Barber
Published 20 Apr 2010

For background on the role of television and advertising in American life see the older books by Marie Winn, Plug-In Drug (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1977); Frank Mankiewicz and Joel Swerdlow, Remote Control: Television and the Manipulation of American Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979); Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980); and Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon, 1983). 2. Geraldine Fabrikant, “Bell Atlantic’s Acquisition,” The New York Times, October 14, 1993, p. C 7. 3. I will not try here to rehearse the thoughtful critique of television that has been offered by social critics such as Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, or Todd Gitlin. But, as an encapsulation of our themes here, John Berger’s comment that “publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy” is worth citing. Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 149. 4. Steven Daly, “London Is Dead: Invasion of U.S. Pop Culture,” The New Republic, June 14, 1993, p. 12.

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
by James Bridle
Published 6 Apr 2022

While the machines we are constructing today might one day take on their own, undeniable form of life, more akin to the life we recognize in ourselves, to wait for them to do so is to miss out on the full implications of more-than-human personhood. They are already alive, already their own subjects, in ways that matter profoundly to us and to the planet. In the words often attributed to Marshall McLuhan (but more properly ascribed to Winston Churchill): ‘we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.’23 We are the technology of our tools: they shape and form us. Our tools have agency, and thus a claim upon the more-than-human world as well. This realization allows us to begin the core task of a technological ecology: the reintegration of advanced human craft with the nature it sprung from.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 31 Dec 1998

The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977. _________, ed. Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973. Sambursky, S. The Physical World of the Greeks. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963. Original, 1956. Sanderson, George and Frank Mcdonald, eds. Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1989. Saunders, Peter T. “The Complexity of Organisms.” Evolutionary Theory: Paths into the Future, edited by J. W. Pollard. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1984. Savage, John E., Susan Magidson, and Alex M. Stein. The Mystical Machine: Issues and Ideas in Computing.

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin
Published 1 Jan 1998

Weʼll solve it by giving up the comforting blanket of darkness, opening up these new eyes, and sharing the world with six billion fellow witnesses. CHAPTER TWO THE AGE OF KNOWLEDGE But all the conservatism in the world does not afford even a token resistance to the ecological sweep of the new electronic media. MARSHALL MCLUHAN, UNDERSTANDING MEDIA Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it. PERICLES OF ATHENS TRANSFORMING TECHNOLOGIES OF THE PAST AND FUTURE Each human generation seems to have a fulcrum—a pivot around which fateful transformations revolve. Often, this has less to do with the struttings of kings and statesmen than with technology.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

Instead, most individuals who viewed computers as tools for liberation were politically agnostic, more focused on forming alternative communities, and inclined to embrace new technology as a means to better achieve personal liberty and human happiness—what one scholar has labeled as the “New Communalists.” Stewart Brand, Stanford University biology graduate turned publishing entrepreneur, became a leading voice for the New Communalists through creating The Whole Earth Catalog. Deeply influenced by cybernetics visionary Norbert Wiener, electronics media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and architect and designer Buckminster Fuller, Brand pressed NASA to publicly release a satellite photo of the Earth in 1966. Two years later the photo adorned the cover of the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog. Publishing regularly between 1968 and 1971, Brand’s catalog identified and promoted key products or tools for communal living and, in doing so, sought to help “transform the individual into a capable, creative person.”

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000
by John Steele Gordon
Published 12 Oct 2009

Many of these satellites were for military purposes, such as spying, but many others had both civilian and military uses such as communications and weather data gathering. By the late 1960s geosynchronous satellites were able to transmit television pictures that could be received simultaneously by anyone, anywhere, who was able to pick up the signal. The global village, first named by the philosopher Marshall McLuhan in 1960, but which had begun with the laying of the Atlantic cable nearly a hundred years earlier, was now at hand. The economic applications of space technology, especially since the end of the cold war when many of them were declassified, are nearly limitless and increasing every day. Agriculture, transportation, cartography, navigation, and communications are but a few.

