Roger, your writing of the past couple of years has been simply amazing. There's very little writing I would call breathtaking, but yours is among it (you just throw out those Gorsky lines!). You've been hitting that poignancy that I think of with Mozart...wistful but funny. All too aware and yet compassionate. You've always been a talent, of course, but IMHO, this medium and this age have brought out your best.

(Incidentally, I still sometimes can't believe that AI ending made it through Hollywood. It's an "Ozymandias" moment almost despite Hollywood's best efforts.)

So why does someone write comments like these? I dunno. I don't write many of them. But while there's a chance you'll hear it, I guess I'd just like to say it to you: Thank you for writing about movies with such grounded intelligence.

D'oh. "Gorky," even.

"Most people...still cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world."

Perhaps Joni Mitchell put it more succinctly: "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone."

Maybe you can answer me this, and tell me how it changes or reinforces your understanding: McLuhan actually wrote "The Medium is the Massage," not the "message." Most people don't get this. Why do people get it wrong? Is McLuhan also saying something about how particular media alter our ability to see what's in front of us?

The only person I've seen even acknowledge this shift in word is Ian Austen in today's New York Times, but he doesn't really talk about it. This shift is a phenomenon I've always found fascinating. Even if McLuhan said "the medium is the message," his book title wasn't that. Yet most people list that as the book title.

Ebert: McLuhan wrote "the medium is the message" in his book Understanding Media. He co-authored another book named The Medium is the Massage.

You nailed it but good, Roger. This is what I've been trying to say to younger relatives and acquaintances of mine for years. You know, the type who gasp in genuine astonishment when they find out I don't text or play video games.

Wow. What a lyrically beautiful insightful masterpiece of a post.

I savored this writing. Lingering over it. Treasuring it.

I can't stop staring at the photo of the turntable and the vinyl LP. I have a box full of 100 or so LPs in my garage that I can't bring myself to throw away. They are tangible history. I may never hear them again, but I can't bring myself to not have them. As I stare at the picture, I'm remembering my pre-teen self upstairs in my room living life through that turntable. Elton John. Michael Jackson's "Ben". Jermaine Jackson. How about putting the little clip in to be able to play 45 singles? Wow. This article is a time machine.

I'm with you on the digital age. It's ethereal. Lacking in substance. I can and do play in the world of digital immersion, but it's a degraded experience from what we had then.

I have a bonding game with my sons. They'll have something in their hand like a cell phone. I'll say "Do you know what kind of cell phone I had when I was a kid?" They'll get an exasperated voice and say"Dad! You didn't have a cell phone when you were a kid! Your life must have sucked." No. No it didn't. I think it's them that are missing out.

I can remember many many many movie experiences as events. What theater I saw it in. How it impacted me. Etc. How impactful is it to watch it on your phone?

First pass on this article makes me sad. My world is visible. And gone.

I'll get different things out of it as I read it more. And I will read it again.

Wow. So much here.

Reminds me of "Midnight in Paris" and that nostalgic longing for a golden age, only to realize that the present is the golden age for the emerging generation.

And I too love reading books, actual books, the ones you can peruse in a musty store, the ones where you can smell its years in its pages. I received a Kindle as a birthday gift; it's currently resting nicely under a David Foster Wallace novel.

I wonder if this same philosophy can be applied to one's own retrospective view of their life toward the end of it.

We can be introspective about our life and progress and regrets and lessons learned throughout the journey, but is it not a more poignant moment when looking back when facing your own mortality? Aren't we always facing our own mortality, you may say?
Perhaps.

I think if someone is fortunate enough to reach their "twilight years" and perhaps even "feel" their end approaching, their perspective on the world and their own life has to be different. It must be.

There is no new environment after death as far as I'm concerned. With that knowledge, facing the edge of oblivion, will my life come into focus differently? Or will I simply smile knowingly and learnedly, accepting my fate?

You're a wise man. I love reading your posts. To be as thoughtful as you are proves you digest what you read and truly absorb it's lessons and observations. You are what you eat, as they say.

The rear-view mirror "outlook" made me think of how the Maginot Line was rendered irrelevant by the development of the airplane; and yet by and large the aims and strategies of warfare remained unchanged. And while the ever increasing pace of technology has placed more and more sophisticated and powerful tools in the hands of more and more story tellers, the basic aims and strategies of storytelling remain unchanged. What I learned from reading your movie reviews in the early 70's on up through television and now in this precious corner of the internet, is this: in addition to the immediate visceral experience of the imparting of a story, what is the story and how well was it told. As I get older and less affected by the immediacy of popular culture, I can see past the ephemeral temporal trappings of a story, be it language, fashion or societal convention, and recognize the story and the art in its telling. And though the landscape and language of video games may feel like terra incognito to you; and the latest advancements in dimensional rendering and delivery of the story may be novel, the basics still apply. For the medium is not the message, the story is the message, and the medium is merely the arena and manner in which it's told. And with the means of production in the hands of the many, and the means of distribution more egalitarian than ever, there is just that much more horseshit to wade through to find the true gems. And the aims and strategies of criticism that I learned from you, will never be rendered irrelevant, and never fail to direct an audience past the sensational sideshows of bluster and bunk and onward to those stories that will be cherished and passed on from generation to generation. Thanks, Roger.

What - like this?

http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2011/07/26/email-10-years-ago-vs-now-cartoon/

Here in Canada, we are even more prone to quoting McLuhan without really understanding him. And yet, we probably understand him better simply because he was Canadian. We do, after all, have a unique and privileged vantage point when it comes to American politics and culture.

nice post. i have seen the video. and agree with kevin said:You nailed it but good, Roger. This is what I've been trying to say to younger relatives and acquaintances of mine for years. You know, the type who gasp in genuine astonishment when they find out I don't text or play video games.

why can't i post a comment??

Nostalgia......that's the viewpoint of the past....what makes it come alive and be seen. I think people enjoy the past, even if it was a bore or a bother to get through at that time. We tend to forget what we felt and simply think it was all a marvel. A familiar marvel, like the bottom of your foot. It's there yet you dont see it really anymore. The 'medium' is simply a lense, a tool to convey information with. What you feel is the uncomfortable realization that even children can now enjoy the things you felt in your hands with just the click of a button. This is progress. Nostalgia is nothing new.

McLuhan thought that each new medium altered our central nervous system and became extensions of our own bodies so that the medium, as opposed to the content, was the message. So whether one is watching Bergman or "Pulp friction" is irrelevant to the medium's effect; what matters is how the fact of watching television alters who we are. I'm exceptionally fond of my copy of "Understanding media: the extensions of man" for quoting Umberto Eco on the back cover: the medium is not the message.

Nevertheless he writes gloriously and intricately with a deep range of sources (including Joyce and Shakespeare whom he quotes relentlessly) and pulls them altogether into a semi-cohesive thesis. I love him, that's enough for me. Just don't ask me which mediums are 'hot' and 'cold' in his system and why the exact opposite is true in Russia.

Very nicely put. In a way the rear view mirror effect seems like a version of what might be called the Tocqueville effect - which makes it impossible for us to understand ourselves until an outsider explains to us who we are.

I'm at a terrible stage in which I refuse to buy new technology like Blue-ray because, without knowing what's next, I'm convinced this is yet another temporary technology in which I'm going to spend too much money, only to soon realize that, like my DVD collection,, it will soon be obsolette.
Sometimes I wish they would simply hit the "pause button" on new technology until I leave this world.
This one is up there with one of your best blogs Roger. Thanks.

Bless my soul! I've been thinking about Marshall McLuhan for weeks. In truth, I've been looking for a reason to write "the medium is the message," but no one's offered me even a subconscious cue, and young Ebert here has beat me to it.

I used to get McLuhan mixed up with Frank Lloyd Wright. Both were architects-of-perspective, both praised higher than their accomplishments, whereas no one has done better altogether.

Uh oh. Roger's essay has disappeared. I wonder if this thing works. Better give it a try and see.

As I progress in age, I always try to keep up with the times and new mediums. I have iPods, a Kindle, and an iPad. I use them all a great deal and enjoy them.

What I find disturbing is that many of the old methods (that are close to disappearing forever) are so much richer than the digital replacements.

Listening to a vinyl LP is so much richer sounding than an Mp3. The sound is so much more dynamic, powerful, and life-like.

