The New Republic is today running my review of Douglas Coupland’s biography Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! Here’s the start:

One of my favorite YouTube videos is a clip from a Canadian television show in 1968 featuring a debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan. The two men, both heroes of the 60s, could hardly be more different. Leaning forward in his chair, Mailer is pugnacious, animated, engaged. McLuhan, abstracted and smiling wanly, seems to be on autopilot. He speaks in canned riddles. “The planet is no longer nature,” he declares, to Mailer’s uncomprehending stare; “it’s now the content of an art work.”

Watching McLuhan, you can’t quite decide whether he was a genius or just had a screw loose. Both impressions, it turns out, are valid. As Douglas Coupland argues in his pithy new biography, McLuhan’s mind was probably situated at the mild end of the autism spectrum. He also suffered from a couple of major cerebral traumas. In 1960, he had a stroke so severe that he was given his last rites. In 1967, just a few months before the Mailer debate, surgeons removed a tumor the size of an apple from the base of his brain. A later procedure revealed that McLuhan had an extra artery pumping blood into his cranium.

Read on.

Bonus: the YouTube clip:

In an essay at Berfrois, Justin E. H. Smith gets at the weird technological totalitarianism that makes the Net so unusual in the history of tools:

The Internet has concentrated once widely dispersed aspects of a human life into one and the same little machine: work, friendship, commerce, creativity, eros. As someone sharply put it a few years ago in an article in Slate or something like that: our work machines and our porn machines are now the same machines. This is, in short, an exceptional moment in history, next to which 19th-century anxieties about the railroad or the automated loom seem frivolous. Looms and cotton gins and similar apparatuses each only did one thing; the Internet does everything.

It is the nuclear option for human culture, unleashed, evidently, without any reflection upon its long-term consequences. I am one of its victims, caught in the initial blast wave. Nothing is the same anymore, not reading, not friendship, not thinking, not love. In my symptoms, however, I resemble more the casualty of an opium war than of a nuclear war: I sit in my dark den and hit the ‘refresh’ button all day and night. When I go out, I take a portable dose in my pocket, in the form of a pocket-sized screen. You might see me hitting ‘refresh’ as I’m crossing the street. You might feel an urge to honk.

And yet perhaps all the Net does is make what was always implicitly virtual explicitly virtual:

If then there is a certain respect in which it makes sense to say that the Internet does not change everything, it is that human social reality was always virtual anyway. I do not mean this in some obfuscating Baudrillardian sense, but rather as a corollary to a thoroughgoing naturalism: human institutions only exist because they appear to humans to exist; nature is entirely indifferent to them. And tools and vehicles only are what they are because people make the uses of them that they do.

Consider the institution of friendship. Every time I hear someone say that Facebook ‘friendship’ should be understood in scare quotes, or that Facebook interaction is not real social interaction, I feel like asking in reply: What makes you think real-world friendships are real? Have you not often felt some sort of amical rapport with a person with whom you interact face-to-face, only to find that in the long run it comes to nothing? How exactly was that fleeting sensation any more real than the discovery and exploration of shared interests and sensibilities with a ‘friend’ one knows only through the mediation of a social-networking site? …

One would do better to trace [the Net] back far further, to holy scripture, to runes and oracle bones, to the discovery of the possibility of reproducing the world through manipulation of signs.

If human culture has always been artificial, isn’t it frivolous to worry about it becoming more artificial?

I’m going to have to mull that over.

Yesterday, I was one of the recipients of an amusing mass email from the long-time tech pundit Guy Kawasaki. He sent it out to promote a new book he’s written as well as to promote the Facebook fan page for that book. Under the subject line “Free copy of Guy’s first book,” it went as follows:

A long time ago (1987 exactly), I published my first book, The Macintosh Way. I wrote it because I was bursting with idealistic and pure notions about how a company can change the world, and I wanted to spread the gospel …

I recently re-acquired the rights for this book, and I’m making it freely available from the fan page of my upcoming book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. To download The Macintosh Way:

1. Go to the fan page.

2. “Like” the page.

3. Click on The Macintosh Way book cover to download the PDF.

Yes, that’s right. The pure-hearted, Apple-cheeked idealism of youth has given way to the crass cynicism of using virtual swag as a bribe to get you to click a Like button. Marketing corrupts, and Facebook marketing corrupts absolutely.

Here, by the way, is how Kawasaki describes his new tome: “The book explains when and why enchantment is necessary and then the pillars of enchantment: likability, trustworthiness, and a great cause.” That’s “likability” in the purely transactional sense, I assume.

Back in elementary school, there was this distinctly unlikable kid who, if you agreed to act like his friend for a day, would let you swim in his family’s swimming pool. Little did we know that he was a cultural pioneer.

