A second thought

A lot has changed since Cynthia Selfe wrote this book. It hardly needs to be mentioned that the world we live in is storming all around us. But eleven years ago, things looked rosy –– especially for technology. The dot com. bubble was growing fast in 1999, and that’s something I just plain forgot about in my earlier assessment of Selfe’s call to “acknowledge the economic and political goals that policymakers have identified as the end product of technology expansion: the effort to maintain and extend American privilege, influence, and power…” (161). I was blinded by my anger over recent developments in America, but now I suppose Selfe had a right to feel that she and America were riding high on a prosperous tide pulled along by technology. However, even though this is not the same America, or world, that Selfe was immersed in back when she wrote this book, I still think her advice is sound. Understanding that our environment acts on us in consequence to the way we act on it, and that the whole thing is reciprocal, still calls for paying attention. Now more than ever.

Democracy?

I guess what bothered me most about "Technology and Literacy in the Twenty–First Century" is the equation I kept seeing between democracy and corporate capitalism. Just recently, the last nail in the coffin of democracy in the United States was driven home when corporations were given the same rights as individuals –– the right to “freedom of speech.” Anyone who’s been “paying attention” knows that this means unbridled ownership of the airwaves, and that now, corporations will be able to pump as much money as they please from their “war chests” into advertisements to see that their candidates are elected. Do we really want to extend this type of “privilege, influence, and power” into cyberspace? I question who owns the internet now. Everywhere I go, no matter how little I surf, I run into someone trying to sell me something. The corporate world is entrenched in cyberspace, and it appears, if I can trust their track–record, they will be clamping down on it with an iron fist in the future. After all, now that they’ve got the networks of the American empire completely in their pockets, what’s left?

Just Wondering

The intro to “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man” poses a lot of questions. One has to do with “the dilemma of Western Man,” who, having acquired from “the technology of literacy” the “power to act without reacting,” now finds this ability a hindrance in “the electric age.” Noninvolvement just won’t do anymore according to Marshall McLuhan, because “when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action” (20). Is McLuhan suggesting that karmic law didn’t exist prior to the “electric age,” or that as we “implode” into this new universe karmic law will increase “in depth?” And what does that mean? Will it become faster because it follows us along at our own ever-increasing pace?