Communication philosopher Marshall McLuhan was once nearly as rock star famous as Timothy Leary. McLuhan actually wrote Leary’s famous “turn on, tune in and drop out” line for him, then the Moody Blues immortalized hallucinating jailbird Leary while McLuhan sort of faded into textbooks. When the internet happened, folks noticed that McLuhan had seen it coming 30 years earlier, so he’s kind of in vogue again, as much as any philosopher ever gets.
McLuhan’s “media is the message” divvied up media into hot and cool categories—it was “hot” if it came at you fast and heavy (frothing Fox TV) and it’s “cool” if you’ve got to inject some info yourself, (pithy DKos cartoons).
But McLuhan didn’t live to actually see the internet. Nobody really knows how he’d classify it. Is it super-cool because of its innate interactivity, or super-hot because there’s so damn much of it?
Why need it be super-anything? —Because it more closely approaches the threshold of telepathy, arguably the ultimate communication criteria. Our haste for psychic instantaneity has spawned a vernacular of abbreviations akin to code. Can’t get those thoughts out fast enough, lol.
Impatience in fact seems the predominant message of this media. Which inevitably leads to intemperance, because stupid. Absent a bodily connection, the mind reveals a shocking depth of bile, it turns out. Anonymity breeds contempt. So it’s like civilization had to reinvent itself to deal with it; witness the DKos intro to diary-writing...a finely detailed treatise on manners and some studied advice for dealing with those stubbornly immune to them.
Professor McLuhan hails from a generation for whom “LoL” meant “lots of love,” as many a post Gen-x late adopter confesses. Either way; laughing or loving, hot or cool, we are now inexorably that global village he defined.