The "etym" is the fundamental 'bit' in the Joycean world, just as the atom is in the physical world. For Joyce, TV's annihilating of the 'etym' is as significant as in the realm of culture as the potentiality of destroying the atom in the physical world. Since, however, neither etym nor atom disappears as a result of the contemporary challenge, the process is abnihilisation, not actually a destruction.
Donald Theall
Beyond the Word,
1998
In the spring of 1928 when the Swiss art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker first visited James at his flat in Paris, their conversation included a highly suggestive interchange about technology. She reports that Joyce asked, "Tell me what sort of an idea do you think the word 'automobile' would have aroused in the middle ages," and without waiting for a reply, he continued, "Certainly only that of a divine being, a self mover, thus a god." ... Recollecting that original conversation, she observes that there is a cultural project central to the Wake by which, "from a key word and the conceptions it aroused, Joyce wanted to crystalize a cultural state, or better yet the cultural crisis of a century. For god and technology had moved critically close to each other.
Donald Theall, James Joyce's Techno-Poetics, 1997
In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan came to be for the populace the prophet of the death of the book, since many commentators transformed his observations on these problems into an unqualified prediction and endorsement of that death. What actually has been implied as taking place in this process is not the movement beyond a particular medium, such as the book or print, but a movement beyond the very idea of a unique communication medium. The appearance of new methods of technological production, reproduction, and distribution permitted the possibility of transcending traditionally recognized modes and returning to the original vision of the poetic as a concept which could simultaneously embrace various modes of communication, as in Aristotle's treatment of drama in the Poetics. Joyce represents a monumental movement beyond media--itself a comic commentary on McLuhan and his commentators.
Don Theall, Beyond the Word, 1995