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
by David Rothkopf
Published 18 Mar 2008

Passing along the sidewalk from the Congress Centre where we had just heard an address by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and comments from the Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, through the stream of big name boulevardiers, and then walking directly into this icon of the global literary scene—it was made clear again that Davos was truly the incarnation of Marshall McLuhan’s global village. It was like small-town Planet Earth, or the once-a-year Brigadoon of globalization: a community connected to everywhere and, in one way or another, to everyone. Indeed, during the course of this meeting, top trade ministers would caucus to try unsuccessfully to rescue global trade talks, Africa activists would meet with corporate chiefs and political leaders to seek funding for medical aid programs, global warming would “go mainstream” as mostly American skeptics were persuaded by session after session of expert views, and proponents of different solutions for dealing with everything from anxiety about immigrants to anxiety about terrorism would present their views directly to those in a position to implement them.

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales From the World of Wall Street
by John Brooks
Published 6 Jul 2014

When the writer protested, the businessmen were taken aback, and even injured; they had thought the writer would be pleased by their attention to his work, but the flattery, after all, was of the sort shown by a thief who commends a lady’s jewelry by making off with it. In the opinion of some commentators, what has happened so far is only the first phase of a kind of revolution in graphics. “Xerography is bringing a reign of terror into the world of publishing, because it means that every reader can become both author and publisher,” the Canadian sage Marshall McLuhan wrote in the spring, 1966, issue of the American Scholar. “Authorship and readership alike can become production-oriented under xerography.… Xerography is electricity invading the world of typography, and it means a total revolution in this old sphere.” Even allowing for McLuhan’s erratic ebullience (“I change my opinions daily,” he once confessed), he seems to have got his teeth into something here.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

In a work they titled “The Californian Ideology,” Barbrook and Cameron described a “new faith” emerging “from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley.” Mixing “the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies,” the Californian Ideology drew on the state’s history of countercultural rebellion, its role as a crucible of the New Left, the global village prophecies of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and “a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.” Survivors of the “Me” decade, weaned on utopian sci-fi novels, self-help, and new-age spiritualism, adherents of this faith forsook the street-side rebellion and civil actions of an earlier generation in favor of “a contradictory mix of technological determinism and libertarian individualism.”

Dealers of Lightning
by Michael A. Hiltzik
Published 27 Apr 2000

There might still be bicycle runs to Rosati’s in town for beer and brainstorming, but the thrill of biking back to PARC and implementing some unprecedented new idea on the spot had evaporated. To Kay the team had lost its balance. The idea of a Dynabook for Children had “dimmed out,” overwhelmed by everyone’s professional imperatives and their desire to elaborate on what were now, to him, old ideas. Kay remained preoccupied with a lesson he had assimilated from Marshall McLuhan: Once humans shape their tools, they turn around and “reshape us.” That was fine if the tools were the right ones, but he was unconvinced that Smalltalk fell into that category any longer. Within a few weeks of the Pajaro Dunes offsite he enticed Adele Goldberg and Larry Tesler, two who were still willing to follow him off on a tangent, into joining his quest to regain the simplicity initiative.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

That such daydreams are more than just fantasy is evident from the plans of futurist entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson of Virgin Air fame, who hopes to service such colonies with novel companies like his Virgin Galactic, which is reportedly preparing to offer space miles benefits to its customers. Even old-line politicians such as Newt Gingrich now talk about colonizing the moon as staples of their political campaign patter. For some time, idealists and dreamers have looked even further—beyond our known urban behemoths and linked megacities—in search of Marshall McLuhan’s global village, a mote in his prescient eye sixty years ago, but today an abstraction being realized not only in digital and virtual forms like the cloud, but in global economic markets and in the complex urban networks that are our focus here. Global village indeed! The urban philosopher Constantinos Doxiadis, pursuing his own science of human development he calls Ekistics, has predicted the emergence of a single planetary city—Ecumenopolis.21 Doxiadis gives a sociological and futurist spin to science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov and William Gibson who for decades have been imagining urban agglomerations on a planetary scale.22 Just beyond the global village, pushing out from the imagined Ecumenopolis, one can catch a glimpse of Gaia, that mythic organic entity that, in the hypothesis posited by James Lovelock, is as an evolving and self-regulating system in which biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and pedosphere all work together on behalf of a sustainable and integral planet, though whether it is urban or not, or even includes humanity, remains a puzzle.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant
Published 25 Sep 2023

