While it’s common to see news articles, TV shows, pundits, editorials, blogs, tweets and books discussing what limits we should or should not put on technology, Edward Snowden is one our few public figures who saw what was going on internally at the NSA and decided that our technological progress needed limits. Contrary to those […]
The E-Book and the Surveillance Society
November 18, 2013 By
When I embarked on a reading of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, in the spring of 2013, a commercial e-book version was not yet available. I located a bootleg PDF copy online somewhere. It was an interesting artifact, not well formatted but possibly useful for copying passages to paste into another document. I could have read the […]
McLuhan on Snowden…in 1972
July 17, 2013 By
An interview of Marshall McLuhan in 1972 recently surfaced and is published in full by Maclean’s. Many of McLuhan’s insights are more relevant than ever, particularly his comments on surveillance and espionage with electric media. The new human occupation of the electronic age has become surveillance. CIA-style espionage is now the total human activity. Whether […]
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