Understanding Media

McLuhan once said, “We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish. A pervasive environment, a pervasive medium is always beyond perception.” The big point to McLuhan is this: the messages that these media of written language are sending to us go far beyond the actual content or subject matter of the thing that’s being written abo... See more

Like so many technologies that came before, it seems to be here to stay; the question is not how to escape it but how to understand ourselves in its inescapable wake.

In his new book, “The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is,” Justin E. H. Smith, a professor of philosophy at the Université Paris Cité, argues that “the present situation is intolerab... See more