The readings this semester of the New Media Faculty Seminar have been challenging week after week, Doug Engelbart and Nelson less so Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg. This week the reading from McLuhan was difficult in a different way. McLuhan is a type of public intellectual that draws from a wide array of sources from literature to intellectual history. He was in fact creating what became media studies.

Marshall McLuhan and Northop Frye, the author of Anatomy of Criticism were two Canadian public intellectuals who not only framed their own disciplines but set ripples in a number of other disciplines. What made it possible for them to function as public intellectuals was the way they were able to transgress disciplines.

Part of this type of transgression involves parsing out metaphors of well worn and tired mental associative paths. Cppant explores the desktop metaphor as a way to think about the computer. She observes the way that the metaphor desktop and the limits of paper have become a limiting metaphor. The metaphor of Bookburning and metamedium (Alan Kay and Adel Goldberg NMR 394) appliances provide an alternative way to think about augmenting human intellect.

Just as McLuhan and Frye brushed away dead metaphors and created new ones through the venue of public intellectual discourse, as opposed to discipline limited discourse, so Jeff Jarvis in his blog buzzmachine.com does today. I watch and listen to Jarvis, a professor at City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, on the TWIT Network show This Week in Google.  Jarvis’ description of the types of media today reminds me of the discussion of McLuhan in his Gutenberg’s Galaxy when Jarvis describes the New Molecules of media.