Posts Tagged ‘history’
15
Mar
2010
Uncovered Gem: Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village
Why tribal man is the future of communication, or what TED has to do with Playboy.
A few months ago, we raved about this brilliant Marshall McLuhan interview from a 1969 issue of Playboy, where the iconic media scholar and pop culture philosopher — a man most famous for his contention that “the medium is the message” — lays out his fascinating and radical theories about “hot” vs. “cool” media, the loss of identity in the age of “electric media,” and other cultural phenomena remarkably relevant in today’s social media landscape, some four decades later.
Today, we look at this uncovered gem from 1960, where McLuhan explores how “electric media” are turning the world into one global village, changing our relationship with print, and extending our sensory capabilities — all issues occupying the media theorists, publishing gurus, cultural anthropologists and iPad enthusiasts of today to an extraordinarily similar degree. And though the video cuts off abruptly, it makes up in brilliance for what it lacks in ending — if there ever was a real cultural Nostradamus, McLuhan would be it.
These new media have made our world into a single unit. The world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum, where everybody gets the message all the time. A princess gets married in England and — boom boom boom! — we all hear about it; an earthquake in North Africa; a Hollywood star gets drunk — away go the drums again.
We find this particularly relevant, after just having seen a fantastic SXSW panel on making content available in 100 languages, which covered TED’s Open Translation Project, the wonderful global conversation aggregator Global Voices, and Mozilla’s translation development platform — all brilliant tools enabling and democratizing the global dialogue, using new media as the vehicle for this powerful social movement.
How will you beat the global drum today?
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08
Mar
2010
Popular Science, Digitized
137 years of human curiosity, or what lawnmowers have to do with nuclear detectives in China.
Thousands of magazines have stuffed our mailboxes and collected dust on our coffee tables over the years, but very few have captivated the attention of geeks and dreamers as long as Popular Science.
A hundred and thirty-seven years ago, Edward L. Youmans founded the publication to help bring scientific knowledge to the educated layman. Topics ranged the scientific gamut from the birth of electricity to the mystery of the brain. In addition to staff writers, our modern world of science has been covered by the likes of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, T.H. Huxley, and Louis Pasteur.
Luckily for historians and the ever-curious, Popular Science has teamed up with Google to archive all 137 years of the magazine. (You may remember Google’s groundbreaking similar partnership with LIFE Magazine in late 2008.) Not only is this spectacular treasure of information free, but it’s available in original format — which means that besides enjoying antique articles about human-powered flying machines, you can also enjoy the advertisements of eras past. (Cigarettes, whiskey and riding lawnmowers seem to populate the 60’s.)
The archives aren’t indexed by volume. Instead, a fairly accurate search function brings up all the relevant articles from the past century for you to wade through. This time machine of science is beautiful to navigate, and even looks fantastic on the iPhone.
For those of you who are new to the archives, we’ve taken the liberty of finding a few nuggets of nostalgia to get you started:
The Moon — So Far (May, 1958): “Look hard, next full moon (April 3, May 3). Our oldest-established permanent satellite looms over the trees, familiar and close, yet mysterious and distant…We are ready to stretch across 240,000 miles to touch it…”
A nuclear detective looks at China’s atom bomb (Feb, 1965): “To an atomic scientist, what are the implications of China’s atomic bomb? We asked Dr. Ralph E. Lapp, a physicist who participated in the World War II Manhattan Project…”
Traveling telephones — new technology expands mobile service (Feb, 1978): “There’s a button labeled SND on Motorola’s futuristic –looking Pulsar II radiotelephone. I pushed it, and a number stored in its microcomputer memory began stepping, digit by digit, across the red LED handset display.
Go ahead, dive in.
Len Kendall is the cofounder of the3six5 project. (Featured on Brain Pickings here.) He enjoy being clever, quippy, and constructively grumpy.
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