Working at the Interface: Dr. Kevin Brooks / mcluhan

• Eric McLuhan >Electric Language< An old flash site with one chapter from Eric McLuhan's EL. Probably way ahead of its time; still a decent remediation of the text.

• YouTube - The iPhone is the Massage Part 1 One of MyClueIn's many YouTube video probes--a succinct exploration of the iPhone. Check out his great collection. Not a tetradic analysis, but a good example of a video essay.
• YouTube - Craigslist: Get with tetrad. Get with social. (Original) A good video analysis of craigslist using McLuhan's tetrad. The video "author" has composed some of the material and conducted interviews with users. Nice work!
• The Resonating Interval: Exploring the Tetrad A student-produced website with explanation and exploration of tetrads.
• E-merl.com - A Webcomic Tetrad A visually interesting tetrad--viewers are forced to move the image around. Also a tight form-content relationship--a comic-like explanation of a tetrad for comics.
• TheFeature :: It's All About The Mobile Internet Howard Rheingold's application of tetrads.
• Tetrad - McLuhan - Old Messengers, New Media - Library and Archives Canada The tetrad page in this excellent website about McLuhan and Innis.
• McLuhan's Laws of Media Simple but interactive explanation of the laws of media.

• Rhetorics of the Web: McLuhan Hot and Cool Doug Brent's good, short reflection on hot and cool.
• McLuhan would blow hot and cool about today's internet | Technology | The Guardian A nice piece of journalistic analysis; suggest that the web is both hot and cool, which seems about right--a mix. The author seems bothered by the mix, however, he seems to want a medium to be one or the other, and to stay as it is. Or he thinks that Mc

• Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: Games as National Culture: An Interview with Chris Kohler (Part One) This interview starts with a McLuhan quotation about games and culture, and notes that McLuhan's line has been used by at least two new books on games. Also an interesting post for thinking about Japanese cultural influences on games and anime giving way

• Mullen, McLuhan’s Understanding Media A retrospective review of MM's UM.

• AmeriQuests - Vol. 3, No. 2 (2006) James Morrison essay on McLuhan

I opened up my computer thinking about a blog entry and found out that my new NDSU blog account had just been set up. This won’t be the typical test blog, but part of my ongoing blog work at TenADay. Of course one of the goals is to just test out the Word Press interface, which, I have to admit, is very elegant from the backside. Also plays well with Safari!

So, I’m reading Manovich and thinking about McLuhan, which is how I read everything. I’ve been thinking for a while that Manovich’s new media forms, film and database, map onto McLuhan’s hot and cool in potentially interesting ways, but I haven’t known what to do with the 5 principles of new media Manovich lays out. But here is how Manovich makes sense of his relationship to McLuhan. He says, “New media calls for a new stage in media theory whose beginnings can be traced back to the revolutionary works of Harold Innis in the 1950s and Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s. To understand the logic of new media, we need to turn to computer science” (48). So Manovich sees his work as part of a new stages of media studies, which is fair enough. McLuhan definitely represents first-wave media studies, with lots of flaws and limitations. I have seen others refer to the more sociological and fine-grained analyses that followed McLuhan as being a second wave of media studies (the work done in the ’70s and ’80s, maybe even 90s, culminating in Remediation?), leaving Manovich, perhaps, as a third-wave, concerned with code, software, and computing capabilities.

Manovich also makes a distinction between what he calls the “cultural interface” or “cultural layer” of new media and “the computer layer” of new media (46). This is another way of describing his third wave, but what this phrasing helps me understanding is that I am primarily interested in (and qualified to analyze), the cultural layer, the interface layer. I have even adopted “working at the interface” as the title of my video blog, and I plan to use it as a subtitle in almost already started book, McLuhan for Compositionists: Working at the Interface.

I also understand more clearly that my work (published and in my head) never advances new theories, but instead tries to synthesize and use existing theories or concepts or practices in new ways. My book project would not advance a “new rhetoric for new media” but instead would try to synthesize the diverse scholarship that already exists, and most specifically, locate the various terms (hot and cool, immediacy and hypermediacy, film and database) on a functional map of cultural interfaces: Scott McCloud’s big triangle. My reasons for wanting to do this kind of synthesis project (beside the obvious fact that I don’t have a new theory to contribute) is that I think the field of composition studies could benefit from a more solid and interconnected base of concepts we could teach and research from. It might also be useful it we all spoke more similar languages, or at least understood more clearly how the “interface language” spelled out by Kress and Van Leeuwen relates to the inteface language of McLuhan, McCloud, and Manovick.

• Specters of Mcluhan This site looks to be an ongoing bibiographic project by Richard Cavell (author of McLuhan in Space) and Jamie Hilder. The collection is selective rather than exhaustive (which means they didn't include my review of 4 McLuhan books ; ). They did identify

• Reconstruction 6.4 (2006) Danah Boyd takes a "medium" look at blogging.

• Walter Ong's thought as framework and orientation for cultural studies in the humanities Renascence - Find Articles An article closely related to Tom Farrell's book, I believe.

• Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: "The Tomorrow That Never Was": Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter (Part One) The first of four long entries (a presentation broken up) about Dean Motter's comics. Motter's work is new to me, but he seems to have been significantly influenced by McLuhan, who, I am realizing, significanlty influenced most of the big thinkers in com
• Marshall McLuhan, review of his first book
• Mediamatic.net - McLuhan Thorough and interesting response to the MechBride.