The internet changes nothing, argues Marshall Poe, whose ambitious new book, A History of Communications, has just been published:

We knew the revolution wouldn’t be televised, but many of us really hoped it might be on the Internet. Now we know these hopes were false. There was no Internet Revolution and there will be no Internet Revolution. We will stumble on in more or less exactly the way we did before massive computer networks infiltrated our daily lives …

Before the Web we were already used to sitting in front of electronic boxes for hour upon hour. The boxes have now changed, but they are still boxes. Of course the things we do on the Internet are different from those we did (and do) in front of the TV. But it’s important to remember that they are only different; they are not new. Think for a moment about what you do on the Internet. Not what you could do, but what you actually do. You email people you know. In an effort to broaden your horizons, you could send email to strangers in, say, China, but you don’t. You read the news. You could read newspapers from distant lands so as to broaden your horizons, but you usually don’t. You watch videos. There are a lot of high-minded educational videos available, but you probably prefer the ones featuring, say, snoring cats. You buy things. Every store in the world has a website, so you could buy all manner of exotic goods. As a rule, however, you buy the things you have always bought from the people who have always sold them. You play games. There are many kinds of games on the Internet, but those we seem to like best all fall into two categories: the ones where we can kill things and the ones where we can cast spells. You look things up. The Web is like a bottomless well of information. You can find the answer to almost any question if you’re willing to look. But you generally don’t like to look, so you get your answers from Wikipedia. Last, you do things you know you shouldn’t. The Internet is great for indulging bad habits. It offers endless opportunities to steal electronic goods, look at dirty pictures, and lose your money playing poker. Moreover, it’s anonymous. On the Web, you can get what you want and be pretty sure you won’t get caught getting it. That’s terrifically useful.

But what exactly is new here? Not very much. Email is still mail. Online newspapers are still newspapers. YouTube videos are still videos. Virtual stores are still stores. MMORPGs are still variations on D&D. A user-built encyclopedia is still a reference book. Stealing mp3s is still theft. Cyber-porn is still porn. Internet poker is still gambling. In terms of content, the Internet gives us almost nothing that the much maligned “traditional media” did not. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the Internet is a post office, newsstand, video store, shopping mall, game arcade, reference room, record outlet, adult book shop and casino rolled into one. Let’s be honest: that’s amazing. But it’s amazing in the same way a dishwasher is amazing—it enables you to do something you have always done a little easier than before.

What you see depends on where you stand, and from one viewpoint – a high one – Poe is absolutely correct. He puts his finger on a tragicomic fundamental of human existence: Whenever we come upon a wild new frontier, we jump up and down and say we’re going to restart history, and then we proceed to do exactly what we always do: build houses, shops, brothels, bars, gaming emporiums, churches. And then more shops. Modern electronic media, from this view, simply allow us to do all the same stuff with less physical effort. Lots of big boxes collapse into one small box, but the contents of the box remains the same.

The problem with a high vantage point is that you can’t see the details, and if you stand there long enough you begin to believe that the details don’t matter. But the details do matter. The texture of our lives is determined not only by what we do but by how we do it. And that’s where media play such an important part: they change the how. Which is what Poe misses. Just as the dishwasher (along with the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, and all manner of other electrified household appliance) altered in profound ways the rhythms and roles of home life during the last century, so the internet changes, in ways small and large, everything it subsumes. The same shit, when routed through a different medium, becomes new shit.

No sooner does Time magazine place its fabled curse on the head of the Star Child than the fanboys begin to sidle toward the exits. “I’ve started to take one step back from the digital world,” tweets Nick Bilton, the New York Times’ chief tech blogger and resident future-dweller. He cops to the fact that “over the last few months, my wife and I have started to make a conscious effort to limit the use of our mobile phones during dinner or while spending time with family.” Bilton is not alone in giving in to the denetworking urge. Wired columnist Clive Thompson confesses that he has begun “to completely ignore his e-mail ‘from Friday night to Monday morning,’ so he doesn’t accidentally get involved in work and pulled away from his family.” Gizmodo reporter Joe Johnson has also begun pocketing his gizmo, at least when dining out with his girlfriend: “The two allocate a few moments to check-in on Foursquare or snap a quick picture, but then put their phones away.” Johnson’s boss, Brian Lam, muses that “an obsession with technology can ‘dilute the quality time we should spend with the people closest to us.’” Former Digg CEO Jay Adelson worries about “the increasingly damaging and fatiguing Twitter lifestyle.” All this neoluddite handwringing comes amid word, from TechCrunch, that Twitter’s US growth seems to be flatlining, with nary an uptick since the summer. Bilton senses a meme emerging. He wonders: “Is society as a whole retreating a bit from using technology in our personal relationships?”

