1. Hypertext The rise of electronic media has brought about an Age of Connectivity .

2. This man may have predicted it. The rise of electronic media has brought about an Age of Connectivity .

3. His work defined the field of media theory. The argument describes four types of culture.

4. oral culture manuscript culture typographic culture electronic culture participation control collage linear perspective

5. For McLuhan, the paradigmatic electronic medium was television . Neil Postman did not like this.

6. a medium that privileges emotion a medium that privileges reason Enter hypertext .

7. oppositions overcome. Enter hypertext . hot/cool producer/consumer oral/typographic

8. a different textual medium requires As Ted Nelson said, a different way of writing text.

9. dynamic static hierarchy collage Hypertext Structure on the Grid Yahoo Victorian Web Blogs Wikipedia flickr del.icio.us User recs. Google

11. Its promise… When we post and…tag pictures on … Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions . -Kevin Kelly, Wired [Electronic communication promises a] Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. -Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

12. … and peril. … [T]he cosmic membrane that has been snapped round the globe by the electric dilation of our various senses [has become] a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer…And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence…Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. -Marshall McLuhan, ibid.