What about having a talk with a group of friends at a party vs exchanges on Facebook.

I fear that as we continue down this road of replacing analog with digital, that we also are creating a watered-down existence.

McLuhan is among my favorite theorists, a poet of ideas. Part of that poetry is that all of his ideas have a vaporous uncertainty about them, a feeling that they'll never be 100% proven true, but that there's always a seed of truth buried in them. I find his final book, published posthumously -- The Laws of Media -- to be among his strangest and most provocative, but like much of his work, it's elusive and requires some patience to come to grips with.

I just finished Proust's Swann's Way on the screen of an e-reader, read almost entirely on the New York subway. It was a rare experience, earth-shattering, but gentle, like an earthquake in slow motion. I know that, as McLuhan said, the medium affected the reading experience... for instance, I had, and still have, no sense of how big an accomplishment that was, in terms of volume of words. In the past, that's something I've understood from the thickness of the volume and the size of the type. On the e-reader, it may be as long as Infinite Jest, or as short as Curious George, and I wouldn't know. Even so, I think Proust's wit, his keen and snarky observations, and his love for his characters, in all their flaws and absurdities... I think that still shines through, even when it's coming from a little touch-screen.

I created a video montage on McLuhan not long ago, extrapolating his ideas of visual and audio culture into something about tactile culture. If you're familiar with any of that era of his work, feel free to take a look: http://www.vimeo.com/25752760

Thank you for the beautiful piece. So timely for me as I have recently downsized and am having the hardest time parting with "stuff," namely books, records, cassettes, movies, CDs -- and I'm not sure why. Somehow, I feel if I get rid of the "evidence," I will forget that I ever read/watched/listened to them. So, I cling...

Ebert: Yeah, how can I throw away anything that has my eye-tracks and ear-tracks all over it?

I can see why Steampunk appeals to you ;)

My son, who turns 19 next week, has an interesting approach to technology. Unlike many of his peers, he doesn't restrict himself to just the latest thing - he consumes *all* of it.

He reads books from books when he's at home, but he also listens to audio books on his MP3 player when he's out and about. He has an enormous amount of music on there as well of course, but it comes from a wide range of sources. Some he downloaded directly from the internet, some is from CDs he purchased, and a great deal of it came from mining our vinyl collection - and even my parents' old jazz 78s - and converting them to digital through his USB turntable.

Take him to a flea market and he'll make a bee line straight for the records. And yes, when he's at home he will happily listen to them with a needle and turntable.

As for me, I still have a collection of VHS tapes of movies I've been unable to find on DVD, but we're converting them to digital now because the tape is degrading. That's not an aesthetic choice - it's a practical one. I don't care as long as I can still watch 'Erik the Viking', or 'H', or 'Prospero's Books', or 'Utu'. Frankly, I enjoy watching the old tapes just to see the trailers for other old movies that have long been forgotten.

I guess my point is, just because you embrace a new technology doesn't mean you have to abandon the old one. Some things are more practical in certain circumstances, others have an aesthetic appeal. There's no reason why you can't have it all - you just have to be careful to preserve those bits of past technology in case you want to use them again. And people are: vinyl LPs, Super 8 cameras, Kodachrome film, repertory theatres, even old Atari computers are all enjoying a resurgence - and not just with old farts like us.

Roger,

I was once at a conference where someone said:

Technology is only technology to those who were born before it was invented.

To me, my iPhone is "technology" because it came along well into the course of my life; to my 5yr old son, it's not "technology" at all - it's just the thing he plays Angry Birds on when I'm not using it to check email, update my calendar, text my wife, check for movie showtimes, take pictures, listen to music or amazingly enough, make & receive phone calls.

Even that sentence alone speaks volumes about where he stands (culturally) at the age of 5...hand held, high quality video games - mobile email - electronic calendars - texting - wireless internet access - digital music files - 3G cellular phones...ALL of these are "technology" to me; NONE of them are to him.

P.s. My dad is a librarian. Several years ago I asked him for his thoughts on e-books, Kindles, etc. "That's all well and good," he said, "but they'll never replace the experience of curling up under a blanket, next to a fire, with a good old fashioned book."

Great article Roger and a special thanks for showing my favorite comedy scene in any film. By the way, how did Woody Allen convince Marshall McLuhan to appear in "Annie Hall". I have read many interviews Allen has done and none mention him doing the scene with Mr. McLuhan. Do you have any insight on this?

After getting a degree in Media Studies and entering into the "real world" I was surprised to find out that few people had ever heard of McLuhan. It was wonderful to hear yet another fresh take on his musing.

But what made this post so memorable for me was that, if you replaced books and cinema with television and video games, it would speak to how I feel today.

Being raised on those two mediums, I understand what you mean in terms of living in an invisible world. It has also helped me better understand you stance on video games. Although I do hope you find one you enjoy someday. In return I will continue to read physical books more vigorously and frequently

Mr. Ebert, you need to give yourself more credit. You have embraced the digital age with gusto -- this very blog and your wonderful writing here is evidence of that. You have been an "early adopter." And what does it say that you apparently believe that what you write still conveys the same power in this digital form as it would in print?

What you are doing is trying to find and appreciate whichever medium conveys content to its greatest advantage. Sometimes that is ink on paper, or a needle on a groove, or black and white. You have the benefit of knowing the value of older forms of media. Many young adults of the digital age prefer the sound of LPs to MP3s, but they had to make that discovery in reverse. I adore black and white movies and TV, although I grew up in a color era. I'm with you that at least so far, 3D is no advancement over 2D.

I complain about cell phone coverage like everyone, but every so often I am struck by the idea that I'm complaining I can't make a phone call from a beach or a mountain pass. We adapt so quickly to the new technology that it becomes had to remember that phone calls used to be made at home or from a pay phone. It's fun watching the old Columbo episodes and seeing him check in with the office so they know where to forward calls.

Even the idea that I write this and Roger Ebert might actually read it is kind of amazing.

I'm reminded of this quote from Joe vs the Volcano: "My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement."

Lovely and lucid thoughts. Je suis en accord completement.

Roger, you summed up in this piece exactly how I felt a few years ago when I realized there was a YouTube video available for a song I'd heard more than 40 years ago on the radio but had not heard in all that time since. I eagerly clicked on the video, whose audio track was, of course, the song, but whose video portion, at least partially, consisted of the record itself playing on a turntable. Until I watched that video, I realized, I had forgotten what watching a record play felt like, and the strange kind of rhythmic pleasure it provided, seeing a record on a turntable, the tone arm gently bobbing a bit from side to side as the needle traveled its course through the track of the groove, slowly moving toward the center label as the record spun 'round and 'round. It had been so long since I'd actually seen that mechanical process--I discarded my last turntable decades ago, and have played countless cassettes, CDs and MP3s for music since--that to watch it again was like coming back to some vacation spot I hadn't visited in ages. I was surprised at how much I actually enjoyed it. I imagine I might feel strangely the same about looping my finger into the holes on a rotary phone dial, pushing the hole up against the little metal clip and then letting it go, hearing the satisfying sound as it whirls back into place.

I have high-speed Internet that connects noiselessly, but to the day I die, I will probably remember the sound of the static and screeches and honks of a phone line on a modem as it made the dial-up connection, and how it used to excite me back in the days when it was still the way I got onto the Internet.

I realize my nieces will never feel about vinyl records or rotary dials or dial-up Internet the way I do. But I suspect that at some point, they may become similarly nostalgic about the type of keyboard on which they used to thumb out text messages on their phones when they were kids. The mere sight of one of those keyboards, someday, will bring back fond memories, and actually touching one will make them feel as if they could almost flick a thumb and once again be gossiping and sharing secrets with old school friends they haven't seen in years. This is something their children, in turn, will laugh and shake their heads at, as proof that their moms are hopeless old ladies.

I agree with you about not liking to read on Kindle. I Love Books! (and I will miss them)

Ebert: I hope books are not going away anytime soon.

Mr. Ebert, Thank you for your intelligent writings. I have learned so much from you. You are one of my great teachers. Long Live Ebert. We LOVE you.