Craig Mod is psyched about the future of literary storytelling. “With digital media,” he writes in “The Digital Death of the Author,” an article that’s part of New Scientist’s “Storytelling 2.0” series, “the once sacred nature of text is sacred no longer. Instead, we can change it continuously and in real time.” E-storytelling is to storytelling, he says, as Wikipedia is to a printed encyclopedia. And that’s a good thing:

The biggest change is not in the form stories take but in the writing process. Digital media changes books by changing the nature of authorship. Stories no longer have to arrive fully actualised … [Ultimately,] authorship becomes a collaboration between writers and readers. Readers can edit and update stories, either passively in comments on blogs or actively via wiki-style interfaces.

Sound familiar? It should. In the 1980s and early 1990s, when personal computers were new and their screens appeared to literary theorists as virgin canvases, there was enormous excitement over the possibilities for digital media to revolutionize storytelling. The enthusiasm back then centered on hypertext and multimedia, rather than on Internet collaboration tools, but the idea was the same, as was the “death of the author” rhetoric. By “freeing” text from the page, digital media would blur the line between reader and writer, spurring a profusion of new, interactive forms of literary expression and storytelling. As George Landow and Paul Delany wrote in their introduction to the influential 1991 compendium Hypermedia and Literary Studies, “So long as the text was married to a physical media, readers and writers took for granted three crucial attributes: that the text was linear, bounded, and fixed.” The computer would break this static structure, allowing text to become more like “a network, a tree diagram, a nest of Chinese boxes, or a web.” That in turn would shift “the boundaries between individual works as well as those between author and reader,” overthrowing “certain notions of authorial property, authorial uniqueness, and a physically isolated text.”

Then, as now, the celebration of the idea of interactive writing was founded more on a popular ideology of cultural emancipation than on a critical assessment of artistic expression. It reflected a yearning for a radical sort of cultural democratization, which required that “the author” be pulled down from his pedestal and revealed to be a historical accident, a now dispensable byproduct of the technology of the printing press, which had served to fix type, and hence stories, on the page. The author was the father who had to be slain before culture could be liberated from its elitist, patriarchal shackles.

The ability to write communally and interactively with computers is nothing new, in other words. Digital tools for collaborative writing date back twenty or thirty years. And yet interactive storytelling has never taken off. The hypertext novel in particular turned out to be a total flop. When we read stories, we still read ones written by authors. The reason for the failure of interactive storytelling has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with stories. Interactive storytelling hasn’t become popular – and will never become popular – because it produces crappy stories that no one wants to read. That’s not just a result of the writing-by-committee problem (I would have liked to have a link here to the gruesome product of Penguin Books’ 2007 wiki-novel experiment, but, mercifully, it’s been removed from the web). The act of reading a story, it turns out, is very different from, and ultimately incompatible with, the act of writing a story. The state of the story-reader is not a state of passivity, as is often, and sillily, suggested, but it is a state of repose. To enter a story, to achieve the kind of immersion that produces enjoyment and emotional engagement, a reader has to give up not only control but the desire to impose control. Readership and authorship are different, if mutually necessary, states: yin and yang. As soon as the reader begins to fiddle with the narrative – to take an authorial role – the spell of the story is broken. The story ceases to be a story and becomes a contraption.

What we actually value most about stories, as readers, is what Mod terms, disparagingly, “full actualization” – the meticulous crafting of an intriguing plot, believable characters and dialogue, and settings and actions that feel true (even if they’re fantastical), all stitched together seamlessly with felicitous prose. More than a single author may be involved in this act of artistic creation – a good editor or other collaborator may make crucial contributions, for instance – but it must come to the reader as a harmonious whole (even if it comes in installments).

I agree with Mod that the shift of books from pages to screens will change the way we read books and hence, in time, the way writers write them, but I think his assessment of how those changes will play out is wrongheaded. (See also Alan Jacobs’s take, which questions another of Mod’s assumptions.) A usable encyclopedia article can, as Wikipedia has shown us, be constructed, “continuously and in real time,” by a dispersed group of writers and editors with various talents. But it’s a fallacy to believe that what works for an encyclopedia will also work for a novel or a tale. We read and evaluate encyclopedia articles in a completely different way from how we read and evaluate stories. An encyclopedia article can be “good enough”; a story has to be good.

If your ability to make money hinges on keeping people in the dark, there’s nothing quite so discombobulating as the prospect of someone turning on the light.

