From The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan

“PLAYBOY: How can you be so sure that this all occurred solely because of phonetic literacy–or, in fact, if it occurred at all?

MCLUHAN: You don’t have to go back 3000 or 4000 years to see this  process at work; in Africa today, a single generation of alphabetic literacy is enough to wrench the individual from the tribal web. When tribal man becomes phonetically literate, he may have an improved abstract intellectual grasp of the world, but most of the deeply emotional corporate family feeling is excised from his relationship with his social milieu.

This division of sight and sound and meaning causes deep psychological effects, and he suffers a corresponding separation and impoverishment of his  imaginative , emotional and sensory life. He begins reasoning in a sequential linear fashion; he begins categorizing and classifying data.

As knowledge is extended in alphabetic form, it is localized and fragmented into specialties, creating division of function, of social classes, of nations and of knowledge–and in the process, the rich interplay of all the senses that characterized the tribal society is sacrificed.”

I’m backing up quotes and things from stickies on the desktop to my blog, prior to leaving the BBC this friday.

This one is Alvin Toffler:

“I once had a class of 15-year-old high school kids and I gave them index cards, and I said, “Write down seven things that will happen in the future.”

They said there would be revolutions and presidents would be assassinated, and we would all drown in ecological sludge. A very dramatic series of events. But I noticed that of the 198 items that they handed in, only six used the word “I.”

So I gave them another set of cards, and I said, “Now I want you to write down seven things that are going to happen to you.”

Back came, “I will be married when I’m 21,” “I will live in the same neighborhood, I will have a dog.”

And the disjuncture between the world that they were seeing out there and their own presuppositions was amazing We thought about this, and concluded on the basis of just guesswork that the image of reality that they’re getting from the media is one of high-speed rapid change, and the image that they’re getting in their classrooms is one of no change at all. “

It’s originally from a Wired interview with Toffler, but I found the quote in an essay called: Human Redundancy by Coleen Gittin.

Tom Matrullo says to examine blogging specifically is to miss the point:

“21st century: demand for indigenous individuated authority and power threatens to usurp systems of producing authority and representation in both political and media arenas extending and disturbing borders of nations, media, and individuality.”

What technologies are historical aftershocks, and which are the epicentres? Is that a false distinction?

William Gibson, in interview:

“Social change today, I think you can seriously argue, is primarily technologically driven, one way or another, whether directly or indirectly. And the emergence of new technologies is not legislated – it just happens, it’s market driven. History has become market driven. And that’s a strange and very interesting place to be at the turn of the century.”