Meaning of Robots is a doc about one man’s dream of making a stop-action robot porno. Creepy yet impressive.
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I’m really bad at remembering faces but really good at reading them in the moment, which can be both advantageous and disconcerting. I don’t know that I’m happier for realizing that people are sometimes saying one thing while feeling another. I’m surprised when other people don’t seem to recognize the subtext contained in expressions and body language. Or perhaps they do and they’re just ignoring it. At any rate, it’s like having two very different conversations at the same time with a person, which is odd. From “The Naked Face,” Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent 2002 New Yorker article on the topic:
“All of us, a thousand times a day, read faces. When someone says ‘I love you,’ we look into that person’s eyes to judge his or her sincerity. When we meet someone new, we often pick up on subtle signals, so that, even though he or she may have talked in a normal and friendly manner, afterward we say, ‘I don’t think he liked me,’ or ‘I don’t think she’s very happy.’ We easily parse complex distinctions in facial expression. If you saw me grinning, for example, with my eyes twinkling, you’d say I was amused. But that’s not the only way we interpret a smile. If you saw me nod and smile exaggeratedly, with the corners of my lips tightened, you would take it that I had been teased and was responding sarcastically. If I made eye contact with someone, gave a small smile and then looked down and averted my gaze, you would think I was flirting. If I followed a remark with an abrupt smile and then nodded, or tilted my head sideways, you might conclude that I had just said something a little harsh, and wanted to take the edge off it. You wouldn’t need to hear anything I was saying in order to reach these conclusions. The face is such an extraordinarily efficient instrument of communication that there must be rules that govern the way we interpret facial expressions. But what are those rules? And are they the same for everyone?
In the nineteen-sixties, a young San Francisco psychologist named Paul Ekman began to study facial expression, and he discovered that no one knew the answers to those questions. Ekman went to see Margaret Mead, climbing the stairs to her tower office at the American Museum of Natural History. He had an idea. What if he travelled around the world to find out whether people from different cultures agreed on the meaning of different facial expressions? Mead, he recalls, ‘looked at me as if I were crazy.’ Like most social scientists of her day, she believed that expression was culturally determined– that we simply used our faces according to a set of learned social conventions. Charles Darwin had discussed the face in his later writings; in his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he argued that all mammals show emotion reliably in their faces. But in the nineteen-sixties academic psychologists were more interested in motivation and cognition than in emotion or its expression. Ekman was undaunted; he began travelling to places like Japan, Brazil, and Argentina, carrying photographs of men and women making a variety of distinctive faces. Everywhere he went, people agreed on what those expressions meant. But what if people in the developed world had all picked up the same cultural rules from watching the same movies and television shows? So Ekman set out again, this time making his way through the jungles of Papua New Guinea, to the most remote villages, and he found that the tribesmen there had no problem interpreting the expressions, either. This may not sound like much of a breakthrough. But in the scientific climate of the time it was a revelation. Ekman had established that expressions were the universal products of evolution. There were fundamental lessons to be learned from the face, if you knew where to look.” (Thanks TETW.)
Tags: Malcolm Gladwell
In a report about utter bullshit, Mike Wallace interviews Major Donald Keyhoe about an alleged UFO cover-up, in 1958.
Tags: Donald Keyhoe, Mike Wallace
From CNN, a report about an outdoor billboard in London that can filter ads based on gender:
“A billboard that went up on Wednesday in London uses facial-recognition technology to know – 90% of the time – whether you’re a man or woman. And it gives you a different advertisement depending on your gender.
Women who walk up to the billboard, which is located at a London bus stop and will be viewable for two weeks, are greeted with a 40-second film explaining the plight of women and girls in poor countries around the world, who often are denied eduction and opportunities that are afforded to men.
Men, however, get a cut-down version of the content. They can’t see the film, but they do get to see shocking statistics about the situation, like the fact that 75 million girls are denied education.”
