Mediacology

Update:

This is where William Burroughs comes in with his Naked Lunch. When we
invent new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since
these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment
shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To
survive one must study the habits of cannibals”

- McLuhan, “The Hot and Cool
Interview,” 67.

Wired’s latest issue focuses on the current cultural trend to snack on bite-sized media. McLuhan noted long ago that the new media environment would make us return to a hunter gatherer’s mentality. Are we now grazing media as if we were gathering digital blackberries in an electronic forest?

Wired 15.03: Minifesto for a New Age:

Replace Nabisco with Apple, the Mini Oreo with the iPod nano, and youve got a blueprint for the current boom in what might be called snack-o-tainment. Apples single-minded marketing campaign for the iPod (its tunes - not albums - in your pocket, after all) taught us the joy of picking the choicest cuts and shuffling them into individual hit pdes. The same with television: When the video iPod launched in October 2005, we were suddenly eager to pay $1.99 to watch a music video or a recent episode of Lost in a smaller, portable version of what was already available for free on that big square thing in our living room.

Technorati Tags: McLuhan, media, snack, Wired