McLuhan Fer Ya

A guest I interviewed today for Spark reminded me of a great McLuhan quotation: "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future."

We're always looking at technological change in its immediate technical impacts, but with very little sense of all the social organization that surrounds it. The way the social changes with new technology always seems to catch us by surprise. Reminds me of another great bit of McLuhanism: "As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse."

What would it mean to look at our technologies, those 'extensions of our own bodies' as imbued with culture, and embedded within culture?

Life in the Perpetual Future

I saw this cool post at New Scientist, suggesting that we no longer have a clear sense of when "The Future" is, in the way that we once would have said 'the year 2000' or 'the 21st century'.

I wonder whether it's actually that we now live in a time of perpetual almostfuture. In the way that we have ennui about technological innovation, and lack surprise, hope and delight about the future. We seem perpetually not in the present, always in the almost tomorrow.