Thanks to the Browser for pointing me in the direction of Evgeny Morozov’s long New Republic consideration of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio. The article, largely critical of Isaacson’s work, also devotes space to how much Jobs was influenced by Bauhaus and Braun designs. An excerpt:
“I DO NOT MEAN to be pedantic. The question of essence and form, of purity and design, may seem abstract and obscure, but it lies at the heart of the Apple ethos. Apple’s metaphysics, as it might be called, did not originate in religion, but rather in architecture and design. It’s these two disciplines that supplied Jobs with his intellectual ambition. John Sculley, Apple’s former CEO, who ousted Jobs from his own company in the mid-1980s, maintained that ‘everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing.’ You cannot grasp how Apple thinks about the world—and about its own role in the world—without engaging with its design philosophy.
Isaacson gets closer to the heart of the matter when he discusses Jobs’s interest in the Bauhaus, as well as his and Ive’s obsession with Braun, but he does not push this line of inquiry far enough. Nor does he ask an obvious philosophical question: since essences do not drop from the sky, where do they come from? How can a non-existent product—say, the iPad—have an essence that can be discovered and then implemented in form? Is the iPad’s essence something that was dreamed up by Jobs and Ive, or does it exist independently of them in some kind of empyrean that they—by training or by visionary intuition—uniquely inhabit?
The idea that the form of a product should correspond to its essence does not simply mean that products should be designed with their intended use in mind. That a knife needs to be sharp so as to cut things is a non-controversial point accepted by most designers. The notion of essence as invoked by Jobs and Ive is more interesting and significant—more intellectually ambitious—because it is linked to the ideal of purity. No matter how trivial the object, there is nothing trivial about the pursuit of perfection. On closer analysis, the testimonies of both Jobs and Ive suggest that they did see essences existing independently of the designer—a position that is hard for a modern secular mind to accept, because it is, if not religious, then, as I say, startlingly Platonic.
This is where Apple’s intellectual patrimony—which spans the Bauhaus, its postwar successor in the Ulm School of Design, and Braun (Ulm’s closest collaborator in the corporate world)—comes into play. Those modernist institutions proclaimed and practiced an aesthetic of minimalism, and tried to strip their products of superfluous content and ornament (though not without internal disagreements over how to define the superfluous). All of them sought to marry technology to the arts. Jobs’s rhetorical attempt to present Apple as a company that bridges the worlds of technology and liberal arts was a Californian reiteration of the Bauhaus’s call to unite technology and the arts. As Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, declared, ‘Art and technology—a new unity.'”
Tags: Evgeny Morozov, Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson
The erasure of memories through pharmaceuticals is upon us and has been reported with some concern. Will expunging traumatic memory alter a person fundamentally or did the trauma already do the trick? Thorny questions about the nature of identity abound. An excerpt from “The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever,” Jonah Lehrer’s new report on the topic for Wired:
“This new model of memory isn’t just a theory—neuroscientists actually have a molecular explanation of how and why memories change. In fact, their definition of memory has broadened to encompass not only the cliché cinematic scenes from childhood but also the persisting mental loops of illnesses like PTSD and addiction—and even pain disorders like neuropathy. Unlike most brain research, the field of memory has actually developed simpler explanations. Whenever the brain wants to retain something, it relies on just a handful of chemicals. Even more startling, an equally small family of compounds could turn out to be a universal eraser of history, a pill that we could take whenever we wanted to forget anything.
And researchers have found one of these compounds.
In the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice.”
Tags: Jonah Lehrer
Nick Bilton has a post at the New York Times “Bits” blog, about Google’s new Terminator-style specs. They will have to suffice until Google eventually implants a chip in your brain. It really does seem like a smartphone is enough, but Larry and Sergey disagree. An excerpt:
“People who constantly reach into a pocket to check a smartphone for bits of information will soon have another option: a pair of Google-made glasses that will be able to stream information to the wearer’s eyeballs in real time.
According to several Google employees familiar with the project who asked not to be named, the glasses will go on sale to the public by the end of the year. These people said they are expected ‘to cost around the price of current smartphones,’ or $250 to $600.
The people familiar with the Google glasses said they would be Android-based, and will include a small screen that will sit a few inches from someone’s eye. They will also have a 3G or 4G data connection and a number of sensors including motion and GPS.”
