Saturday, August 30, 2008

Surf Music

It is Saturday night, and I'm listening to Rockin' John's show I like it Like That on WORT. He's playing some surf guitar music. There are several layers of media at work here... Surf rock music, recorded, played on radio.

Surf music began in the 1960's, before the World Wide Web. In the 1990s, the Web was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The process of navigating the web came to be called surfing.

McLuhan used Edgar Allen Poe's A Descent into the Maelström to illustrate the swirling, whirlpool effects of the modern world of electronic communication - and this was almost 30 years before the emergence of the Internet.

McLuhan also described a cultural change fostered and encouraged by electronic communications: the change from information classification to pattern recognition - surfing.

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