It's not just technology advances or new media. Our brains are hard-wired to reject disorder. As McLuhan also said, changes in the world (or "revolutions") never look like breakthroughs, they look like chaos. DH Lawrence put it even better. He wrote that we are all walking around with parasols over our heads with a painted facsimile of the universe -the sun, moon, stars, galaxies- painted on the undersurface. So that when we look up all we ever see is the facsimile, the "fake" cosmos, the universe we're comfortable with and never want to see changed. He goes on to say that every now and then something comes along to tear a hole in that parasol so that for a brief while we see the real universe beyond. It can often be a terrifying event, usually breathtaking, possibly inspiring. He's talking about poetry doing the parasol-ripping, but really it can be any kind of art, or life experience, a religious awakening, intellectual awakening, etc. He warns, however, that no sooner do we get that glimpse, we patch that hole over with a simulacrum we've just seen so that our parasols as we go through life reflect a patchwork of various universes that is inspired by, but never quite achieves, the true chaos of the universe.
Here is the link to his essay: http://www.fascicle.com/issue03/essays/lawrence1.htm

I envy you. In a healthy manner, but, indeed, I envy you. I envy the past generations. Because things were harder, there was passion on how things were done. I slowly see how my favourite directors has gone away, some of them even before I was born. Lumet, Tarkovsky, Bergman, Truffaut- one day, Herzog will be dead, and a complete style of cinema will go with him. And that scares me.

It's hard to convince people to go see a great film, because you can't pitch it to them- and I'm talking here about my mother, my sister, my friends. Most people want just the easy way. Video games can be entertaining, yes, and they are a big part of my life, but there's not a lesson to learn in most of them. They jumped from the early experimental phase directly into bad exploitation. Top 10 game titles of the year- just guys with guns killing the bad guys.

And the top 10 movie titles? We can rejoice at least in the fact that we still have the Coens, the Scorseses, the Tarantinos, the Kitanos. But one day they'll die too, and there will be only small YouTube-based directors, mostly great CGI and funny moments, but no core, no soul- no great questions, not a lesson to learn. And we're losing this existencialism in a hipsterical world of uncaring, bored people. And it's easy to lose the faith in humanity, and in greatness, but when in doubt, I go to the movies.

- M Janet Mars

Very good read - couple of points.

We do and we don't look in the rear view mirror. The fact that your Sun Times article came to me by Twitter, over the internet and included YouTube video clips says you and we are all moving forward and becoming participants in the new world.

The fact that I and others have left comments that can be seen instantly around the world says we have left the past, with its letters to the Editor or grumbling to ourselves into the vast blackness of space.

As for the McLuhan misquote on Message v Massage, here's what McLuhan's son says about that (again instantly available unlike the Woody Allen movie)

"Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter’s, it had on the cover “Massage” as it still does. The title was supposed to have read “The Medium is the Message” but the typesetter had made an error. When Marshall saw the typo he exclaimed, “Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!”

"Now there are four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: “Message” and “Mess Age,” “Massage” and “Mass Age.” "

Thanks for the article and a lifetime dedicated to writing.

Ebert: Yeah, how can I throw away anything that has my eye-tracks and ear-tracks all over it?

Things! Ears, eyes! The intention is not to remind you of mortality. But travelling light is nice!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VanGogh_Bedroom_Arles1.jpg

I walk through the streets of Manhattan and count the people on cell phones, then count those that make eye contact with me.

I work in an information driven industry, never before has there been so much at my finger tips, and never before have I felt the pressure to know so much.

I listen to 30 seconds of a song, watch 5 mins of a basketball game, and read 2 paragraphs before I move to something else.

I know the intimate details of relatives from Facebook posts, yet have no real relationship with them.

I have nearly every song, every tv show, and every movie available at my whim. Yet, I consume less of these than at any other point in my life.

Today's technological advances are amazing, but they are not wondrous. Our scientists build elaborate algorithms to bring us more, efficiently and rapidly.

Gone are the grand quests, the scientific adventures that led to the moon, and promised a trip to mars.

I am elated that I have my wish to have it all. But, if the medium is the message, then the message is "I'm tired".

@dumbricht

Apart from Annie Hall, the best film image of MacLuhan I'd had in my head was the roman-a-clef character of Brian O'Blivion from David Cronenberg's "Videodrome": A so-called "media prophet" who only appeared in interviews on videotape, and spouted impenetrable isolated buzz-quotes about video and the mass media--And as it turned out, there was a reason for that (SPOILER WARNING), as he'd died years before, and his interview tapes were now being redistributed at random, since they never had anything to do with the conversation anyway, and nobody would know the difference. ;)

That image of, "Um....o-kayyy? 0_o? " always stuck in my head as symbolic of MacLuhan's influence in the 60's vs. today:
Saying that "The media is the message" or calling TV "a vast wasteland" was the sort of quote that got on the cover of Time for being "provocative", back when it either never occurred or seemed sacrilegious to say that I Love Lucy reruns had any sort of social effect on the public when they could be watching Edward R. Murrow.
Today, though, in the '10's--now that broadcast network TV has become a ghost town, shows come and go without schedules, shows air only as a courtesy to advertisers while networks remind us we can download them to our iPad, and series have now balkanized into either serial-arc dramas for the faithful, or "America's Got Talent" five nights a week for the channel-clicking audience that wants a disposable hour of vaudeville--we look back at 70's and 80's "media essays" and say "Ohh, isn't that quaint, that was back when people watched TV, remember?"

(Which's now become one of my rear-view mirrors: I've dug up classic reruns on Netflix, just to have to watch something of an evening, and never quite appreciated just how GOOD we had it to know specifically what comfort-food story we'd be told on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, or to know that everyone at school would have been watching the same movie at the same time.)

Thank you Roger! This made me smile.

Early this morning I wrote a story about your Great Movies series (http://www.chicagonow.com/eye-on-chi/2011/07/great-writing-and-great-films-with-roger-ebert-and-se7en-2/) commenting on how your gifts as a writer snuck up on me over many years of reading your work just as a film's greatness can sneak up on us after many viewings. The story was as much about my love of the cinema as yours, and how your work has helped enrich my appreciation of that medium. So I was delighted to find this post as you explore your own feelings toward the ever-changing media landscape.

I am also moved by the expressiveness and poetry in the comment section. I turn 30 this year, still a young man, and I gather that most of the commenters above are 15 to 20 years older than me, at least. I don't know if they have spent as much time writing as have I, or if they consider themselves writers, but I do know that they are naturals at expressing themselves through the written word. I still struggle with word choice and succinct expression, and I find the writers younger than me -- my former students or writers whom I've edited for a student-run magazine program where I work -- hold even less command of the language. They can express themselves just fine, I suppose, but the receiver of the language needs to fill in more gaps, make more assumptions about the meaning of each "whatever" and "you know" and "right?" Their vocabularies are smaller: I am reminded of Syme from 1984, the man who delights in the fact that by 2050, the English language of Oceania will be pared down so tightly that only the most basic ideas will be able to be expressed.

I read old journals that my grandfather kept, or sportswriting of the early 20th century, or old novelists, and find that people seemed to be naturally gifted writers because of practice and an emphasis on the value of vocabulary, handwriting, depth and shade of meaning, and written language. I feel like those traits come less naturally to me, because of schooling and childhood television time...

...and yet here I am being nostalgic for a time gone by, (like Leon above said), just as grade school kids will one day be nostalgic for the days when video games were handheld and not implanted, when films were 3D and not 4D, or whatever their nostalgia shall be. Is this stupid? Should we just roll with whatever technology comes along? I mean, Roger, your career and visibility has blown up with new media -- Twitter, blogging, and the ability to watch old S&E episodes on YouTube. Is the old technology truly obsolete, or do we simply have more options than ever before of how to experience life and art? You have the option to read Bleak House from a Kindle, or to read your copy that will "[fall] open to the page and [sit] on your lap with authority." Isn't that choice better than just the book?

And round and round we go. Thanks for keeping me thinking. Time to get off this computer and take a walk...

This is an incredible piece which I feel a connection to in a number of ways. Your words are inspiring.

I'm currently in the process of completing my education degree, and had the pleasure of teaching a great group of 13-year-olds this spring. Seeing the world through the eyes of digital natives was quite the experience, as I came to realize how prevalent Google, Facebook, YouTube, and iPods (to name a few) were in their lives. Many students were shocked to know that Google was only 13 years old, created in the same year they were born!

