Word: mcluhaner
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...professor at Columbia) mindlessly nattering on and on about every topic imaginable. The professor's knowledge knows no bounds: we are subjected first to criticism of Federico Fellini's oeuvre, then to a savage diatribe against Samuel Beckett. Names are dropped with impunity, including that of media theorist Marshall McLuhan...
...medium's own most distinctive format bears out a theory of its first prophet, Marshall McLuhan. TV discovered that on the whole, amid all its sitcoms and music and dramas, the most entertaining, the most amusing and sometimes the most gripping thing it can show us is people sitting and talking to one another, and to us. McLuhan argued that speech is the richest form of human communication because it involves several of the senses--sight, sound, touch, etc.--and that speech on TV is the nearest equivalent yet to the face-to-face variety. Hence the ubiquitous talk show...
Little by little, the world is getting wired. Despite some big bare spots in middle Africa, Mongolia and the real Siberia (as opposed to the Cyberia Cafe), PCs and their attendant modems are knitting together the global village just as Marshall McLuhan predicted. While no country is as well connected as the U.S., with 32 PCs per 100 citizens, Europe and Asia are coming up fast. Among the reasons are the privatization of industry, which is breaking the stranglehold of government telecommunications monopolies, and the recognition by political leaders of the vital importance of getting up to speed...
...generation of the '60s -- were inspired by the ``bards and hot- gospellers of technology,'' as business historian Peter Drucker described media maven Marshall McLuhan and technophile Buckminster Fuller. And we bought enthusiastically into the exotic technologies of the day, such as Fuller's geodesic domes and psychoactive drugs like LSD. We learned from them, but ultimately they turned out to be blind alleys. Most of our generation scorned computers as the embodiment of centralized control. But a tiny contingent -- later called ``hackers'' -- embraced computers and set about transforming them into tools of liberation. That turned out to be the true...
...startling. Every night, when they should be watching television, millions of computer users sit down at their keyboards; dial into CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online or the Internet; and start typing -- E-mail, bulletin-board postings, chat messages, rants, diatribes, even short stories and poems. Just when the media of McLuhan were supposed to render obsolete the medium of Shakespeare, the online world is experiencing the greatest boom in letter writing since the 18th century...