“What do you think Marshall McLuhan would have said about ebooks?How do they change the message of books?” | Edge.org
▻https://www.edge.org/conversation/eva_wisten-what-do-you-think-marshall-mcluhan-would-have-said-about-ebookshow-
Nicholas G. Carr (Author, Utopia is Creepy) :
McLuhan pointed out the initial content of a new medium is the old medium it replaces, and we seem to be in that phase with ebooks—the content of today’s ebooks is print books. What that also means is that we don’t yet know what an ebook really is, because it has yet to take its true shape. But there is an important hint: we can see in the web itself what a computerized, networked, screen medium looks like, and that’s likely to be a closer model for the ultimate form of an ebook than an old printed book is. So if a printed book served as, to borrow Robert Frost’s phrase, “a momentary stay against confusion,” an ebook will likely serve as a further indulgence in confusion. (And I mean “confusion” in all its meanings: a mingling together, a jumble, bafflement.)