{"id":2246,"date":"2003-03-02T03:31:43","date_gmt":"2003-03-02T10:31:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2003\/03\/mcluhan-rolls-in-his-grave\/"},"modified":"2003-03-02T03:31:43","modified_gmt":"2003-03-02T10:31:43","slug":"mcluhan-rolls-in-his-grave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2003\/03\/02\/mcluhan-rolls-in-his-grave\/","title":{"rendered":"McLuhan rolls in his grave"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tMarshall McLuhan’s chief acolyte Mark Federman takes me to task<\/a> for believing this is the best of all possible worlds, our political system (“representational democracy”, whatever that is) can’t be improved, and that technology only advances by intended consequences. I don’t get the whole “Global Village” thing, in other words.<\/p>\n

I really do hope that the people who build these strawmen out of my observations enjoy ripping them apart as much as I enjoy laughing at them, because the prospect of professors of English and Mass Media explaining technical progress in networking to someone who’s been making it happen for 25 years is pretty hilarious, you have to admit.<\/p>\n

I certainly don’t deny that tools, policies, and initiatives have unintended consequences; I’ve spent way too much time combating these in the legislature not to know that. But I also know that these things also have some clearly intended consequences, and that nobody embarks on a tool-building exercise without some idea of where he’s going and why he wants to go there. I don’t just start up Visual C and turn the keyboard over to an infinite number of monkeys, and neither does any other technology dude. And while we don’t have omniscience about all the long-term effects of our work, we do have crisp specification in hand before we start laying code, for the most part. That’s how progress works: you get an idea, flesh it out, and then lay some code and see how it works. Brownian motion just isn’t a good methodology.<\/p>\n

I liked McLuhan when I read his books (you know, those old-fashioned paper things with black marks on them) 30 years ago; they were provocative and challenging, but now that they’ve been fossilized into a religion, I doubt McLuhan himself would have much use for the causes to which they’ve been yoked. Best to strive for you own vision than to spend your life erecting monuments to dead guys.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marshall McLuhan’s chief acolyte Mark Federman takes me to task for believing this is the best of all possible worlds, our political system (“representational democracy”, whatever that is) can’t be improved, and that technology only advances by intended consequences. I don’t get the whole “Global Village” thing, in other words. I really do hope that … Continue reading “McLuhan rolls in his grave”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-Ae","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}