I find myself in a unique situation, straddling the analog and digital worlds (thanks for applauding me, Roger). I have found myself buying more and more books lately (they're piling up faster than I can read them!), perhaps fearful of a day when we lose the book as an artform, which appears likely if Google and Amazon have their ways. For all the time I spend reading books composed of atoms, I spend an equal (or greater) amount of time in the world of bits, reading blogs, playing videogames, and watching movies on my laptop (streamed wirelessly through my Xbox). I wonder if my generation represents the last of these digital-analog straddlers.

As a 20-something Canadian, I feel slighted that I was never introduced to Marshall McLuhan in my formal education. I came across his work through reading Neil Postman (for my own pleasure) during my teaching program, and have since delved deeper into The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and the aforementioned Playboy interview (which is excellent, by the way!). McLuhan's words are poetic and prophetic, and like most intellectual greats, I believe that his legacy will only grow with time. I hope to incorporate his work into my future classroom's lessons and activities.

If anyone's interested, I recently read Douglas Coupland's biography of Marshall McLuhan, and have posted a pseudoreview here: http://t.co/wupeb0K

For Sale Now on Ebay:

1950 Post Raisin Bran Cereal Box (Captain Video Spaceman Robot Figure enclosed)

Bidding now at $750. (till Aug.3)

Condition - Box and figurine pristine. Wax wrap wrinkled. Remaining raisins edible.

your piece was very insightful. It made me Stop and think ; it also spoke volumes about me - to myself. As a 60 year old man and a viewer of films for 55years, you have explained in 'beautiful' words what I was neither eloquent enough nor intuitive enough to understand about myself. Thank you.

Like layers of sediment, each new "environment" obscures, and eventually buries the one before, and the people of that environment get buried with it.

But there are always some treasures from the past that are worth digging for. Specifically, and having to do with your mention of the texture of language over the story it tells, I recently started through Finnegans Wake.

Superb, Roger. The most lucid and accessible explanation of generation gaps and future shock I've seen. Brilliant

who knew that we would become the firemen in Fahrenheit 451?

Being a Generation Xer, old enough to remember LPs and rotary phones and when remote controls for TVs were considered novelties but young enough to adjust to the new technology, I can appreciate the nostalgia and marvel at what's been achieved at the same time. I have an iPhone. Yes, I can make and receive phone calls on it. I can also check my e-mail, listen to anything in my music collection--32 gigabytes can hold a lot of tunes--read a book, watch a live baseball game, take fairly decent photographs (with flash if necessary), make out my grocery list, get a recipe for dinner, look up something on Google, find my destination in an unfamiliar city, check my bank balance, show someone a funny video, locate a store when I need something, etc., etc., etc. All on a device smaller than my hand (I have little hands too). That's pretty amazing. Technology may be maligned but it can also be a blessing. My 80-year-old aunt loves to read, but due to severe carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis she finds it difficult to hold anything larger than a thin magazine. My cousins got her a Kindle and she loves it because she can read books in bed comfortably again. Mark Twain's "The Innocents Abroad" is just as funny on a Kindle as it is in a gilt-edged leatherbound edition. "The Adventures of Robin Hood" looks pretty damn good on a 48" LCD. Trust me, there's young people out there who DO appreciate the old stuff. It's not going to die, it's just going to translate into new mediums.

He meant something specific too, didn't he? That engagement with a boob tube was the thing, and not what's on it at the time. Writing before Mad Men or Nielsen data, I suppose.

It has been a joy to acquaint myself with your blog over the past few months. This post resonated with me deeply. Your subject is something I've given a lot of thought to in the last couple of years. I think turning forty and realizing my "little kids" were now getting ready to enter junior high had much to do with my ruminations. I wrote a blog post last summer that I feel shares a kinship with your post and I'm including it here, in case you should want to read it.

http://thecenterholds.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/toy-story-3-and-tidal-waves-of-nostalgia/

Ebert: That is a lovely essay.
Thank you, Mr. Ebert, for a thought-provoking post and blog.

Note to self: go buy a turntable this week. How have I lived without one for so long?

Hope the old LPs are not too warped out in my garage...

McLuhan: "Most people...still cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world."

Actually, I would argue, we are at least two steps behind in our worldly perception because of the Heisenburg Principle. Of course, the common, non-scientific definition of this principle states that our mere belonging to our environment precludes our completely objective view of it. In other words, observation alters perception. I would also argue that because of the Heisenberg Principle, even perception of past events from a new environment is not "fully visible"; it is necessarily refracted (and perhaps sometimes distorted) by our accumulated knowledge and wisdom.

Your description of a book that "falls open to the page and sits on my lap with authority" gave this booklover a similar feeling of blinding clarity. Yes, "authority" is exactly the word.

I enjoy reading Latin, which means prowling though used book shops for out-of-print texts. Often when perusing an old volume I'll find notes from a previous owner--a comment that untangles an obscure meaning, a schoolboy's joke, or an absent-minded doodle. These marginalia never fail to delight me. More than just the scars of a worthy veteran, they're bottled messages long lost at sea, friendly tokens of kinship that span time and space. Given the choice between two copies of a book, I'll always take the marked-up version (and not just because it's usually cheaper:-). I believe you wrote something similar about the marked-up texts in Studs Terkel's library.

IMO no ephemeral e-book will ever match that. OK, some of the scans a Google Books are from marked-up copies, but still...what authority is there in 1's and 0's?

I don't mind technology, I just wish it came with a bit more romance. When I saw the picture of the old wood radio case it reminded me of a project I have in store to pull the guts out of just such a device and install a motherboard and modern computer parts. Then I'll wrap my monitor in brass and drop it on a marble base just like that Steampunk Workshop guy did. Why can't we have new technology that still looks good and retains a level of craftsmanship?
I may have to crank up the old lp player and pull out some vinyl tonight and listen while I nurse a brandy... and if I do I'll have a drink for you too...

Balzac's "Lost Illusions" is one of my favorite books.

I understand what you mean; I'm a assistent professor of Philosophy (who decided studying it after reading tagThe Brothers Karamazovtag when young) who sometimes still play videogames, mostly because they're a part of my youth. I've recently taught a course about the method of generations in History, and talking to students who are no more than ten years younger than me, there's already a clear divide between those who grew up in the digital age and those, like me, who still remember a world in which computers were glorified typewriters.

All I remember of Balzac is from Eugen O'Neill's 'Ah Wilderness!', in an argument, 'Balzac' is pronounced with incredulity creating a double entendre. What a movie! Wallace Beery as a drunken uncle, Lionel Barrymore, Cecilia Parker, even Mickey Rooney! Directed by Clarence Brown, screenplay by Goodrich and Hackett, a fine film. In the language of film from the language of the stage. I think, from reading comments, that so many readers ignore, really, the very depth of the simple expression 'the medium is the message'. It has religious, or rather spiritual, overt-tones. Our consciousness is formed in every moment to a degree of uncertain permanence by aspects of our experience that we can not control, because they have happened. That formative process creates a form. Experience is nothing less than the Journey of the Mind to God. This is the underlying message of McLuhan's work. It perceives everything in spiritual terms, it looks at trajectory.
'Balzac?'
'Balzac.'
'Balzac!'

In one of the comments above you say "Ebert: I hope books are not going away anytime soon. "
Living in Australia, I worry that books will indeed soon be things of the past. Two of our three major book seller chains have gone to the wall in the past few months. Thank God for Amazon and book Depository, but there is something special about going to a good book shop and turning the books over in your hands. There is something so intangible about online shopping, which renders it far less satisfying than actually browsing for a purchase.

A couple of final thoughts:

- That is a beautiful radio up above. I always wonder what televisions and the like would look like if they were around in the Art Deco period.

- "I was poking around on the internet, and came across this passage from the Playboy Interview with McLuhan" Poking around the internet huh? Sure, if you say so! ;-)

Don't forget, some of us young people are as obsessed with the rear view mirror as you are! I love LPs, I need to have a physical copy of all my movies and books to properly enjoy them (ebooks usually end up frustrating me), and though I do play a select few video games from time to time, I would for the most part much rather spend my time with Kurosawa or Ozu! The fact that I know I'll never be able to view some (read: all) of my favourite films on the big screen - or even see a third of the films Ozu made at all - is something that I find singularly frustrating and depressing. I just have to make a point of watching every single Kaufman movie that comes out from now on to assuage my feelings of remorse for being born so late!

