One of the problems I seem to keep striking with McLuhan is the whole technological determinism thing. Just because two things happen at more or less the same time, no matter how related they are, it does not necessarily follow that one caused the other. Take ‘the medium is the message’, for instance. The clear implication of this is that electric technologies ’cause’ the global village. True, there is certainly an enabling aspect of technology in developing, for instance, world trade – but a global consciousness might not necessarily be the direct result of communications technology.

Things go both ways. The development of a mind that can conceive of instantaneous global communication also lays the groundwork for a societal structure that can incorporate and encourage electric technologies. That said, I have no doubt that extensions of our sensory surroundings via any medium, electric, digital, print or whatever, have a large impact on our psychological framework. I tend to disagree that things are as astonishingly simple as this direct causal framework indicates.

The more McLuhan I read, the more I like Joyce. McLuhan’s percepts lead you to think about media in certain ways, and with far more direct clarity than Joyce – but Joyce, and particularly in Finnegan’s Wake, seems to have a more pluralistic and in my view, realistic take on the multiply connected relationship between Man and his communicative technologies and artefacts. Necessarily, Joyce is more dense – his communication contains far more entropy, as Eco would have it. However, the multiplicity of potential meaning inherent in an entropic communicative system also tends towards a quantitatively greater abundance of meaning.

Must re-read The Open Work and the Wake…