In the beginning was the command line, v. 2

The Command Line In 2004 is an annotated version of Neal Stephenson’s “In the Beginning was the Command Line.”. Garrett Birkel got permission to update it with annotations.
See my previous entry on the Stephenson original at, grockwel: Research Notes: Stephenson: In the beginning was the command line. This is from Slashdot.

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?
Continue reading Used Mechanical Bride

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.

Wal-Mart sells $500 linux laptop

InfoWorld: Wal-Mart breaks price barrier with Linspire Linux laptop is a story about a laptop from Linspire for $498 USD for sale at Wal-Mart. While it isn’t a Mac titanium, it has 128 MB of memory, 30 GB hard drive, a 14.1″ LCD panel, and a VIA C3 processor, 1.0 GHz. See the Walmart.com – Balance 14.1″ Notebook Computer with CD-ROM Drive catalog entry.

How the Wayback Machine Works

The Internet Archive is an amazing database of old web sites. James Chartrand pointed me to an interview with the director of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle from January 21, 2002, titled How the Wayback Machine Works. The interview is by Richard Koman and still interesting, especially for those of us interested in text spiders and archives. I was intrigued by Kahle’s claim that the IA is the largest database in the world, “It’s larger than Walmart’s, American Express’, the IRS. It’s the largest database ever built.”

See my previous post on Ghost Sites and the Internet Archive.

Canadian Multimedia: the Cyclorama of Jerusalem

The Cyclorama of Jerusalem is one of the few remaining large panoramas that are still on exhibition. (The other one I know of is at Gettysburg.) Is was created in the 1880s and has been exhibited at the pilgrimage site of Sainte-Anne-de-Beauprè since 1895. Cycloramas are large paintings that form a complete circle creating a “virtual” space where you can immerse yourself in a place and time. As the glossy brochure says, “We claim 3-D as a modern invention but this Cyclorama, in existence for a so long time, gives such an illusion of depth that viewers feel they are among the crowd marching with Roman soldiers…” (p. 2)
My theory is that types of media are like species – you have periods of exploding variety, and then something happens, and all the experiments die out before a particular technology. The late 19th century saw an explosion of different types of immersive media, including panoramas and other optical expositions. Cinema made them all obsolete, effectively wiping the variety out. We are now in another period of expanding diversity – what technology will survive?
Continue reading Canadian Multimedia: the Cyclorama of Jerusalem