The New York Times Magazine Inescapably Connected: Life in the Wireless Age
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"Information everywhere, at light speed, immersing us -- is this what we want? We seem unsure. We are the species that defines itself in terms of information: homo sapiens sapiens. We are knowledge connoisseurs. We are being promised some approximation of All Previous Text (and music and pictures) in our pockets. Then again, we didn't evolve in a world with so much data and buzz. Our sense organs tuned into one slow channel at a time. Now we tune in and out. The dream of perfect ceaseless information flow can slip so easily into a nightmare of perfect perpetual distraction.

Our technologies don't just empower us: they also harass us, and they change us -- for better and for worse."

The Christian Science Monitor Online all the time
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"Questions such as: What does it mean to be online all the time? How will that change the way we live? What are the benefits and the drawbacks to being constantly connected?"

""It's easy to say we would just have more of the same: more speed, more multitasking, more frequent messages," Mr. Powell says. "But maybe we will see something more qualitative than quantitative - watch kids doing homework with four or five instant-chat windows open. Is this just more, or is it something very different from, say, sitting quietly with a book? Whatever that difference is, that's what is coming.""

redux [08.10.00]
Dr. Kim H. Veltman New Media and Transformations in Knowledge
"This paper began from the premise that every new medium changes our definitions of, approaches to and views of knowledge. It claimed that networked computers (as enabled by the Internet), cannot be understood as simply yet another medium in a long evolution that began with speech and evolved via cuneiform, parchment, manuscripts to printed books and more recently to radio, film, and video. Computers offer a new method of translating information from one medium to another, wherein lies the deeper meaning of the overworked term multimedia. Hence computers will never create paperless offices, they will eventually create offices where any form of communication can be transformed into any other form. "

"A half century ago pioneers such as Havelock, Innis and McLuhan recognized that new media inevitably affect our concepts of what constitutes knowledge. The mass media epitomized this with McLuhan’s pithy phrase: "The medium is the message." Reduced and taken in isolation, it is easy to see, in retrospect, that this obscured almost as much as it revealed. The new media are changing the way we know. They are doing so in fundamental ways and they are inspiring, creating, producing, distorting and even obscuring many messages. New machines make many new things possible. Only humans can ensure that what began as data streams and quests for information highways become paths towards knowledge and wisdom."

Netfuture Media Ecology:Taking Account of the Knower
"Our dialog with technology is a dialog with ourselves. Technology can indeed have a powerful effect upon the subsequent development of culture, but it is the kind of effect that powerful meanings have. This must be distinguished from any mechanical sort of cause and effect.

I draw on the work of Owen Barfield to indicate how the development of both printing press and perspective art, as companion movements toward abstraction, fit into the broad evolution of western consciousness. My conclusion is that, once we take this evolution into account -- and reckon especially with our own place in it -- we cannot say, in quite the way it is often said, that technology "causes" a radical transformation in the conditions of intellectual life."

Rhetoric Notes Review of Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy
"Ong pulls together two decades of work by himself and others on the differences between primary oral cultures, those that do not have a system of writing, and chirographic (i.e., writing) cultures to look at how the shift from an oral-based stage of cons ciousness to one dominated by writing and print changes the way we humans think. His approach to the subject is both synchronic in that he looks at cultures that coexist at a certain point in time, and diachronic in that he discusses the change in the Wes t from being oral-based to chirographic which began with the appearance of script some 6,000 years ago. In addition to pinpointing fundamental differences in the thought processes of the two types of culture, he comments on the current emergence in Western society of what he calls a second orality. This second orality, dominated by electronic modes of communication (e.g., television and telephones), incorporates elements from both the chirographic mode and the orality mode which has been subordinant for some time."