There is a long legacy of broader criticism of technology, stretching at least as far back as Plato’s Phaedrus, a dialogue between the Egyptian king Thamus and his chief technologist, Theuth. Thamus is appraising Theuth’s many inventions, when they arrive to the technology of writing, then a novel development in Egyptian society. In a famous exchange dissected by theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, Thamus warns Theuth about writing, arguing that “those who acquire it will cease to use their memory and become forgetful.” Today, someone making the equivalent argument about, say, smartphones making us less smart—would be called a Luddite. The list of critics of invention and “progress” is endless; it includes Sigmund Freud, Henry David Thoreau, Ted Kaczynski, and certain Amish sects.

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
by Michael Dobbs
Published 3 Sep 2008

Then, as now, the world was in the throes of a technological revolution. Planes could travel at the speed of sound, television could transmit pictures instantaneously across the oceans, a few shots could trigger a global nuclear war. The world was becoming "a global village," in the newly minted phrase of Marshall McLuhan. But the revolution was unfinished. Human beings possessed the ability to blow up the world, but they still used the stars for navigation. Americans and Russians were beginning to explore the cosmos, but the Soviet ambassador in Washington had to summon a messenger on a bicycle when he wanted to send a cable to Moscow.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

That’s the face of social media with engagement as its fitness function. Millions of nonstop hosts. Billions of personalized shopping channels for content. And as was the case with Google, both legitimate players and bad actors soon were playing to the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithm. As Father John Culkin so aptly summarized the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” You choose the fitness function of your algorithms, and in turn, they shape your company, its business model, its customers, and ultimately our entire society. We’ll explore some of the downsides of Facebook’s fitness function in Chapter 10, and of financial markets in Chapter 11.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Published 28 Sep 2010

The business of news, as it’s currently constructed, is vanishing. Efforts to copyright news stories, charge for them, or somehow protect them behind a newspaper “pay wall” are futile. As one young college student famously said in a focus group, “If news is important to me it will find me.”24 With democracy comes power. Marshall McLuhan’s teacher and mentor, University of Toronto political economist Harold Innis, was the real pioneer of media theory. He said that, by understanding the characteristics of media technologies, we can understand the nature of societies and unlock the secrets of history.25 While this sweeping premise may be an overstatement, his analysis of media is rich with insights for the publishing industry today.

Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution
by Leonard Shlain
Published 2 Aug 2004

The Old Testament, New Testament, and the Koran became for their respective believers the final arbiters for sacred truth. In the beginning was the Word. Denying the pre-eminence of the images of Lascaux, Luxor, and Nineveh, the word superseded the image. I had based the hypothesis of AVG on the media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, “The medium is the message.” The process people use to absorb and generate information is a more important factor shaping culture than the content of the information that they are absorbing or generating. Though AVG obviously struck a chord with many readers, judging by its popularity and many favorable reviews, there were those who criticized it, protesting that men’s malevolent attitudes toward women were more deeply rooted.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
by Rick Perlstein
Published 1 Jan 2008

The quality they were said to have in common was “charisma”—“Kennedyesque” charisma. To the talking heads on the Sunday panel shows, it was obvious: the man who went into the showdown with Lyndon Johnson would have to be a TV star. It simply couldn’t be Nixon. The logic of the times demanded it. This new political science had a prophet, and his name was Marshall McLuhan—“the new spokesman of the electronic age,” as the blurb to his 1964 magnum opus, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, called him. A key hinge of that book’s argument that “the medium is the message” was his exegesis of the Kennedy-Nixon debates. He thought Nixon resembled the railway lawyer in westerns “who signs leases that are not in the best interests of the folks in the little town….

