Used Mechanical Bride

I bought a used paperback copy of McLuhan’s first book, The Mechanical Bride. It is a non-linear book; a collection of ads and other clippings from magazines and newspapers, each with questions and commentary by McLuhan. McLuhan encourages us to jump to any section or exhibit as each view is a way into “the circulating point of view” of the book.

Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now. (p. v of Preface)

The book sets out to help the reader by analysing how print media works by returning to it and analyzing it like art or literature.

It was this amusement born of his rational detachment as a spectator of his own situation that gave him the thread which led him out of the Labyrinth. And it is in the same spirit that this book is offered as an amusement. (p. v of Preface)

The detached reader is amused by the manipulation and that is a way back, but back out of the Labyrinth to what?

Most of the exhibits in this book have been selected because of their typical and familiar quality. The represent a world of social myths or forms and speak a language we both know and do not know. (p. v of Preface)

McLuhan calls these ads, cartoons, news clips and so on, “folklore of industrial man” and quotes anthropologist C. B. Lewis to the effect that folklore is not made by the folk, but for them.
The ads he turns up are even more obvious in their manipulation today (or were they always obviously?) One ad for RCA radios is titled “Freedom to LISTEN- Freedom to LOOK” and goes on with rubbish about radio and television promoting freedom. One wonders if such ads lose any power once they look dated or did McLuhan just do a great job at readjusting our reading of such media?
Now that we have all been educated to understand media (thanks to McLuhan), Why are there still ads? Why are we still fooled?
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Theremin: Science Fiction Music

CBC had a great short on the Theremin, an instrument invented in 1919 by the Russian Lev Termen (later Leo Theremin). You don’t touch the instrument, you move your hands close to antennas to produce an eerie, almost human, sound typical of early science fiction movies. According to Theremin World a revival started in the 1990s – the Theremin is back. Needless to say, I want one.

Scrolling foldout from at site on Lissitzky

I found an interesting use of HTML and Javascript while browsing this site on the Russian Futurist designer El Lissitzky (1890-1941), “Monuments of the Future”: Designs by El Lissitzky (Getty Research Institute). For the catalogue of the Soviet Pavilion’s installation at the International Press Exhibition in Cologne in 1928, Lissitzky designed an accordion foldout of photomontages. The Getty Research Institute page for this foldout lets you scroll right across the panels of the foldout.
I’m not sure about the rest of the design for the site with its use of frames, but the information and images make this a first rate research site.
An interesting feature of the site is that you can compare HTML (“Common Format”) and Flash (“Enhanced”) versions. To my mind the HTML is better; I’m not sure what is enhanced about the Flash version.

OECD Information Technology Outlook 2004

The Table of Contents and the Highlights PDF of the OECD Information Technology Outlook 2004 is now available. The Highlights document mentions that spam is now estimated to be about 60% of e-mail and the OECD is now coordinating a Task Force on spam (see OECD Work on Spam: Department), they have a “Toolkit” (which you can’t download!) and there are some reports online that nicely summarize things. (See OECD Work on Spam: Publications & Documents: Reports – the Background Paper in particular provides an overview of the growth in spam.) Maybe the OECD will do something about spam. This came to me from a post by Lachance on Humanist.

Computing or Humanities?

From Humanist, an essay on Computing or Humanities? The Growth and Development of Humanities Computing which mentions what is happening at King’s and Willard McCarty and Harold Short’s map of a Methodological Commons.
I tend to take a very different view where Humanities Computing is not an area of computing methods and tools useful to the humanities, but a discipline that brings humanities inquiry to and through computing. The radical idea I would put forward is that computing (or at least multimedia) is a new discipline of the humanities that draws on traditions of the more established disciplines.

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