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Jon: > As i said it appears to me that people have been struggling > with this since the 90s and i see no sign of it stopping. Thanks! You are certainly correct that the various "professions" have circled their own wagons and not stepped up to the challenge of understanding the effects of digital media. So, most of what has been said is in the popular press etc (i.e. Lanier, Johnson, Carr, Morozov etc). Since I've been a part of those discussions -- which is how nettime found me and invited me to "keynote" Metaforum III in Budapest -- and I probably personally know most of the people who have been writing about these issues for the public, my observation is that -- 1) While there are lots of opinions there has been little careful "thought," very little "science" and even less attention to the underlying "history." 2) As a result, most of what has been said becomes "special-pleading" with almost no "legitimacy" (outside of the author's fan-base) and is just more background noise in a world beset by "information overload." 3) To the extent that there are "policy-makers" who count, this lack of any coherence (or even peer review) just encourages them to ignore the problems caused by fundamental technological changes. > I'd just guess life did not stop with Mcluhan Exactly! And, therein lies the problem . . . McLuhan lived in the television era and his most-remembered comments (i.e. those which were turned into "ad-copy") are best for understanding the ONCE new effects of television (i.e. in the 1950s/60s) -- specifically when compared to radio (i.e. HOT and COOL) and books (i.e. Global Village etc) but, since he died in 1980 (and was largely ignored after the early 70s), he did NOT have much-of-anything to say about "computers" or "networks" or the effects of *digital* technology. The McLuhan "revival" beginning in the 90s at WIRED etc wasn't McLuhan at all but the version of him that passed through the intestines of the Whole Earth gang. Their interest was in "co-evolution" of humans and machines, as reflected in Kevin Kelly's books about "What Technology Wants," which has nothing to do with McLuhan (except perhaps in reverse.) Grasping the *differences* between the effects of DIGITAL technology -- social, psychological and economic -- and the corresponding effects of television etc (i.e. what McLuhan actually wrote about) would require a) first understanding what television did *to* us and b) some method/technique of comparing those effects to the ones *caused* by newer technologies. Is there any body of research that does this -- with or without McLuhan? There have been a couple books published in the past few years that purport to deal with this on McLuhan's terms but, alas, they really don't (and, I'll guess that you never heard of them) -- an unfortunate result of being published as "text-books" hoping to capitalize on high-priced "media studies" college courses. The Schmidt/Cohen "metaphor" of living in two *civilizations* echoes the work of Sherry Turkle (and others?) and, IMHO, is valuable precisely because it requires an analysis that is based on *differences* and not treating the Internet as if it's just another version of ad-supported mass media. If you know of any "serious" work along these lines, please tell us . . . Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org