…

For instance, Iowa’s: Interview with John Schmidhauser. In Gallup’s poll: D. Duane Angel, Romney: A Political Biography (New York: Exposition Press, 1967), 220. To the talking heads: See, for example, “GOP Governors Seen Trying for Moderate in ’68,” LAT, July 5, 1966. This new political science: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964); Nixon citation from 2001 Routledge edition, 360. “Republican Camelot”: See the chapter by that name in Wills, Nixon Agonistes, 219. George Romney: “The Dinosaur Hunter,” Time, April 6, 1959; “The Citizen’s Candidate,” Time, November 16, 1962.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
by John M. Barry
Published 9 Feb 2004

Basically everything in the body—whether it belongs there or not—either carries a form on its surface, a marking, a piece that identifies it as a unique entity, or its entire form and being comprises that message. (In this last case, it is pure information, pure message, and it embodies perfectly Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message.”) Reading the message, like reading braille, is an intimate act, an act of contact and sensitivity. Everything in the body communicates in this way, sending and receiving messages by contact. This communication occurs in much the same way that a round peg fits into a round hole.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

I know so many people, for example, who were against Trump but were talking about him, criticizing, on their social every day. Would you put up a giant billboard of someone you don’t want to see elected? Probably not. We truly don’t understand social media. A good book that would help us is Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan. It should be the online behavior bible of the 21st century. We all use media 24/7 but most of us have never truly studied it. Back to your question: I would like two billboards. One for something I tell myself when I have a difficult decision to make that goes against the odds. And it is “Make yourself proud.”

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght
Published 20 Mar 2017

Similar ideas are to be found among members of the French “personalist” movement (Charbonneau and Ellul 1935/1999) and in the “federalist” movement led by Alexandre Marc (1972, 1988). 56. Goodman and Goodman 1947/1960: 198. 57. Long 1934, 1935. 58. On Huey Long and his Share Our Wealth movement, see Brinkley 1981 and Amenta et al. 1994. 59. Theobald 1961, 1963, 1967. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan was among the authors gathered by Theobald for his collective volume on the “guaranteed income” (Theobald ed. 1967). In his chapter, McLuhan (1967: 205) argues that automation creates room for “the kind of ‘leisure’ that has always been known to the individual artist and creative person: the leisure of fulfillment resulting from the fullest use of one’s powers.”

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece
by Michael Benson
Published 2 Apr 2018

Most film executives didn’t, either, and the Variety piece on April 10 led with what today might seem a ridiculously self-evident observation: “Because today’s filmgoers are predominantly under 25, it would seem vital for the industry to learn something about this market and their tastes.” Citing Marshall McLuhan, the article cut to the heart of the Clarke-Kubrick left-brain, right-brain split that Colin Cantwell had identified months before, pointing out that to the “visual-oriented” youth of 1968, “visual and aural sensations have replaced words.” It also quoted one of Kubrick’s earliest public comments on 2001: “I wanted to make a nonverbal statement, one that would affect people on the visceral, emotional, and psychological levels.

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
by Adrian Johns
Published 5 Jan 2010

To make this pirate revolution work, experts (“technical freaks”) would be needed, and Hoffman recommended that readers find them in the world of amateur radio. He also directed them to Radical Software, a periodical emanating from a New York group of artists in the brandnew homeproduction medium of videotape. Operating oxymoronically as the Center for Decentralized Television, Radical Software was heavily influenced by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, and also by Norbert Wiener’s antiproprietorial vision of information. The magazine proclaimed in the first lines of its first issue the imperative to universalize access to information, not least by abjuring copyright. It included what it called a “pirated” interview with Fuller, and invented a symbol to represent the “antithesis” of ©.