My aunt repeatedly insists that someday in the late future, my newborn niece will be utilizing interfaces for video games that will completely escape my narrow mind. Let me assure you, THAT DAY WILL NEVER COME!!! I will however, be borrowing every piece of technology she can possibly loan me.

I have to say I disagree about it being "old." I think it more has to do about being warm. I think analog is warmer; there is a needle touching the tape, where as, with digital it is a laser beam reading...you get the idea. I also think the artist's kind of play off of that warmth and create a warmer product. And if one is of the notion (as I think I am) that art is not only about HOW it is done rather than WHAT is done, but it is a way to SHOW us how to live, and the canvas itself kind of being part of that, then I think there's a correlation between a colder technology and a colder humanity. The sound and look of film pre-1950's was more impressionistic and as a result, that affected the way the artist's created, and movies were more theatrical, for example. And if you are of the notion that art is about how it is about it BECAUSE it is showing you how to live, then you can see how a warmer technology is going to create a colder humanity: because we kind of live as art lives; if it's warm, we're warm, if it's cold, we're cold. Also, about the CGI effects, you can tell it's fake, because there is incongruity of the lighting: which is probably why so many CGI movies are often so dark; they don't want you to notice that incongruity of lighting; usually, I noticed that CGI-lighted characters, say, are lighter than the real world environment it is inhabiting, or rather, that were kind of just copied and pasted onto the movie. Also, it's not just the lighting, the CGI also looks blocky because it comes from mathematical/geometrical forms: which also cannot be captured if they don't follow the laws of physics; so it has to be kind of rigid. Also, the older special effects, like "King Kong" or even "Superman" look more messy, and it's more human when it looks more messy.

I think the messy analog contributes to the aesthetic, or is "there", as you said. I was watching "Thundercats" yesterday, as they were having a marathon on the Cartoon network to kind of announce a new version of "thundercats" is coming out, and I was pretty stunned at how the analog, like with laser beams, really contributed to the aesthetic. There was that warmth there too. Or speaking of lasers, there was the old tron vs the new tron. I haven't seen the old tron, only the previews, but I noticed how much more "there' were the laser-effects (which was crucial to the movie), but I Did see the new tron, and the lasers weren't really doing it for me. Or you can look at this old John Stewart show and see how how the messy analog contributes to the aesthetic. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1ehUN9UgWg And as I said, I think we were probably a warmer people back in the days of analog. People could dress a certain way; which reminds me, of that scene in "Say Anything'" where that kid looks at himself in the mirror in horror at the way he's dressed. Although, this wasn't the point of the scene, I think part of the reason he might have made that mistake was that he kind of had an analog vision of himself and then when he goes to the mirror the analog is not there to contribute to the aesthetic. Also, for everyone wondering why there's no John Hughes anymore. I think the reason has to do with analog. I think the warm analog made it possible for a warm filmmaker (as well as there being that messiness and with it and a feeling of not needing to be "real", as also allowing the musical interludes in his films). And then, with the loss of warm technology, came the loss of warm filmmakers, and the loss of a warm people, in a sense. Speaking of warm people, I think the cold technology can make us physically uncomfortable, and that alone can be a cause for colder situations, either through nausea or anxiety or frustration etc.

Also, I have two JVC super-vhs machines, which are VCRs that have s-video; in fact, s-video came from s-vhs, which is used in DVD and Blue-ray players and various other video technologies.

Very well said, sir. Marshall McLuhan's psychological insight brings a startling clarity to my very own notions of future technological phobia and nostalgic embrace of the fleeting, physical, past. When I say "physical", I mean the solid, personal objects that warm your fingers with heft and reality. Books, records, DVDs...all have a personality, a scent, an imperfection, that bonds you to their ideas and invites you to become intimate with them. Digital downloads become impersonal, a simulation of substance with sterile immediacy. I've always had a love affair with the personality of craft. I own a Victrola, two typewriters from 1930 and 1960, read by lamplight and enjoy the record pop and hiss of a blues record. I think McLuhan's idea is a fine observation to the hindsight of mortal clarity, that which makes experience turn to history and nostalgia almost overnight. But I also feel that, once we reach a certain age, clarity of our surroundings becomes palpable, and thus with each new gadget introduced that changes the personable history we adored, we are immediately cautious and fully aware of how much further away from our physical, personal past we are getting. Having hindsight, we recognize what is being lost for the sake of convenience. I think it's safe to embrace technology, but with a strong hold upon the past, so the beauty of intimacy and craftsmanship won't die in pixels.

Also, I don't know if it's essential, but there was also that thing when HD television first came out and everyone seemed (and probably still seems) all worried that the camera is now going to be able to see all the wrinkles on their face etc. So, I think that probably contributes to the discomfort as well as not contributing to the aesthetic, where there is also a feeling of "this is not real." When there is that feeling, like with HD (also not warm like analog), that "this IS real" then I think that affects how the people behave; it's supposed to be a feeling of "this is just a television show; this is not reality" and maybe that this feeling of reality is contributing more so to the kind of brainwashing going on in the media (televsion, movies, radio) and people are seeing what is supposed to an unreality as real so much that the unreality has become reality and they can't tell the difference of which is which.

Editorial on viewing mirrors in the rear view

Hef's fiancee, Miss Crystal, addresses the causes of their recent breakup. She states her total sexual involvement with the Playboy legend covered a miniscule "two seconds."

Damn the omnipotent sildenafil lobby. We propose a constitutional amendment banning marriage of those over 85 to those under 25.

You mean my whole fallacy is wrong.

Not sure if you've read it, but the great writer Jonathan Franzen's 1996 Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream" -- which also appears in a book of essays as "Why Bother?" -- is a wonderful examination of precisely what you're discussing here. His great sadness is also one of yours - that people seldom read anymore and of that small number who do, few read to be challenged. Franzen says : "The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?"

As well, Franzen's corresponds with another great writer, Don DeLillo, whose response to the matter is among my favorite pieces of written truth, which also seems relevant here: "The writer leads, he doesn’t follow. The dynamic lives in the writer’s mind, not in the size of the audience. And if the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the cracks and ruts of the culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously, as an endangered spectacle. A reduced context but a more intense one."

Your column reminded me of Karl Weick’s comment in Sensemaking in Organizations: “How Can I know what I think until I see what I say?”. I think he got it from E. M. Forester. Weick has been as powerful in helping us think about how organizations work as McLuhan was in helping us think about media in a new way.

This reminds me of a short story by Isaac Asimov titled The Feeling of Power. In it, the world has forgotten how to solve mathematical problems without the aid of computer. A "radical" scientist rediscovers multiplication and long division and is able to save civilization or so he thinks. What strikes me in conjunction with your post is what was once seemingly necessary and indispensable can be forgotten in as little time as a generation. Case in point: I am nearly 30 and writing in cursive is a serious chore for me as I printed my entire scholastic career with not one teacher or professor scolding me into using handwriting. Now I read that many schools have done away with teaching cursive altogether; the invisible becoming visible.

Wow. What a tremendous piece, Roger. Amazing. I'm going to be sharing this one an awful lot!

hey randy, if the LP's are warped, here's what you do:

wait for a hot, hot sunny day, like any day in new jersey over the past few weeks.

get two firm squares or circles the same size as the warped LP. glass works fine.

put the LP between the glass, or whatever, but put a thin piece of material, like a paper towel, between the LP and the glass.

on top all of that, get something heavy, like a weight for working out. about 10 pounds should work.

stack that all up.

park your car in the sun.

place it all in the rear dashboard of your car. it should soften the LP, and the weight should flatten it again. it's worked about 75% of the time.

i left one of my favorite LP's warped because it still played and looked cool as it potato-chipped its way around my turntable. that was a ramones album called "it's alive."

Excellent post. Thank you for what you offer. I must take you up on one point, however. I don't think all mediums should be evaluated relative to the individual doing the evaluating. I think I can say, objectively, that the mind that consumes and interacts with Balzac is superior to the one that consumes and interacts with Left for Dead 4. My guess would be that it would even be measurable scientifically. George Orwell portrays rather convincing evidence in 1984 that certain mediums are more condusive to mass behavior training than others. I couldn't see Balzac surviving BB. Violent video games? Absolutely.

