INTEGRATIVE HYPERMEDIA

The Telegraph of the mid-nineteenth century signaled the end of the printed word’s reign, and as the further development of electronic mediums chipped away at the monopoly of printed mediums, vision-oriented humans rediscovered their sensual balance of the past, managing to become multi-sensual beings once again.

In McLuhan’s narrative, electronic mediums are not rational but emotional, and more tactile than they are visual, more integrative and fusing than they are analytic or fragmentary. The hypermedia that forms the core of today’s digital convergence is the hybrid medium that McLuhan predicted, an integrative form that has achieved groundbreaking development across art, film, television, and computer science. The experiments of the twentieth century’s avant-garde artists, such as multimedia and montage techniques, were then combined with the ideas of thinkers in cutting-edge computer technology and science fiction, resulting in the multi-sensual, non-linear digital mediums conceived in the twenty-first century.

What do you think of McLuhan’s thinking that narrative, electronic mediums are not rational but emotional, more tactile than visual, more integrative and fusing than they are analytic or fragmentary?