Tags: Nick Bilton
Whitey has already been on the moon, and now hackers want in. A note from Adam Clark Estes on Atlantic Wire about the increasingly outré plans of attention-seeking hackers, who are Anonymous but don’t wish to be anonymous:
“‘At the Chaos Communication Camp 2011 Jens Ohlig, Lars Weiler, and Nick Farr proposed a daunting task: to land a hacker on the Moon by 2034,’ Tom Hardy writes on The Powerbase. ‘The plan calls for three separate phases: 1. Establishing an open, free, and globally accessible satellite communication network, 2. Put a human into orbit, 3. Land on the Moon.’
Hackers on the moon? Promoting these crazy-sounding plans may be a way for older school hackers to steal back the spotlight from LulzSec and its sometimes meaningless website takedowns in 2011. Even their fellow hackers made fun of the group at the time of the assaults. ‘They were rampaging, and clearly not willing to stop,’ one hacker who calls himself Asherah told The New York Times last summer. ‘Despite the rumors, they’re not very accomplished hackers. They’re attention-drunk.'”
Tags: Adam Clark Estes
Timed to the publication of his new book, Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson is interviewed by Kevin Kelly in Wired. The opening:
“Wired: Because your father, Freeman Dyson, worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, you grew up around folks who were building one of the first computers. Was that cool?
George Dyson: The institute was a pretty boring place, full of theoreticians writing papers. But in a building far away from everyone else, some engineers were building a computer, one of the first to have a fully electronic random-access memory. For a kid in the 1950s, it was the most exciting thing around. I mean, they called it the MANIAC! The computer building was off-limits to children, but Julian Bigelow, the chief engineer, stored a lot of surplus electronic equipment in a barn, and I grew up playing there and taking things apart.
Wired: Did that experience influence how you thought about computers later?
Dyson: Yes. I tried to get as far away from them as possible.
Wired: Why?
Dyson: Computers were going to take over the world. So I left high school in the 1960s to live on the islands of British Columbia. I worked on boats and built a house 95 feet up in a Douglas fir tree. I wasn’t antitechnology; I loved chain saws and tools and diesel engines. But I wanted to keep my distance from computers.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: George Dyson, Kevin Kelly
Fifty years ago, the great John Glenn orbited the moon and America was on its way in the Space Race. Behind the scenes, things were murkier, as erstwhile Nazi Wernher von Braun was leading the program. The scientist collaborated with Walt Disney on the 1955 short film, “Man in Space.”
See also:
- Norman Mailer profiles Von Braun. (1969)
Tags: John Glenn, Walt Disney, Wernher von Braun
Paul Krugman is the subject of a new Playboy Interview conducted by Jonathan Tasini. Because a monthly magazine covering current events is completely crazy at this point, the two mostly stick to more general policy questions, and there’s some good stuff there. (If you click the link at work, be advised that there are bare boobs and butts all over the page, though none belong to Krugman.) An excerpt:
“KRUGMAN: The point is there’s a tremendous amount of suffering. A lot of America is much worse off than it was four years ago. I think the main reason you should be angry about it is that it’s gratuitous. This doesn’t have to be happening. We actually have the tools to make most of this go away. If we could throw aside the political prejudices and bad ideas that are crippling us, in 18 months we could be back to something that feels like a much better economy.
PLAYBOY: So people in America today are suffering when they don’t have to be because of policy makers who won’t do the right thing?
KRUGMAN: That’s right. I’ve gotten some grief for my remark that if it were announced that we faced a threat from space aliens and needed to build up to defend ourselves, we’d have full employment in a year and a half. But that’s true. Why couldn’t we do that to repair our sewer systems and put an extra tunnel under the Hudson instead of to fight imaginary space aliens? Everybody in the world except us is doing a lot of investment in infrastructure and education. This is the country of the Erie Canal and the Interstate Highway System. The Erie Canal was a huge public infrastructure project financed with no private or public-private partnership. Can you imagine doing that in 21st century America? We really have slid backward for the past 200 years from the kinds of things we used to understand needed to be done now and then. And all of that because we are shackled to the wrong ideas.”
