Before computer hacking, the analogue, mechanical telephone system was the play-thing of “phone phreaks” like Steve Wozniak. But few are aware of the unbelievable life of this subversive past-time’s founderâJoybubblesâwho started it all in the 50s before he turned eight. Documentary Film Director Rachael Morrison joins the New Explorations Podcast to retrieve one of the
Understanding Media Intensive is a 12-part look at media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s major 1964 work “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,” taught by Andrew McLuhan, Director of The McLuhan Institute. In an age where our media environment conditions and structures our reality in increasingly potent ways, Understanding Media provides important foundational knowledge on how our cultural traumas and
A book is a beginning. In the last decade, when some might have said the book was dead, books have really come alive for me. Some may be inclined to say that books are not living thingsâbut I know differently: books, libraries, are not inert, and there is more than meets the eye. There they sit,
Is there any hope our private selves aren’t too far gone? Does total surveillance and data analytics pull our agency and very being inside-out? Are we becoming, as McLuhan said of Narcissus over fifty years ago, “the servomechanism of own extended or repeated image?” Professor Derrick de Kerckhove, 25-year director of the McLuhan Center
Phenomenology is treated ambiguously in McLuhanâs posthumous Laws of Media, which was edited and co-authored by his son, Eric. On the one hand, it is seen as an abstract attempt1 to achieve what could not, in McLuhanâs view, be achieved in this way: the root problem of phenomenology that it is an all-out attempt by dialectic to
With the plane the cities began to have the same slender relation to human needs that museums do. They became corridors of showcases echoing the departing forms of industrial assembly lines. – Understanding Media, 1964 Centralism depends on margins that are accessible by road and wheel. Maritime power does not assume this center-margin structure, and
When Marshall McLuhan mentions Henri Bergson at all, it is in a dismissive tone. The reasons why are simple enough. McLuhan was a Thomist inspired by Jacques Maritain, a fellow convert to Catholicism and student of Bergson at The Sorbonne. Bergson’s philosophy of Creative Evolution(1907 in French)âof a rising spirit of change and time coursing
Cameron McEwen is a digital publisher who has been regularly posting at McLuhan’s New Sciences since 2013. This post was originally written in April of 2020. In July 1978, as part of Louis Forsdaleâs course on communication at Columbia1, McLuhan and Forsdale conducted a dialogue of sorts (with McLuhan doing nearly all the talking, of
