I heard from Mark Federman of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. He teaches a graduate course in “Mind, Media and Society” at the University of Toronto, my alma mater. He writes: “Essentially the course teaches people to think like Marshall McLuhan did… you know… come up with cute aphorisms, predict the future, that sort of stuff…” The course has a blog jam-packed with ideas. Here’s part of an entry:

We began the “Applied McLuhanistics” course last evening. If the nature of the discussion at the first class is any indication, this will be a lively and most interesting term! We left the seminar with the following probe: The invention of the phonetic alphabet changed us from a primarily oral culture to a primarily literate culture (starting in ancient Greek times, and accelerated by Gutenberg). The effect of this transition was, among other things, to create private, silent reading (via books), hence private ideas and therefore personal identity and individuality. Now that the acceleration of instantenous, multi-way communications has put us back into “acoustic space” (centre is everywhere/anywhere, boundaries are nowhere), we are regaining our oral culture. (This is one aspect that led Marshall McLuhan to note that we are “retribalizing” in the sense that we move back to acoustic space, from which the Global Village metaphor emerged.) What effect might the nature of Internet as acoustic space have on personal identity, individuality, privacy and so on? Do we still have privacy, or is there a new medium of “publicy” that emerges?

Whew! Nice paragraph!

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