In fact, it is not that wrong to read the potentialities of McLuhan’s mosaic through the heuristic process of hypertext, especially since the newest theories on digital hypertext have convincingly discussed it as a form wihich enables and even fosters a convergence between technology and contemporary critical theory..
… we must abandon conceptual systems founded on ideas of centre, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replace them by ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks… Almost all parties to this paradigm shift, which marks a revolution in human thought, see electronic writing as a direct response to the strengths and weaknesses of the printed book, on of the major landmarks in the history of human thought.
Globe & Mail: McLuhan at 100
McLuhan and fellow U of T scholar Harold Innis were at one time alone among students of human society in making the history of mass media central to the history of civilization. Today it’s a given.
.. He saw three great changes in human history related to communications technology, each one having an exponentially greater effect on humanity, each one externalizing, or “outing,” one or more of the senses.
.. My suggestion for students is to begin with the articles written by McLuhan – ‘Acoustic Space’ and ‘The Effect of the Printed Book on the language of the 16th century’ and a couple others that appear in the anthology entitled Explorations in Communication. These articles are lucid, comprehensible introductions to McLuhan’s thought.”
McLuhan Was Right: U of Virginia Case for Educating Differently
A study conducted by Dr. Jane Healy concluded that we are rearing a generation of “different brains.” She saw subtle but significant changes in the way children learned. Such changes put children in direct conflict with traditional methods of teaching.
.. Frank Lanham suggested that hypertext returns learning to rhetoric, that is, as a conversation between computer and student. Teachers are familiar with the use of rhetorical devices to interact with students, but computers would allow far more interactive learning.
A Hypertext Field Guide to McLuhan Understanding Media
The annotations in the left column are provisional glosses of my own. Highlighting can be very distracting to readers, especially when it is someone else’s, so I have tried to use it sparingly. Highlightings are a lot like scent-markings, a staking out of territory: lime denotes an interesting passage, yellow a central theme. This field guide began life as a self-help project. While it is entirely possible others may find it useful, I have tried to observe a strict discipline in interpreting McLuhan’s book: to write exclusively for myself; for I noticed that as soon as I began to think of these notes as product (rather than process), the adventure of free association failed and I lost touch with the material.
.. McLuhan did not index his books; he was a firm believer in the part played by intervalin human understanding and he may have felt that a specialist approach to his ideas would isolate and strip them of their rich elliptical associations.