Jan. 29 Post by Marc

Whew! That was a lot of contemplation. The one thing I noticed that was similar in all articles was a unifying theme of the way humans work collectively through our intellectual processes and our technologies. Williams said that television unifies us as a culture and goes into a historical breakdown of its impact and criticisms of TV including passivity, diminished human contact social conflict, commentary, expectations and profit-driven forces. 

McCluhen says that media is collective and provides us the power to engage or disengage as much as possible, claiming that what we invest is the extent to which we are affected. He goes on to illustrate how bewildering it would be to be without such a constant barrage of media as it would be to discover it for the first time. Towards the end, his criticisms lean on negative human traits of bias and even the loss of freedoms. I have to highly agree with his last point - make no mistake, we are definitely influenced - there is no "third person."

Bush addresses the unifying and good that has helped us as a collective and the destructive and bad that has separated us in the technology of the sciences. The most interesting part of his paper is the warning at the end. The idea of being "plugged into" learning electronically opens up too many ethical dilemmas and leaves us with a stern warning to not advance to the point of killing each other off before learning how to live in peace.

Englebart adds on to Bush's work and tackles a unified process of thinking in humankind in an attempt to augment the thinking person's sum of knowledge. Some of the attempts at looking at learning symbolically are compelling and highlight the seen, unseen and yet-to-be-seen powers in computer technology, lest we get too lazy. This article reminded me of a great NPR story that reported that computers can be used to make incredible symphonies that used to take years to compose in a matter of minutes. That is incredible...and likely to piss off a lot of musicians and composers.