I’m all about words. And so is the web. If Marshall McLuhan was still around, he’d say this is no coincidence.A while back, I wrote an article about the role of McLuhan’s literacy legacy in his media theory. I argued that his identity as an English professor was not merely a pitstop on the way to media gurudom but the core of his intellectual operating system.From his forecast of the collective unconscious and his understanding of media as extensions of our sensory apparatus to the problem of narcosis and the emergence of a neo-tribalism, he saw the shape of things to come through his academic rear view mirror. For McLuhan, our play with words - arguably the cornerstone of human cognition - offered the most clues about how we organised the world in our own image. These insights are especially prescient in our current technological moment, which is all about the word.
Archive for the 'Literacy' Category
Why the word still rules
PEW Study: Tagging on the rise
Depending on where you stand in relation to the technology adoption lifecycle, tagging is either old news or a recent discovery. Regardless of where you’re at, a new PEW report on tagging has confirmed that tagging is on the rise among mainstream internet users. Here’s a great overview of the trend, with explanations, from the BBC:
New to tagging? Read on for some what, why and how-to resources.
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