And while we are on the subject of how the medium shapes the message (and its receiver), I recommend you read a YA book called Feed by M.T. Anderson. It is a rare example of someone able to look forward in the mirror (akin to Huxley's Brave New World).

And on a personal note, while AI is a deeply flawed movie (in my opinion), the last scene devastated me like no other artistic expression ever has. I lost my mother when I was a teen. (I'm in my late 30's now.) I couldn't even click on the link.

It could be argued that a book is a more perfected technology than an e-reader. What's the average lifespan of a book? 200-300 years? Heck, I have 2 books made in the 18th century. The Ipad was obsolete in about a year, now that a newer and better version has come out. Are e-readers just a fad? Probably not. Will they completely phase out books? Probably not. Think about it. There are literally millions upon millions upon millions (a quick Wikipedia search shows that Stephen King has sold over 350 million books alone) of books that have been printed and are still in existence. Unless they all disintegrate, they won't just disappear.

I look forward to your posts, and read them with leisure and interest. They also hit home to me in some way, but when I read this one, the quote "The medium is the message", is so timely for me, because I recently came across that quote unexpectedly, and without having thought about it in a long time. I always wondered about its exact meaning (A university prof. first introduced the quoted to me about 10 years ago). Definitely, I had a limited understanding of what he meant, and now, after reading your blog, it has helped me to understand just how fast-moving, crazy, and full speed ahead our world is functioning right now. Sometimes, seriously, I cannot keep up, and it literally makes me dizzy. But, I also understand that human beings, we do this all the time, not consciously seeing our world and environment entirely clearly at the present moment. I think this phenomenon also applies to how we see other people in our lives, and maybe also why happiness seems so elusive. Because if we are half unaware in our view, we cannot fully experience the present. It's like somebody traveling halfway around the world to go on vacation, and being disillusioned by the place you go to and getting homesick, and then going home, and looking back at the pictures you took in that place, wishing you were there again. A scene in a novel also comes to my mind in "A Passage to India", when Miss Quested has taken the stand and is picturing her excursion to the Marabar Caves again, and wondering why she didn't realize at the time how beautiful it was to be there. Shortly thereafter, the truth she utters sets her and Dr. Aziz free. The last thing I want to say is that I love books too, and I hope they are not going away as well. I think we must be careful about these things, because nowadays I see so many music stores closing down. And I also agree with you that not having as many CD's in my home seems unnatural. My life was more filled with music when I had to physically take the CD out, put it in the CD player and press play. Now, I guess I have all the music I want at my fingertips with this computer, but you know what? I forget what songs I want to listen to, and what songs I can listen to, and what songs I have already listened to. You are right, things are different. It's not the same, but sometimes we need some same things in our lives. They do become a part of us. They do.

Excellent.

Very insightful. Maybe only the people over 50 would understand. I am 51, and my view of the world was shaped by the 1970's. Most of things that I care about now are things that I cared about 32 years ago. Maybe I am stuck in my ways. I welcome all the advances we have made, but the United States seems to slowly drift away from the country I remember.

Best wishes,

John

P.S. Last night I heard an older gentleman tell a story. He worked at a construction yard in Utah when he was maybe 15. The foreman told him to run to the supply shop and get some dynamite. So he rode his bicycle down there and the shopkeeper gave him dynamite without any complaint. The shopkeeper put the dynamite in the back basket and the detonators in the front and told the kid to be real careful riding back. :-)

In the 1960's, my sister and I who were very young would walk all over our Indiana small town without supervision and nobody worried much about our safety.

"When I see one of the Michael Bay movies there is a solidity missing. There is nothing for my eyes to hang on to. They're all CGI."

My 12 year old son and I just got back from viewing 2001: A space odyssey. It was a pristine 35 mm print. We are just floored by the level of technical accomplishment. I have yet to see a CGI film that even comes close to the level of realism that Kubrick accomplished. I do hope that all the eye (cotton) candy that my son and I have had to endure as modern movie viewers will someday pay off, and some director will accomplish with CGI what Kubrick accomplished with the tools and tricks of his day.

I cringe at the thought that my five year old will never know the joy of thumbing through a book, of returning to dog eared pages, of picking up something she may have read a hundred times, and returned to it with fresh eyes once again.

E-readers lack a certain organic quality that will never be present in digital media.

The same applies to movies, music, and art for that matter.

But it can be rediscovered, just as the food movement is making it fashionable to cook again, to eat real food again, to experience tastes, and smells, and sights on a plate or pan.

A colleague was showing me his iPad, and the books he reads to his daughter... or rather, books that read themselves to his daughter... he has given up the privilege of inventing funny voices, angry voices, cutesy voices, and angry voices, to be replaced by an object that will never love his daughter, never stroke her hair or gently kiss her...

He has given up part of his Fatherhood.

For what?

I've never forgotten the insight, if it is one, that novelists always write about the world as it was when they entered maturity. The example given was Dickens; railroads or telegraphs aside, he always wrote about the people of the world of 1835.
Marcus Goodrich planned a sequel to his novel about the US Navy of 1917, "Delilah". He changed his mind after a wartime cruise as a correspondent; he no longer knew how sailors thought.

One of the reasons I like the Coens is my sense that their cinematic frame of reference was established, not by long weekends at the Thalia, but by a childhood spent watching any movie that ran on one of the 3 or 4 channels available. If that meant staying awake, more or less, until three on a Friday or Saturday night to see "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", or seeing "Ride the High Country" twice a year through the 60's, fine. There are worse educations.

Sometimes, the medium literally CARRIES the message, especially books: I have books I used as a college and university student decades ago--and in the margins are the usual notes, some of which I made while reading, some of which while listening to profs lecturing. One of my children borrowed a crumbly paperback Sophocles and mentioned how insightful my notes were. I beamed until I looked at them--and knew immediately that they were in-class notes, versions of my Classics prof's comments. So the medium carried him all those years while, across various points east of the Mississippi, I dutifully carried the medium--all the way to my daughter who grew up to read all three of us.

Hard to Kindle-ize that experience, especially the Signet paperback crumbly part--a message in itself.

I wish I had those resources so I could choose, or only one fulfilled choice.

Terrific essay.
One small and perhaps illustrative quibble.
You wrote that, "Schools are more eager to teach programming skills than reading and writing."

Actually this is idea is already nearly 20 years out-of-date. Today's students know and care less about programming than you do. They have grown up in a world in which the mechanics of the medium have always been hidden by the simplicity of its use. Your own high school classmates are more likely to know a bit of HTML than their school-aged grandchildren. As the driver of a Ford Model T had a different relationship to the machine than someone driving a 2011 Ford Fusion Hybrid, today's youth have never had to know what happens beneath the hood. I would estimate that the percentage of those students with knowledge of programming is quite similar to the number who know basic auto mechanics.

We are analog beings, biologically speaking. We process incoming information and sensation using the full organic spectrum of feelings our bodies have evolved to encompass. The digitization of input is limiting, by definition. It reduces all experience to "1" or "0".

When we're young, we want to consume experience, knowledge and sensation to the point of satiety, using the means provided us by the environment of our place and time. Eventually, all of us reach a state of surfeit, at least with the medium. In a sense, as you get older, in order to learn something in a new way you have to unlearn the old way in order to make space. You can't read a Kindle and a book at the same time, one of them must go. And as time passes ever more swiftly into the past, you want to stop with the novelty, stick with what is familiar, and get back to the experience itself. To remember what it was like, feeling it for the first time.

After you reach a certain age, everyone you meet reminds you of someone you already know.

"Clinging to the rear view mirror?"..RE

Sad. Only a past to have.

I'd agree that part of the difference in how generations view the Kindle is a matter of age, Roger, but another part is how well established each generation is in the world. You own a beautiful used copy of Bleak House, which is wonderful, and I'm sure a delight to read. I am just starting my library, and don't have a copy of Bleak House. I could search for a version like yours, and likely spend upwards of 20 bucks. I could get a cheap Barnes and Noble edition with a facile introduction that likely won't survive a second reading. Or I could get an electronic copy off Project Gutenberg for free- and while I'm there, get other Dickens novels I haven't read, including some that I'm hard-pressed to find in a bookstore at all (Little Dorrit, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, the Pickwick Papers).

