Notes: McLuhan and the Machine
October 6th, 2009 by bruno boutot“…professor of English literature and literary critic” from Wikipedia #
I must say that I have not half of McLuhan prodigious cultural knowledge and I don’t get a significant part of his literary references. So I am not venturing on this terrain. Furthermore, McLuhan was mainly a man of the spoken word rather than a writer and there is beauty beyond literal meaning in the shock of his words. #
I also can understand how it feels to swim in a giant flow of information and to be swept in swirls of echoing data: it is not always easy to transcribe the sparks of rising correspondences or the trail of fleeting harmonies. Every time I am tempted to write as a macluhaniac, I just have to read one or two of his pages to remember that I am a simpler member of the tl;dr club and I go back to diagram drawing. :-) #
I think that, given sufficiently advanced computing, culture as a whole could be holographic: we could probably deduce chemistry from movies, music from physics or religions from gastronomy. So one can as well deduce media from literature or, as I am trying to do, from news and marketing (which is not necessarily the best angle, but it’s all I have). #
#