The Social Life of Money
by Nigel Dodd
Published 14 May 2014

This, then, is the era of cool money, characterized by the proliferation of monetary instruments, and resting on the capacity of these instruments (arbitrarily) to comingle and multiply. Besides money, Baudrillard also describes diaries, events, and memories as “cool.” The term is taken from Marshall McLuhan’s classic distinction between hot and cool media. In Baudrillard’s rendition, cool phenomena lack semantic depth. They are emptied of the tension that comes from the ability to meaning something else and the capacity for contestation. The cool event, for example, is oververified; it lacks uncertainty and emotional charge and is played out as if history has “gone cold.”

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

Who knows, perhaps bioengineering and communications technology will one day combine to reproduce cybercognitively, at a distance of thousands of miles, the incomparable richness of that experience. In the meantime, what characterises our transformed world is external combinations of the virtual and the physical, as a result of developments that I summarise as ‘mass migration and the internet’. COSMOPOLIS In a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy, published in 1962, the media guru Marshall McLuhan declared that ‘the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village’.37 This was an extraordinary seerlike insight, well ahead of its time, but McLuhan’s simile of ‘global village’ is inadequate, both as description and prescription. Villages are small, usually homogeneous and conformist places.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

“Well, I just happen to have on standby the Honorable Bill Chandler,” Leone announced theatrically. “He wrote the law. I’m getting him on the phone.” There was a stunned silence on the board call. For a moment, a scene from Annie Hall flashed in front of Leone’s eyes—the one in which Woody Allen settles an argument about the philosophy of Marshall McLuhan by summoning the philosopher from behind a billboard. Leone dialed Chandler, who explained to the ServiceNow directors precisely what his law said. The general counsel backed down meekly. Because nobody at the company wanted to run an auction—an undesirable acquirer might materialize—the idea of a sale had to be shelved.

Hard Landing
by Thomas Petzinger and Thomas Petzinger Jr.
Published 1 Jan 1995

Whether a cable television system, a complex of automatic teller machines, or an airline computer reservation system, a network exists not as an end in itself but as a convenience to those who create and consume an underlying product: a Hollywood movie, a banking service, a seat on an airplane. The sociologist Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 assertion that “the medium is the message” is by more recent standards a quaintly over-enthusiastic characterization of the Information Age. Even if the medium is the message, it is not the product. Though it may enhance value, it creates nothing. By themselves computers, networks, and systems can no more fly people between cities than they can print money or direct actors.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
by Yochai Benkler
Published 14 May 2006

Liberal political theory must first recognize and understand it before it can begin to renegotiate its agenda for the liberal state, progressive or otherwise. 44 The Role of Technology in Human Affairs 45 The first methodological choice concerns how one should treat the role of technology in the development of human affairs. The kind of technological determinism that typified Lewis Mumford, or, specifically in the area of communications, Marshall McLuhan, is widely perceived in academia today [pg 17] as being too deterministic, though perhaps not so in popular culture. The contemporary effort to offer more nuanced, institution-based, and politicalchoice-based explanations is perhaps best typified by Paul Starr's recent and excellent work on the creation of the media.

The Rise of the Network Society
by Manuel Castells
Published 31 Aug 1996

After all, Hitler showed how radio could be a formidable instrument of resonance for one-way single-purpose messages. What TV represented, first of all, was the end of the Gutenberg Galaxy – that is, of a system of communication essentially dominated by the typographic mind and the phonetic alphabet order.18 For all his critics (generally turned off by the obscurity of his mosaic language), Marshall McLuhan struck a universal chord when, in all simplicity, he declared that the “medium is the message”: The mode of TV image has nothing in common with film or photo, except that it offers also a nonverbal gestalt or posture of forms. With TV, the viewer is the screen. He is bombarded with light impulses that James Joyce called “The Charge of the Light Brigade”… The TV image is not a still shot.

