Home | Syllabus | Course Schedule | Blog
Projects: An Inventory of Effects | Rhetoric of Data Visualization| Reach-Search

At the high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective.

Unhappily, we confront this new situation with an enormous backlog of outdated mental and psychological responses. We have been left d-a-n-g-l-i-n-g. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us--they refer us only to the past, not to the present.

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay. (Marshall McLuhan in 1967, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, p. 63)

Spring 2005
TR 5-6:20
HBC 213B and HBC227
Section M320, No. 32818