Tags: Jonathan Tasini, Paul Krugman
"Copper wires might be ok, but they’ll never deliver a gig." (Image by Thomas Lehmann.)
As Craig Settles points out on a telling piece at Gigaom, today’s telecommunication companies are trying to use legislation to ensure their slow, outdated broadband networks are given preference over faster fiber networks. And that happens to the detriment of us all, especially to people living outside of cities. An excerpt:
“Around 1940, the railroads were in their heyday. They had made America great, railroads still basked in the glow of their role helping to conquer the West, they had nationwide infrastructure, ushered in innovations, and railroad barons carried clout in D.C. and beyond.
Post-World War II, airplanes were evolving into serious transportation vehicles that moved lots of people, mail and packages much faster than trains did. While railroads tried to make trains faster, more comfortable, etc., airlines made greater technological advances AND market advances. No matter what improvements railroads could make, those trains would never fly. Planes, however, got bigger, faster, and more popular.
Today’s telcos are the railroads. They’ve spent money to build infrastructure to a lot of places. But local governments, co-ops and nonprofits are building supersonic jetliners. Chattanooga, Tenn.; Santa Monica, Calif.; Wilson, N.C.; Lafayette, La. and dozens of cities and counties have fiber networks that kick telcos’ assets.
Copper wires might be ok, but they’ll never deliver a gig. That’s what cities and counties are delivering. Nor will the big corporations go to the places that need broadband the most. AT&T basically just told rural America ‘you’re on your own.’ Verizon FiOS? If you don’t have it by now, you probably aren’t getting it.
So incumbents have flocked to the last refuge of a corporate scoundrel, the legislatures where their money can buy what they can’t do easily in a truly competitive market – bills that kill municipal broadband. In Georgia, they have an anti-muni bill in the state senate (SB 313) that defines broadband as 200 kbps!”
Tags: Craig Settles
Finally got around to reading “The Delivery Guy Who Saw Jeremy Lin Coming,” Jason Gay’s fun WSJ piece about an amateur numbers-cruncher who predicted the unlikely rise of the NBA’s newest superstar. An excerpt:
“In May 2010, an unsung numbers hobbyist named Ed Weiland wrote a long-term forecast of Jeremy Lin for the basketball website Hoops Analyst. At the time, Lin was a lightly regarded, semi-known point guard who had completed his final season at Harvard. But Weiland saw NBA material. He emphasized how well Lin played in three nonconference games against big schools: Connecticut, Boston College and Georgetown. He noted how Lin’s performance in two unsexy statistical categories—two-point field-goal percentage (a barometer of inside scoring ability) and RSB40 (rebounds, steals and blocks per 40 minutes) compared favorably with college numbers put up by marquee NBA guards like Allen Iverson and Gary Payton. Weiland concluded that Lin had to improve on his passing and leadership at the point, but argued that if he did, ‘Jeremy Lin is a good enough player to start in the NBA and possibly star.’”
Read also:
Tags: Ed Weiland, Jason Gay, Jeremy Lin
The Harvard Monolithic Bee is a tiny winged insect created with a pop-up manufacturing process.
In the wake of the recent budget-limit travesty, Bill Clinton opined that if President Obama was in a position to be stubborn and let the government close down, perhaps that would have been the GOP’s waterloo moment. Maybe instead the 2012 Presidential election will be the ultimate cratering of the Republicans, the final bottoming out before it can return to sanity and stop treating politics like a zero-sum game. If its Presidential campaign is a culture war and contraception is a centerpiece, the GOP will suffer a devastating loss. Maybe it can rise from that wreckage and become a party worthy of governance again.
The term birth control was coined by New York nurse Margaret Sanger, who is pictured above in a classic photo exiting a Brooklyn courthouse on January 8, 1917. She was on trial for opening a birth-control clinic the previous year, and she was guilty as charged. In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which eventually became Planned Parenthood. Sanger wasn’t completely enlightened herself, embodying some of the biased views of her time regarding race and eugenics. But she did shine a light on the important area of women’s health. From a 1957 interview which Mike Wallace conducted with Sanger:
“WALLACE: Well let’s look at the official Catholic position…opposition to Birth-Control. I read now from a church publication called ‘The Question Box’ in forbidding Birth Control it says the following: It says the immediate purpose and primary end of marriage is the begetting of children, when the marital relation is so used as to render the fulfillment of its purposes impossible–that is by Birth Control–it is used unethically and unnaturally. Now what’s wrong with that position?
SANGER: Well, it’s very wrong, it’s not normal it’s — it has the wrong attitude towards marriage, toward love, toward the relationships between men and women.
WALLACE: Well the natural law they say is that first of all the primary function of sex in marriage is to beget children. Do you disagree with that?
SANGER: I disagree with that a hundred percent.
WALLACE: Your feeling is what then?
SANGER: My feeling is that love and attraction between men and women, in many cases the very finest relationship has nothing to do with bearing a child. It’s secondary. Many, many times and we know that –you see your birth rates and you can talk to people who have very happy marriages and they’re not having babies every year.”
Tags: Margaret Sanger, Mike Wallace
Sony founder Akio Morita dreamed of lifting Japan from the ashes of WWII by selling the best consumer electronics in the world, and he made it happen. By 1985, when he filmed this American Express commercial, he was legend all over the world.
Tags: Akio Morita
New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, who’s done some brilliant work recently co-authoring articles about the Foxconn factories in China, has just filed “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” an excellent piece in the Magazine about a big-box store collecting (and using) every little detail of your life. An excerpt:
“The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. ‘If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID’ [Andrew] Pole said. ‘We want to know everything we can.’
Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics department come in.”
Tags: Andrew Pole, Charles Duhigg
A consequence of our information-rich world is that we forget a lot more than we used to, though that doesn’t mean our memories have grown worse. We likely also remember as much as ever–it’s just that the information we possess at any given time shifts more now. The Internet is a “brain” outside of our brain, and some people worry about that the way Socrates was concerned that the written word was an affront to oral tradition. He was right to think that writing would alter who we are, but that’s probably just a natural part of the evolution of the species. From Evan Selinger’s new Slate article about technology-enhanced memory:
“Ubiquitous information and communication technology is a major player in the memory enhancement game. I’m not alluding to products that target impairments, like the iPhone app for combating dementia. Rather, I mean commonplace software that people use to make recall less taxing, more extensive, or easier to visualize.
For instance, Wikipedia’s anti-SOPA protest made 162 million users, accustomed to turning to the site for those idle questions that crop up every day, feel absent-minded. Nobody messed with my hippocampus or your prefrontal cortex. Rather, Wikipedia’s actions were jarring because Internet use affects transactive memory, which is ‘the capacity to remember who knows what.’ If we know information is available online, we’re inclined to remember where it can be found, rather than struggle to retain the facts. This evolutionary tendency to off-load taxing aspects of cognition into the environment—natural or built—extends beyond using devices to recall information we’re already familiar with.
This is called ‘extended cognition,’ and it plays a crucial role in a controversial view called the ‘extended mind’ thesis. Advocates argue that data-management technologies, from low-tech pads to high-tech computers, don’t always function as mere memory-prompting tools. Sometimes, they deserve to be understood as parts of our mind. “
••••••••••
“What would it mean to have no place in time?”:
Tags: Evan Selinger
Pan Am began the “First Moon Flight’s Club” in 1968, a waiting list for civilian space travel before we even landed a man on the moon. It wasn’t just a gimmick–it was something that the airline’s founder Juan Trippe believed would happen in the near future. From Cosmos:
“IT WAS CHRISTMAS EVE 1968. Three men — Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders — were coasting 100 km above the Moon, the first astronauts to ever circle it. From inside their tiny Apollo 8 command capsule, they pointed a TV camera toward Earth, showing millions of viewers back home what no one had ever seen before. They snapped a famous picture — Earthrise — of our blue world ascending above the lunar horizon. And then they read aloud the story of creation according to the Book of Genesis.
