In 2014, I felt something change. To use some old movie metaphors, it was like a disturbance in The Force, or a glitch in The Matrix. Something had

Smash The Technopoly! - by Nicholas Smyth - After Babel

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2024-12-22 21:30:05

In 2014, I felt something change. To use some old movie metaphors, it was like a disturbance in The Force, or a glitch in The Matrix. Something had changed among the students entering college (which led me to write The Coddling of the American Mind), and something had changed in American society and politics, which led me to write a series of articles in The Atlantic with titles such as

During this period, I became interested in the great media theorists of the 20th century, such as Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan. These scholars were writing about the revolution in instant electric communication that began with the telegraph and continued on through the telephone, radio, and television. They told us to avoid getting too caught up in the analysis of the content people were viewing and to think more about the ways that the medium itself (the technology we create) changes who we are and how we think and act.

They offered thrilling analyses of mid-20th century life and mind-bending visions of where technology might take humanity. Here, for example, is quote from the opening of McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding media: The extensions of man: