Rob Faludi

Marshall McLuhan has always struck me as one part visionary and one part kook. His argument that the “message” of a particular technology is the change it introduces into human affairs. Certainly this is a brilliant observation. There is not only an effect from what a train delivers, but also effects resulting from the speed of delivery and the new types of deliveries that can be made. McLuhan describes a societal trend away from sequence to configurations. This parallels a trend in the sciences away from the so called “clockwork universe” of Newton to the conceptions in his time of randomly distributed parameters. Today the sciences are attempting to tackle chaos itself, so if anything we’re headed beyond McLuhan’s configuration based culture into something potentially far stranger.
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