Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06350_Field_TCUP T5.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 1KB | 16 lines

    Now, however, in the electronic age, data classification yields
to pattern recognition, the key phrase at IBM. When data move
instantly, classification is too fragmentary. In order to cope
with data at electric speed in typical situations of “information
overload,” men resort to the study of configurations, like the
sailor in Edgar Allan Poe’s Maelstrom . The drop-out situation in
our schools at present has only begun to develop. The young
student today grows up in an electrically configured world. It is
a world not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments but of
integral patterns. The student today lives  mythically and in
depth. At school, however, he encounters a situation organized
by means of classified information. The subjects are unrelated.
They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. The student
can find no possible means of involvement for himself, nor can
he discover how the educational scene relates to the “mythic”
world of electronically processed data and experience that he