About to expound in a column about McLuhan, and what he'd have to say about Facebook today, and I can't stop thinking about that scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen pulls out McLuhan himself to correct some windbag, and I keep thinking someone will do that to me.
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mcluhan was a great thinker, terrible academic.
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Did he publish in regular academic journals, or only his (now famous) books? I can't imagine any of this getting past peer review.
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his books, along with innis' research, were the foundation for theories of media ecology. postman built a whole discipline around it at nyu. great ideas, but not very great on the replication part of theory.
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And yet you apply the theories to current media, and they seem so truthy.
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it's quite remarkable. i studied under mcluhan/postman disciples almost 20 years ago, and they salivated at the coming digital world order.
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Really? But Postman wrote so many books against it. If I'd had that insight then, I'd fear it like nothing else. I mostly fear it now.
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yeah, they were excited mainly to be proven right. you know how social scientists are. ;)
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That reassuring feeling of being right will keep them warm no doubt, even as they're burning the remains of Western civilization for heat in the alleyway of a ruined metropolis somewhere, forty years from now.
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Are you familiar with Levinson's "Digital McLuhan" and Logan's attempt to "update" McLuhan in "Understanding New Media"?
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No. Looking them up now.
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Have you read much Baudrillard?
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Only skimmed Simulacra, which I'm guessing is what you're about to recommend? I should probably read it.
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'America' is really good. I've only read parts of Simulacra.
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fb is more foucault's heterotopia than mcluhan's medium though mcluhan certainly foreshadows our collective enslavement to tech.
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Oh my...another prescient quasi-Marxist French author to read.
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read (and update his Practice of Everyday Life ) de Certeau if you must read a new french author :-) most others are good only in bits and pieces.
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I think about this wrt to Zuckerberg's naive idea "I wanted to capture the college experience on a website"; it's a microcosm of SV's delusion that life's meaningful activities can be (literally) codified.
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Pretty much (with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) my top hippy go to book :)
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