FWR #10: Chaos Spirituality Fun to go back to ’96.
New McLuhan book – Probes
Here is the jacket summary on the Ginko Press site, looks like a site worth noting: (thanks for the link Josh)
Until now no book has explored the full expanse of Marshall McLuhan’s thinking or writing. The Book of Probes is an exciting new publication that brings together for the first time a collection of his most prescient aphorisms and excerpts from his prolific life’s work. It is a revolutionary book that distills the wisdom and wit of the brilliant man who was first to understand and articulate thoughts on media, privacy invasion, the information environment, and much more. McLuhan’s bold perceptions, such as ”obsolescence is the moment of superabundance” he called ‘probes’ and they gleam today like hidden gems in his many books, in more than 200 speeches, in his classes (especially the Monday Night Seminars), and most of all in the nearly 700 shorter writings that he published between 1945 and 1980.
Over the past couple of years Eric McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan’s son, and William Kuhns have combed through all of his writings to extract and compile a complete collection of ‘probes’ which has become The Book of Probes.
Not only are these one hundred percent McLuhan’s own words, these are McLuhan’s finest words and, incredibly, most ‘probes’ are so fresh they will be new to even the most avid McLuhan readers and enthusiasts. The Book of Probes opens a new portal to McLuhan’s mind and sets a new precedent as to how we will interpret and appreciate McLuhan in the future. Readers will marvel at how the consistency, the clarity of concept, and the abundant wealth of observations, some made twenty or thirty years apart, dovetail to form a whole.
Art Director and Designer David Carson presents McLuhan’s work with refreshing new visual insight, and in doing so has added his indelible mark to a body of work that is destined to be recommissioned and reinterpreted by countless generations to come.
With commentaries by Eric McLuhan and Terrence Gordon, author of Marshall McLuhan Escape into Understanding.
Also on the Ginko site: Letter from Marshall McLuhan to Harold Adams Innis
Logophilia
Links as a pseudo-monetary unit?
Jill Walker’s (jill/txt) article:Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web
Links have always been fundamental to the web. In the last few years their value has become regulated as search engines and other systems that find and define the structures of the Web increasingly index links and anchor text in addition to keywords and page content. In these projects, links are seen as objective, democratic and machine-readable signs of value. This paper discusses the implications and the power structures inherent in this relatively undiscussed but influential change in the structuring of the World Wide Web.
the toothpaste is already out of the tube
Those are the words of Gene Kan on file sharing as reported in a Wired article on his death by Michelle Delio Quiet, Sad Death of Net Pioneer A sad story indeed.
www.blogchalking.tk
Daniel Pádua www.blogchalking.tk, has come up with an idea. I did his thing. Maybe this will help in the process of making amore intelligent Web. A bit like the promise of XML bot more organic. And here is my bit as part of a post:
Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, New Zealand, Christchurch, City, Walter, Male, 56-60!
NetFuture: Technology and Human Responsibility
This site was recommended by Dolores on Techne & Psyche. I found some of a discussion she reccomends thus:
the ongoing dialogue between Steve Talbott (editor of NetFuture ) and Kevin Kelly (editor-at-large of Wired) which began with Steve’s essay The Deceiving Virtues of Technology. Their forthright give and take cuts through to the deeper issues concerning technology and how it is changing our sense of what it means to be a human being.
Political Corrections
E.l.e.c.t.r.i.c D.r.e.a.m.s – Articles
Index to a wealth of articles, many about dream sharing online. I am looking for dreams that help define cyberspace, that reveal cyberspace, any offers?
More from Axis Mundi
”That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions… Physiologically, man in normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms.The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.”