VOL 4, NO 10

★

Harry times. / Every few years since the internet came along Marshall McLuhan has moment and guys like me name little parts of our website after things he said because we are all so very clever. Harold Innis, the other great Canadian thinker on communications, has almost no moments at all, but probably should.

❝What Innis doesn’t offer is much hope that we’ll be able to change course. His writing on communication is melancholic in tone and pessimistic in thrust. He saw present-mindedness as a comfortable trap. By foreclosing the long view, it blinds us to what we’ve lost. It breeds an arrogant belief in the present’s superiority to the benighted past. Fashionable orthodoxies take hold of the public mind, as thought begins to run in the ‘grooves’ carved out by the dominant media channels. Though Innis devoted his career to exploring the culture of the West, he also sensed its demise. ‘Concern with the position of Western civilization in the year 2000 is unthinkable,’ he wrote in 1951. ‘Each civilization has its own methods of suicide.‘❞

Oh. Bummer.

Related: Some good Innis bias of communication examples:

Space bias: The memes will continue

Time bias: Graffiti limbo. ❝The graffiti in the library carrels ‘reveals conversations playing out in slow motion between otherwise isolated crammers. It voices the anxieties and aspirations of contemporary college students striving to leave their mark on a large and sometimes impersonal institution.‘❞

☆

Suicide / Andy Warhol / 1964

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Confusions. / ⚱️ Val Kilmer, Richard Chamberlain and George Foreman died. More: ❝Ali, the alleged punch-taker, was actually up on every card by multiple points after seven rounds; one judge didn’t give Foreman a single round that night. The real story is that the fight lasted into the 8th only because Foreman withstood several fistic barrages from Ali that would have floored anybody without his tungsten chin.❞ / 👾 The complete Infocom archive. / WikiAsteroids, Asteroids powered by real-time Wikipedia edits. / ♟️ Real-time chess. / 🪟 The 50 best things Microsoft has made. (I fucking hate hate hate that fucking keyboard.) / 🔗 Linkding, self-hosted bookmarks (or: How is it possible I still miss and long for Ma.gnolia after all these years?). / 📝 Bored of it. / Poetical, poetry only readable through your calendar. / 🤘 Trailer for Pavements, the Pavement movie. / Musical DNA. / 📺 They started on soap operas. / ✌️

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