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
by Brian Dear
Published 14 Jun 2017

“People had talked about flat screen displays since the 1950s as a concept,” Kay says, “but I never really thought of it as a computer display until I realized that people could actually start building them like that….The thing that hit me on the plasma panel was that people could actually do thin-film deposition now over large areas and get away with it, and so it was only going to be a matter of time before you could actually do some decent display. So yeah, that had a lot to do with it. That immediately gave me a focus for thinking about user interface. And the crux of the thing was that I remembered a saying of [Marshall] McLuhan’s, which was, ‘I don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish.’ And I realized that one of the problems, one of the reasons user interfaces were lousy, was we had adults trying to design for adults. And thinking they knew what they were doing but actually taking so many things for granted that it just wouldn’t work out.

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980
by Rick Perlstein
Published 17 Aug 2020

Questioning emphasized technical, bureaucratic concerns. The first exciting moments came when a producer broke a rule against showing reaction shots: Carter’s face turned sour after Ford called him a hypocrite; Ford glowered when Carter accused him of public relations stunts. “Lousy television,” the media guru Marshall McLuhan thought. Until there arrived one of the most astonishing twenty-eight minutes in the history of TV. Elizabeth Drew of the New Yorker asked the evening’s final question, about Congress’s eye-opening 1975 investigations of abuses by America’s intelligence agencies, including assassinations of foreign leaders: “What do you think about trying to write in some new protections by getting new laws to govern these agencies?”

…

“His method,” National Review appreciatively observed, “is not to harangue, but to marshal witnesses.” A remarkable thing to say of a man who claimed in 1977 that homosexuals would “kill you as quick as look at you.” It wasn’t what Falwell said but how he said it. TV was a “cool” medium, as the theorist Marshall McLuhan famously put it. Compared to other Southern fundamentalists, Falwell was a cool preacher—none of the “subliminal sex, fire and excitement or rock-tinged music of a Jimmy Swaggart,” in the words of another profile. Packaging, in a pleasingly modern form, the sort of traditional values that millions of upwardly mobile but anxious country-bred Americans left behind when they sought their fortune in the wider world—whether to Lynchburg, Virginia, or Orange County, California, or Concord, New Hampshire—was Falwell’s greatest gift.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 14 Jul 2005

That's why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details) but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because exponential growth is ignored). The Six Epochs First we build the tools, then they build us. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN The future ain't what it used to be. —YOGI BERRA Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order. I'll discuss the concept of order in the next chapter; the emphasis in this section is on the concept of patterns. I believe that it's the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

By the 1960s, continental-scale computational network systems, such as the SAGE early warning system, suggested more comprehensive transformations of urban pathways and partitions according to information processing perspectives, especially in cinema and architecture. A short and scattered list might include Jean-Luc Godard's Alpha 60 (1965), overseeing a future Paris in Alphaville; Dennis Crompton's Computer City (1964); and John McHale's 2000+ (1967). All are part of a milieu popularized by Marshall McLuhan's publication of Understanding Media in 1964, which made the redefinition of the city into a landscape of smart networks, informational prosthesis, a cocktail party commonplace. That figure of the city, less a vast industrial machine than an unfolding collective sensory apparatus, couched many of the important cinematic projects of the time, from Stan Van Der Beek intermedia experiments to Gene Youngblood's expanded cinema; they explored the architectural potential of cinema as an architectural material and the urban environment as a cinematic surface.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