I've read Bleak House on my Kindle, and it's good enough that I'm planning on picking up a physical copy one of these days- which encourages me to look at my library as a curational process (important for a student with limited shelf space). And if I use this vetting process on other authors, my library will be pretty damn flawless pre-1923.

This journal reminded me of a short story I read and thought you and your readers might enjoy.

"The People of Sand and Slag" by Paolo Bacigalupi

Anna

This post kind of reminded me of an old Douglas Adams quote (which is found in the final book of his, Salmon of a Doubt, which is a collection of essays and articles and a partial draft of what would have been his latest novel):

"Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty- five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

Out of all the new gadgets and things people have invented, thankfully, the movies have a rustic charm that is eternal. It is artistic expression in its highest form that employs all the arts. Set decoration, painting, poetry, music, modeling, f/x & acting; all rolled into one. In this way it is an abstraction. One that can't be easily dissected into plain terms.

This is why (I think) they have survived despite the so-called social advances of the world. If you really think about it with all the texts, tweets and twats out there on the info super HW, its a miracle (YES a friggin miracle) that folks still sit down in that dark room and WILL actually watch the movie (no matter how bad the stories get--and they are getting worse as the years go by).

Maybe some of that is marketing/brainwashing/whatever maybe it isn't that and people ARE still smart (so to speak).Thankfully, there's always genuine inspiration around the corner where you least expect. Modern classics like Inception, Slumdog Millionaire, The King Speech and The Social Network inform us that true art is not totally dead. The day that all multiplexes have Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber style movies and no classic drama with competent actors is the day I don't want to live (no offense to people like them personally).

To this day my father sits and listens to his old radio and I can't understand how he enjoys that. I like Pac Man but maybe the eight year old down the street thinks I'm nuts if I don't use a Wii. I don't use Wii regularly. Regardless, my uncle, father, and cousin can watch Star Wars together on television and not complain. We can also see Cowboys and Aliens unschaved. Perhaps nothing is really "new" or "hip" but just what people have at the time. No one will convince me that texting is a good use of my time. Somehow I don't think our future relatives will view Tivo remotes and i-pods with the same fascination historians afford to mummys, fancy furniture and tombs. "You see kids, this is what people used to use to watch something called DVDs."

You really don’t like 3-D do you?

You sound more like the guy in line than Alvy Singer. "Balzac!" "Gorky!" "Cather!" "This is what sets me apart!" "Oh, but I understand my fickle place in the world, and that's what makes me wisest of them all..."

Once more he returned to the living room. This time he noticed the spot where his polyphonic audio components had formerly been assembled. The multiplex FM tuner, the high- hysteresis turntable and weightless tracking arm - speakers, horns, multitrack amplifier, all had vanished. In their place a tall, tan wooden structure greeted him; he made out the crank handle and did not need to lift the lid to know what his sound system now consisted of. Bamboo needles, a pack of them on the bookcase beside the Victrola. And a ten-inch 78-speed black-label Victor record of Ray Noble’s orchestra playing “Turkish Delight.” So much for his tape and LP collection.

Random question but have you changed your verdict on There Will Be Blood yet? This article made me think of it for some reason.

I'm in my 20's and I prefer old black and white movies with cheesy effects over CGI infested scenes. There's purity in them that seems to have died over the years. Everything is more comlex now. Or is it? Complexity is present then too but the method of delivering this complexity was through simplicity. My God, can you imagine what the simple yet heartwarming opening scene of "It's a Wonderful Life" would look like had it been made today? Ughh..

I understand what you're saying even though I'm still in the process of going through it. I prefer the 90's over the 00's, and long for the 60's and 70's. Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong decade. I'm at least grateful that I live in a third world country where technology is a few steps behind and old customs linger for a while longer.

I'm of the new(er) generation, and I and some of my friends aren't entirely happy about the things we have: the internet, the digital sound files (it will never be the same as listening to an album), the e-books (it's definitely not the same) etc., etc.

But we're inevitably forced along the currents of history, and we're not doing anything about it. Perhaps because we're lazy. Perhaps because we know it will bring more comfort if we just tag along.

Technology is great, but we're using it rather badly. Downloading thirty e-books is pretty cool and new and all that. Maybe not as meaningful or profound or satisfying as holding an old book in your hands, smelling the pages, watching the black letters printed deep in the soft leaves. But it's what we do.

Quite a few times I and my friends have said things like, "Oh, how I wish I weren't dependent on my computer! But what can you do? We need it to write our theses, the university would never accept anything handwritten." It would be "harder", but it could very well be that our caffeinated souls would be better off. Perhaps we can find meaning in these new things (movies worked out pretty well), but to tell you the truth: adapting to your times, when times are like this, sucks.

Roger, it so often happens that we've shared a couple of thoughts. I'll probably buy an e-book reader at some point, but I'll never feel the odd affection for it I feel when I pick up a book that I've had for decades, packed and unpacked through a dozen moves, and can practically recognize by the smell of the pages.

Let me reiterate, though, that Cormac McCarthy's prose (after, say, the 1960s) is not so much al dente as emetic. Pouring a bucket of unrelated metaphors over a descriptive passage doesn't make it better.

I've wasted some time with video games, and they can be fun. Sometimes amazing skill has gone into their creation. But they only pass time; they add nothing to your life.

Miss my LPs. I don't even have a turntable anymore.

And, for the love of God, why doesn't the Captcha feature work? Every time I comment on one of your columns, it takes many attempts before it goes through.

Dear Roger,

Can't wait to read your forthcoming autobiography. I would pre-order today but whether I purchase it as a book or e-book will depend on if you've included pictures. I hope you've included the story of your first unaccompanied train journey--that was a gem.

Ebert: Yep, 16 pages of photos.

I question whether or not one can own any type of art, but my sense is that one definitely can not own any sort of performance art. All you have, on your LPs or CDs or DvDs or tapes is the ability to enjoy the experience of that performance whenever you wish. I propose that is still not the same as being present at the performance itself. The difference is in the observer, of course, not the performer. Perhaps Einstein would have agreed?
And, also of course, that ability is relatively new in human history. Oh, but that is what you were saying anyway.

Mediums such as movies and overdubbed recordings are not, I will grant, quite the same animals as live or even "recorded live" performances. Just one more step in the evolution of media that we fail to notice.

Yeah, Wael. I recently watched "The Wizard of Oz" for the two thousandth time and... if ever they try to remake this with CGI, please send me one of your famous expert middle eastern terrorists to dispatch that party. A real one, please, not a CIA agent.

Was reminiscing about the impact McCluhan's basic ideas had on me -- discussed with a best teen pal who committed suicide a couple years later -- and realized that the time and place where we had the discussions are sitting in my mind with a sense of exactness of dimensionality that... let's see... there are ideas one encounters in life that have a timelessness to them, or they seem that way, an unchanging mental immediacy, because the idea has yet to be fully thought out, no matter how many years have passed.

A fair portion of humanity was beginning to attach itself, virtually biologically, to its technology at the time. "Pinball Wizard" was a sort of haphazard illustration of it -- with Pete Townsend's crazy gooroo, Meher Baba, hidden in the metaphorical machinery as he saw it.

Around then, the composer Moondog uttered "Machines were mice and men were lions, once upon a time. Now that it's the opposite, it's twice upon a time."

There's a "Poiuyt" for you (remember that?). Also, Escher prints had become very popular. So was LSD. Our common fashions of perception were attempting to jiggle themselves loose. Some were even trying to blast their consciousness right out of their heads to attempt to see reality more clearly. Such was my friend Paul, with whom I discussed what McLuhan must be up to. Click my name.

In that precisely-limned 3D moment still sitting unchanged in my memory -- it was in the attic of my parents' Victorian house -- I remember thinking, but not telling Paul, that in order to come up with the conclusion he did, as Roger has so ably described it -- there had to be such a thing as telepathy.

If there was such a thing as telepathy, there had to be a medium for it. It would necessarily be non-physical, at least, in relation to the solidity of things as they appear to the senses.

So that everything we perceive as real-and-present is indeed a post-facto rendition of an initially invisible telepathic impulse. The time passed would be relatively miniscule, the snap of nerve synapses, but it would be there and perhaps detectable, that what we think we see in the present moment is actually delayed, relative to the point of initial telepathic perception.

