yeah, you nailed it, and I am really impressed with the Whitehead stuff, I have to find out where he is quoting from. I might be Whitehead’s The Aims of Education (1916)–which might be an interesting next work to read. I’m excited my thuis book and when you get to the pages where quotes are printed backwards, or upside down, so much of the sequential, fragmented logic of the alphabet and print is actually visceral. Wild stuff.

@Chris,
Yeah, I had really similar experience. I was blown away by how the actual phrasing he McLuhan is using in this book, almost down to the word, is everywhere being repeated by tech evangelists and Web 2.0 faithful. But like you, I’m also very wary of the optimism of a kind of return to some kind of supra-national global village–espeically given the way technology is first and foremost a means of spectral control. And the Global Village seems like a neo-liberal catch phrase after Hillary Clinton popularized the idea And The Glass Bees would make a really interesting read side-by-side with this one, for they are both visionary works that intuit the future, yet from completely different perspectives on the question of power and control that is mediated through these electric communications.

I too wanna believe that all this work folks are doing will make a difference, and I delude myself to thinking this is all truly new, but given how beautifully McLuhan called so much of this stuff, and how little of it came to fruition, I too wonder if it isn’t just a moment that will ultimately be sucked back into the corporate wellspring of greed, profit, and control. I pray that it won’t, but praying ain’t exactly my forte.

Seriously, McLuhan’s optimism is memorable (I read TMitM quite a while back… sounds worth revisiting) but perhaps even more unjustified now than ever, seeing what never happened since the time he wrote. Could “this” turn out to be just another peak on the hype-wave machine?

I try to be optimistic, but being a determined foe of creeping technological determinism (and trying to sound an alarm piercing enough to wake the technological somnambulists), my second-most important point when I talk with people about the mind-bendingly revolutionary aspects of the changes in tech/comm/culture/ed (the “ed” part making it possible to talk a bit less abstractly) after “you have to walk the walk” is “none of this is guaranteed.”

Academia hasn’t transformed in a long time, nor a viable alternative emerged, despite many movements and possibilities. It is a large-scale version of the quandary of decades of unchanged pedagogy in the face of brilliant and inspired attacks and alternatives. Emergent ideas upset the equilibrium a bit, but to push over and through takes intentional determination by all the groups whose differences are unimportant in the larger picture of change: the people who care enough to be edupunk and care enough to be upset or irritated by the edupunks, the connectivists and the constructivists, the social software gurus and social media mavens and second live devotees and the men and women who love and hate them… people like you.

I hope people will look back and see ancient artifacts like the BavaBlog and wonder how great it must have been to be part of something that changed the world rather than with the nostalgia that McLuhan (so far) inspires…