McLuhan reacts to Digital Nation

The public conversation is still going strong over there on the right - and I will attempt to dig deeper in and keep up with you all. Over time, the interface and connectivity between the Roundtable discussion and the public dialogue will improve.

Meanwhile, as a way of bringing this first Digital Nation monthly Roundtable to a close, I thought I'd share some of what media theorist Marshall McLuhan may have had to add to our discussion. These quotes are from an interview he did with Playboy magazine in 1969, twenty years before we even had an Internet.

"In the past, the effects of media were experienced more gradually, allowing the individual and society to absorb and cushion their impact to some degree. Today, in the electronic age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves."

and then, on the seemingly opposite side of the discussion:

"Because education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression, imposing upon retribalized youth the obsolescent visual values of the dying literate age. Our entire educational system is reactionary, oriented to past values and past technologies, and will likely continue so until the old generation relinquishes power."

So maybe the disagreement in this forum means both sides are right?