x Like many of California’s trailblazing laws, this one was contested to the Supreme Court, where a conservative majority upheld the statute on a 5–4 vote. See “Excerpts from Supreme Court Rulings on California’s ‘Three-Strikes’ Law,” New York Times, March 6, 2003. xi Mind Grenades is a fantastic early-internet object. It’s a big picture-book, with out-of-context quotes from futurists like Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan over post-psychedelic visuals. The form is indistinguishable from financial services advertising. One two-page spread reads MONEY IS JUST A TYPE OF INFORMATION, attributed to magazine editor Kevin Kelly. Section V 2000–2020 An Anduril autonomous surveillance camera on the Southern California border United States Customs and Border Protection photo Chapter 5.1 B2K Palo Alto for Bush—The Internet After 9/11—Scrapers Eat the World—Amazon Thrives—The iPod For many years, American cultural and political commentators have advanced theories about why Republicans so strongly disliked Bill Clinton, what made him appear as an existential threat to conservatives.

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations
by Ronen Bergman
Published 30 Jan 2018

Schematically, much of the new targeted killing system wasn’t fundamentally new at all: The intelligence echelon gathered information, the prime minister authorized, and the field forces executed the hit, just like in the 1970s and ’80s in Europe and Lebanon. But there were important differences. As one seasoned intelligence officer said, paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan, “The scalability is the message,” meaning that the use of advanced technology in itself created a completely new reality. Enlisting the entire intelligence community, assisted by the best communications and computer systems in the world, along with the most advanced military technology developments, drastically increased the number of assassinations that the system could carry out simultaneously.

In Europe
by Geert Mak
Published 15 Sep 2004

The second impetus behind this ‘perfect storm’ was the exceptionally international, even intercontinental, nature of the revolt. In every student town from Barcelona to Berlin, one saw the same books in shop windows: Herbert Marcuse (the individual is merely a means of production, divorced from all joy and pleasure), Marshall McLuhan (‘the medium is the message’ and the omnipotence of the modern media) and the new proclamation as gospel of the works of Karl Marx. The London fashion – boots, brightly coloured stockings, jeans and miniskirts – designed by the youthful Mary Quant in her boutique in Chelsea, was to determine the look of young people all over Europe and North America.

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
by Laurie Garrett
Published 31 Oct 1994

Citing the fossil evidence for five great extinction events in Earth’s ancient history, Wilson asked how much more environmental destruction at man’s hand the world could tolerate: “These figures should give pause to anyone who believes that what Homo sapiens destroys, Nature will redeem. Maybe so, but not within any length of time that has meaning for contemporary humanity.”4 As humanity approached the last decade of the twentieth century, the concept of a Global Village—first elucidated in the 1960s by Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan as a description of the sense of worldwide interconnectedness created by mass media technology—had clearly entered mass consciousness in the context of Earth’s ecology. Environmentalists were thinking on the macro level, plotting ways to change the whaling policies of places as disparate as Japan, Alaska, Russia, and Norway.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

In chapter 4 I conjectured that the Humanitarian Revolution was accelerated by publishing, literacy, travel, science, and other cosmopolitan forces that broaden people’s intellectual and moral horizons. The second half of the 20th century has obvious parallels. It saw the dawn of television, computers, satellites, telecommunications, and jet travel, and an unprecedented expansion of science and higher education. The communications guru Marshall McLuhan called the postwar world a “global village.” In a village, the fortunes of other people are immediately felt. If the village is the natural size of our circle of sympathy, then perhaps when the village goes global, the villagers will experience greater concern for their fellow humans than when it embraced just the clan or tribe.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder
Published 1 Sep 2008

In October 1967, the college was presenting a three-day fund-raising convocation on “the liberal arts college in a world of change” and had assembled a brilliant panoply of 1960s culture in its speakers’ roster—including author Ralph Ellison, whose novel Invisible Man had won a National Book Award; social biologist Ashley Montagu, who had questioned the validity of race as a biological concept; communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, who had popularized the idea of a media-driven “global village” contemporary artist Robert Rauschenberg; and Fred Friendly, the retired former president of CBS News. But the speaker they were all waiting for was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.8 Nobel Peace Prize winners were not everyday visitors to Iowa.