Ivan Illich’s call to deschool society is certainly a challenging one, and even if I have a hard time imagining many of his propositions  coming to fruition given the stacked deck against which such endeavorsContinue reading

Near the beginning of Sherry Turkel’s chapter “Video Games and Computer Holding Power,” she makes a curious statement that resonates with many of my own experiences regarding the media. Writing about the  controversy and debateContinue reading

Marshall McLuhan broke into the world of communication theory in 1964 with his equally heralded and deplored third book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In a single brilliant, maddening work, McLuhan, a Toronto-based EnglishContinue reading

This isn’t related to probably anything we will discuss in class regarding Computer Lib / Dream Machines, but in my routine background research on Theodor H. Nelson I discovered that he is the son ofContinue reading

I’ll be honest–I had no end of difficult in making my way through Douglas Engelbart‘s “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” This is not to say that the essay, which is actually a report heContinue reading

Vannevar Buch’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” is amazing in its forward-thinking approach to the nature of content management–essentially how we store information, retrieve it, make use of it, and develop knowledge as aContinue reading