Back home, a record TV audience was watching. When transmission ended 17 minutes later, an announcer broke the reverie to breathlessly report that Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American — one of the world’s largest airlines at the time — had announced that Pan Am would start taking reservations for commercial passenger flights to the Moon.
The next day, The New York Times reported that Pan Am had been deluged with inquiries and had established a First Moon Flights Club — effectively, a glorified waiting list for space tourists. Within days, Trans-World Airlines followed suit.”
••••••••••
“In the beginning…”:
“I’m so tired and I wish I was the moon tonight”:
Tags: Juan Trippe
Dialogue about solar energy from You Can’t Take It With You, 1938.
From “What Neil & Buzz Left on the Moon,” on NASA’s official site:
“The most famous thing Neil Armstrong left on the moon 35 years ago is a footprint, a boot-shaped depression in the gray moondust. Millions of people have seen pictures of it, and one day, years from now, lunar tourists will flock to the Sea of Tranquility to see it in person. Peering over the rails ⌠“hey, mom, is that the first one?”
Will anyone notice, 100 feet away, something else Armstrong left behind?
Ringed by footprints, sitting in the moondust, lies a 2-foot wide panel studded with 100 mirrors pointing at Earth: the ‘lunar laser ranging retroreflector array.’ Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong put it there on July 21, 1969, about an hour before the end of their final moonwalk. Thirty-five years later, it’s the only Apollo science experiment still running.
University of Maryland physics professor Carroll Alley was the project’s principal investigator during the Apollo years, and he follows its progress today. ‘Using these mirrors,’ explains Alley, ‘we can ‘ping’ the moon with laser pulses and measure the Earth-moon distance very precisely. This is a wonderful way to learn about the moon’s orbit and to test theories of gravity.’
Here’s how it works: A laser pulse shoots out of a telescope on Earth, crosses the Earth-moon divide, and hits the array. Because the mirrors are ‘corner-cube reflectors,’ they send the pulse straight back where it came from. ‘It’s like hitting a ball into the corner of a squash court,’ explains Alley. Back on Earth, telescopes intercept the returning pulse–‘usually just a single photon,’ he marvels.”
Tags: Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong
"While the two heads were fairly well formed one of them had only one eye." (Image by law_keven@Wikipedia.)
From the January 17, 1897 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“There was a two headed cat at Bellevue hospital, New York, yesterday afternoon. It was dead and in a bottle of alcohol. H.M. Vanderbilt of 249 Jefferson Avenue, this city, took the curiosity to the hospital to show the physicians. The cat was born in his cellar, he said, and lived only a few minutes. While the two heads were fairly well formed one of them had only one eye. The physicians at Bellevue were anxious to have the curiosity left at the hospital, but after exhibiting it, Mr. Vanderbilt brought it back to this city.”
Tags: H.M. Vanderbilt
Sparsh, the brainchild of Pranav Mistry at MIT Labs, allows you to transfer data through touch. No cutting, no pasting, no mouse, no keystrokes, no nothing.
Tags: Pranav Mistry
If I was asked to name a single recent book that best crystallizes the media-drenched world we live in today, the clever things we’ve done to ourselves and each other, the way the sun never sets nor rises anymore in our endless stream of flickering images, the way we’re smarter and dumber, closer together and further apart, I would choose Douglas Coupland’s Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! That may seem like an odd thing to say about a book written about someone who died in 1980, but Coupland’s brilliant first chapter analyzes the contemporary media landscape with rare insight and then proceeds to march forward from McLuhan’s birth as the philosopher grows to understand the signs and symbols and links of a brave new world that was in its infancy (and still is). Coupland is mostly known for his fiction, and that’s a proper match for McLuhan, whose ideas were fantastic–they couldn’t be true, yet, more often then not, they were.
The 1962 McLuhan quote that Coupland uses at the book’s outset:
“The next medium, whatever it is–it may be the extension of consciousness–will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”
••••••••••
“You know nothing of my work”:
Tags: Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan
A prosthetic arm made of Legos.