You may have gathered from some of my posts over the last couple of weeks, including the last one, that I’ve been reading Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism edited by Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith. Previous posts have drawn on one or two chapters in particular. Here is a review … Continue reading “Does Technology Drive History?”: A Brief Review
At the start of this year, I was reading through Ivan Illich’s In the Vineyard of the Text and posting a few excerpts. That book, which paid an acknowledged debt to Walter Ong, focused on developments in the evolution of the book around 1200 and subsequent consequences for literacy and society. (You can visit those … Continue reading Conviviality and Friendship: Ivan Illich and Wendell Berry on the Virtues of Limits
Early in his book Technopoly, Neil Postman presents a helpful summary of the variety of schema or classifications offered by historians for the history of the relationship of technology to culture: We think at once of the best-known classification: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Steel Age. We speak easily of … Continue reading Neil Postman, Technopoly, and Technological Theology
The challenge of McLuhan’s work, both in the sense that it is challenging to read and that it lays down a challenge to be taken up, involves the difficulty of thinking about that which shapes our thinking — it is akin to attempting to jump over your own shadow. Not surprisingly, a good deal of … Continue reading Training Perecption, Awakening to Experience
The medium is the message … five words, plump and alliterative though they may be, are wildly inadequate … he was born in Edmonton, Alberta on July 21, 1911 … He speaks in canned riddles … Speech as organized stutter is based on time. What does speech do to space? … “Clear prose indicates the … Continue reading McLuhan: 100
L.M. Sacasas 