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission recommended the establishment of a Do Not Track program for the Internet. The program would give people a simple way to block companies from collecting personal data about them, data that is today routinely collected and used for targeted, or “behavioral,” advertising. The Do Not Track program, which in some ways would be similar to the popular Do Not Call program for blocking telemarketers, is part of a broader FTC effort to, as David Vladeck, director of the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, described in Congressional testimony last Thursday, “improve the transparency of businesses’ data practices, simplify the ability of consumers to exercise choices about how their information is collected and used, and ensure that businesses take privacy-protective measures as they develop and implement systems that involve consumer information,” while at the same time being “cautious about restricting the exchange and use of consumer data in order to preserve the substantial consumer benefits made possible through the flow of information.”

Vladeck noted in his testimony that, despite the fact that concerns about online privacy have been growing for years, the digital media and advertising industry’s self-regulation efforts have on the whole been scattershot, confusing, and insufficient. Given “these limitations,” Vladek said,

the Commission supports a more uniform and comprehensive consumer choice mechanism for online behavioral advertising, sometimes referred to as “Do Not Track.” The most practical method of providing uniform choice for online behavioral advertising would likely involve placing a setting similar to a persistent cookie on a consumer’s browser, and conveying that setting to sites that the browser visits, to signal whether or not the consumer wants to be tracked or receive targeted advertisements. To be effective, there must be an enforceable requirement that sites honor those choices.

Such a mechanism would ensure that consumers would not have to exercise choices on a company-by-company or industry-by-industry basis, and that such choices would be persistent. It should also address some of the concerns with the existing browser mechanisms, by being more clear, easy-to-locate, and effective, and by conveying directly to websites the user’s choice to opt out of tracking. Such a universal mechanism could be accomplished through legislation or potentially through robust, enforceable self-regulation.

Vladek also made it clear that the FTC recognizes that “consumers may want more granular options” than a universal opt-out: “We therefore urge Congress to consider whether a uniform and comprehensive choice mechanism should include an option that enables consumers to control the types of advertising they want to receive and the types of data they are willing to have collected about them, in addition to providing the option to opt out completely.”

It has been amusing to watch the companies that have an interest in the surreptitious collection of personal information struggle to find ways to criticize the FTC’s sensible proposal. In an article in today’s New York Times, for example, several online advertising executives air some remarkably lame objections. “The do-not-track button holds far more complexities than the designers of the framework envision,” intones John Montgomery, the chief operating officer of the digital division of ad giant WPP. “If a number of consumers opt out, it might limit the ability for companies to monetize the Internet.” Yes, and if a number of consumers decide not to shop at Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart might not make as much money. And if a number of consumers decide to cancel their newspaper and magazine subscriptions, it might limit the ability of companies to monetize the printed page. I believe that’s called freedom of choice, and it seems to me that consumers should be entrusted with that choice rather than having the choice made for them, secretly, by Montgomery and his ilk.

Montgomery also warns that by opting out of behavioral advertising, consumers would lose the benefits of such advertising. “With behavioral tracking,” he says, by way of example, “women will not get ads for Viagra and men will not see ads for feminine hygiene products.” This is very true. There would be a tradeoff involved in choosing the Do Not Track option. But, again, shouldn’t people be able to make that tradeoff consciously rather than blindly, as is currently the case? Here, too, Montgomery seems to be arguing that people are incapable of making rational choices. Or maybe he’s just afraid of the choices they would make if they were given the opportunity to make them.

Another commonly stated objection to Do Not Track is that, by making online advertising less effective, it could lead to a reduction in the amount of content and the number of services given away free online. Adam Thierer, the former president of the libertarian Progress & Freedom Foundation, makes this case at the Technology Liberation Front blog: “Most importantly, if ‘Do Not Track’ really did work as billed, it could fundamentally upend the unwritten quid pro quo that governs online content and services: Consumers get lots of ‘free’ sites, services, and content, but only if we generally agree to trade some data about ourselves and have ads served up. After all, as we’ve noted many times before here, there is no free lunch.” Note Thierer’s use of the terms “unwritten quid pro quo” and “generally agree.” What the FTC is suggesting is that the unwritten quid pro quo be written, and that the general agreement be made specific. Does Thierer really believe that invisible tradeoffs are somehow better than visible ones? Shouldn’t people know the cost of “free” services, and then be allowed to make decisions based on their own cost-benefit analysis? Isn’t that the essence of the free market that Thierer so eloquently celebrates?

There may be valid arguments to make against a Do Not Track program – some of the technical details remain fuzzy, and government regulation, if done clumsily, can impede innovation – but the suggestion that people shouldn’t be allowed to make informed choices about their privacy because some businesses may suffer as a result of those choices is ludicrous and even offensive. Like most people, I have the capacity to understand that, should I choose the Do Not Track option, I may on occasion see an ad for tampons where otherwise I would have seen an ad for erectile dysfunction tablets. In fact, I’m already girding my loins in preparation for such a calamitous eventuality. I think I may survive.