McLuhan: The First Second-Order Cybernetician

Good afternoon!

I’ve written a new article on my main website, The Concerned Netizen blog, about how crypto-cybernetician Marshall McLuhan was at least five-years ahead of others in that field, while mysteriously framing his cybernetics as “structuralism”.

I demonstrate this by rewriting some of McLuhan’s prose from 1963. Here’s a paragraph McLuhan could have written, but didn’t:

I wonder whether Jerome Bruner, during the writing of his fine book on The Process of Education, ever asked himself why there has come the sudden acceptance of the “systems thinking” in all fields today. Am I really asking him whether he had any awareness of the systemic reasons for the new relevance of systems thinking? Had he also asked himself the causes and origins of the linear, non-recursive and simple-hierarchy approach to life and learning which had dominated the Western world in recent centuries? Since American institutions of law, politics and education had mostly originated in the heyday of perception and learning and organization understood as neatly-nested concepts of downward, linear cause and effect, it would follow, surely, that the transfer of these modes and skills into the forms of structural or complex-systems awareness and procedure would entail a considerable trauma in national life…

Read the rest of the piece for more!

The piece above took about four hours to write, and it was intended to be a very short and easy piece! I often spend a dozen hours or more agonizing over each writing that I share with you here, and this is simply unsustainable.

So I’m going to be writing much, much shorter pieces soon. Think of them as building blocks. There are ideas strewn about this blog, buried deep within long essays, which ought to be the subject of their own succinct posts.

This is the spirit of hypertext: non-linear networks of assembled passages. It’s something that I ought to be fluent in; except by the time I write, I’ve already assembled all the pieces for you! That’s what my writing is: assembly of all the ideas bouncing around in my head.

I’d like to be more regular, however, in my updates. Especially out of courtesy for my gracious paying subscribers, who deserve a little more regularity from me.

So please be patient as I recombobulate my whole approach to writing and experiment with some new forms and styles in upcoming weeks. I have complete hope that we’ll come out the other end stronger together. 🫡

Cheers!

Clinton