The Perpetual Nomad

All this information and more has overtly, osmotically, or perhaps inadvertently damaged a collective sense of time that has been working well enough since the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the middle classes. This "timesickness" is probably what killed the economy, and God only knows what it's up to next. Everywhere we look, people are making online links--to conspiracy, porn, and gossip sites; to medical data sites and genetics sites; to baseball sites and sites for Fiestaware collectors; to sites where they can access free movies and free TV, arrange hookups with old flames or taunt old enemies--and time has begun to erase the twentieth century way of structuring one's day and locating one's sense of community. People are now doing their deepest thinking and making their most emotionally charged connections with people around the planet at all times of the day. Geography has become irrelevant. Our online phantom world has become the new us. We create complex webs of information and people who support us, and yet they are fleeting, so tenuous. Time speeds up and then it begins to shrink. Years pass by in minutes. Life becomes that strange experience in which you're zooming along a freeway and suddenly realize that you haven't paid any attention to driving for the last fifteen minutes, yet you're still alive and didn't crash. The voice inside your head has become a different voice. It used to be "you." Now your voice is that of a perpetual nomad drifting along a melting landscape, living day to day, expecting everything and nothing.


Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: 
You Know Nothing of My Work!
2009

Technological Determinism

The consequences for literature that stem from major changes in technology are only inevitable to the extent that they are unforeseen. Determinism is the result of the behavior of those who are determined to ignore what is happening around them. Recognition of the psychic and social consequences of technological change makes it possible to neutralize the effects of innovation. If we maintain lively dialogue with, and among, the technologies, we can enlist them on the side of traditional values instead of watching those values disappear while we play the helpless bystanders.


Marshall McLuhan, Letters of Marshall McLuhan