And I didn't do drugs at all. Still don't, and still haven't totally grasped that thought.

I don't think we've figured out how different it is to read from a book or a Kindle/ipad. My hunch is that the difference has to do with the experience involving different parts of the brain. For proof I would offer what happened to newspaper copy desks when they made the switch to computer screens; the level of editing went way down. I know from personal experience that it's much harder for me to catch typos on a screen than on paper, and other writers and editors have mentioned this, too. Online editions of publications tend to have many more typos than the print versions, mostly in the headlines that had to be re-written for the online edition. Since the triumph of Kindle/ipad is almost inevitable given the environmental, cost and convenience benefits (there will remain a market for real books just as audiophiles have preserved their cumbersome vinyl), I hope scientists can figure out this one.

Great piece! I've been an avid silent reader here for several years now but I can't resist commenting on this fantastic entry. I'm a few generations behind you, but I too have fond personal memories of the movies.

My parents once drove us 45 minutes out of town to see a double-bill of *To Catch A Thief* and *North By Northwest* when it played for one night at a revival theater.. and 2 hours out of town to see *Rear Window*. Who would have guessed that we could someday rent these on VHS in our shopping center... let alone STREAM right in our living room? (not that those experiences are even half as pleasurable as being in a real movie theater)

My earliest movie memory: seeing *Freaky Friday* at the local drive-inn (note to younger readers: that's where you watched a movie outside at night while sitting in your car), and begging my parents to let us stay and watch *Blackbeard's Ghost* too. They obliged.

(Incidentally, I also have fond memories of watching you and Gene Siskel on my local PBS station. Your weekly debates were an indoctrination of sorts.)

A little jpeg thumbnail is no substitute for a real album jacket. Although I have, only recently, loaded an iPod with all my CDs, it's strictly for car use; the real library remains in my living room. I still need that tactile connection with the music (an LP sleeve, or at least a CD insert) in order to fully enjoy it.

I'm completely non-plussed by iPhones ("smart" phones in general) and the general "need" had by everyone around me to stay connected to facebook, etc. while walking on the beach or eating at a restaurant. (Hey everyone! You're so busy with your virtual lives that you aren't even present in the real one!)

I played "Angry Birds" once. Meh.

So at 41, I guess I'm already an old fart. :-)

My favorite 'time' quote. Forget who said it.

"Time is the greatest of all teachers. Unfortunately it kills all its pupils."

Roger, I believe you are a key figure in bridging the gap between your generation and my own. Indeed, I graduated at a time that almost all my college cohorts never knew life without the internet. I barely remember the time it didn't yet exist. That innovation allows me to frequent your blogs and reviews and feel inspired. I do not always agree with your political opinions, but I respect your reasons for them. They are logical and are informed and honest. My generation needs more of that, to be sure. I dearly love your insights on the past you fondly recall with such emotion and I find your adaptation to new technologies impressive.
Thank you for guiding me straight when I need a proper opinion about film and stirring in me a love for cinema that I didn't understand in my youth. Even when your outlook on current motion pictures differs from mine, I always give your posts a second look to see what I may have missed.

Should you ever find a moment to gaze over my humble movie blog site, I'd feel I would have been bestowed an honor.

http://reviewself.blogspot.com/

Sincerely, Clayton Self

This happens with world view too. We resist seeing evidence that an era has past. As I read the political postings on this blog and others it seems to me that we are fighting yesterday's political war. The world has changed fundamentally but we keep framing the discussion in the terms that worked fifteen years ago.

(I think my first attempt at posting this failed. If I post double I apologize.)

I used to be the internet. All of my friends and family would call me when they had a question about TV or Movie trivia. I was that guy. No more. I miss those days.

On the other hand, I feel like I live in the future. Given all of the amazing technological advances that have happened during my 50 years on this planet, none amazes me more than Image Search.

I imagine H. G. Wells talking to a room full of Victorians.

"Imagine! On this machine, you press the letters and write the name of anything you can imagine. Anything! And a picture will appear. Anything!"

Apollo 11 landed on the moon on my grandmother's birthday. We interrupted her party to watch. I can't begin to describe how blown away I was by that event. Grandmama seemed unmoved. I asked her why. She said, "Well, it's not like Kitty Hawk."

Grandmama was born in 1898.

Mark, thank you for mentioning Wallace Beery. To me, one of the most under-rated actors in Hollywood history.

You young whippersnappers need to watch Stablemates.

There is a scene where Margaret Hamilton is trying to seduce Wallace Beery. Not because she wants him, but because she needs him. Two people, who by today's Hollywood standards would be considered butt-ugly. It's one of the sexiest things I've ever seen on film.

Speaking of historical treasures, Cheesus, the acclaimed Cheetos Jesus, is currently on sale in Texas. Praise the Lord and pass the chip dip. The ultimate communion treat.

McLuhan: "...an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment..."

Visibility is a product of the viewer as constrained by his or her circumstances. Any environment is fully visible at the moment, during that moment. A new environment adds context. That's all."

Ebert: Yep, 16 pages of photos.

Doh! Guess I'll pony up for the old-fashioned variety. Don't know where I'll be able to fit one more book, though. Next click, Amazon!

And, for the love of God, why doesn't the Captcha feature work? Every time I comment on one of your columns, it takes many attempts before it goes through.

Here's what I've found that works for me to pass through Captcha and limits it to two attempts.

1. Type in your name/email info and your comment the way you want it.

2. Highlight and save your comment. Ctrl-C for me on a PC

3. Submit

4. Get the submission error screen

5. Hit the back arrow on my browser screen. Not any other button.

6. It takes me back to my entry. Worst case to the top of the screen and I have to hit "End" and scroll to get back to the Captcha code

7. Without editing anything in your comment! enter the new Captcha code and submit.

Then I usually get the successful entry screen. That's just become habit for me. I figure it generates a code before I start my comment which becomes invalid because I've edited. So, back browser and enter the new code and it takes it.

It's a pain, but if it helps Roger keep sane from the spam I'll do it every time. Worth it to get to comment here.

Kindles and other devices are fantastic for reading fast paced novels. They give one the ability to truly "curl up with a book" since they require much less dexterity in page changes and allow reading from any angle. Reading on one's side is much much easier on a Kindle and the ability to get lost in the story is facilitated. Traditional books allow for less of this type of reading, but work much better with non-fiction or books one wants to often refer back to. Or open at random or find a favorite passage. Kindles also allow one the ability to travel with what would be an impossibly heavy book for those whose back or other contraints make it difficult to lug arouond a heavier book. They are both part of the way I read and I hope they always are.

I like not being anonymous here. Are all girls dumb, or just the ones I know?
-David

Ebert: 16 pages of pictures in your memoir

Perchance, sir, will you be including any photos of that bygone glorious evening spent with luscious Liz Taylor and a Pan-like Mickey Rooney?

"Painted yourselves in talcum and rode naked & bareback under a silvery moon. O what a night." (Twitter 4 Jan)

Ebert: Ah, yes. The pictures didn't turn out.

Dear Roger,
I've always enjoyed your blog, and this one was interesting as well. I just wanted to say you are almost right about this year's college graduates not having known the internet. I graduated this spring and was born in 1987. I remember a time when I did not have a personal computer or the internet, but I suspect my younger brother by 7 years will not remember such a time. I think that this years' graduating class is just on the cusp of the time when people will no longer remember such a period.

I do miss what seemed like a simpler time without computers, or cell phones for that matter. It is always a little shocking to see somewhat recent films from the early-mid 90's that show kids as spending their free time, not using a computer or cell phone, but reading! The example that sticks out in my mind was Cape Fear, especially since it played a part in the plot. That was not that long ago. Anyway, it is simply fascinating to be able to have that memory of that time before, even if it is a bit hazy.

This was great. Thank you Roger.

I don't know, I've been reading books and magazines now for going on 45 years. I always got caught up in WHAT I was reading, not HOW I was reading it. Which is why i transitioned into reading on the computer, then the Kindle, and now the iPad, so easily.

I don't care about the tactile feeling of the medium I'm reading something on. The feel of the traditional paper, the smell of the ink etc etc. That all goes away when I start reading the actual words that the medium is delivering....so it doesn't matter if it's a book or newspaper or Kindle or iPad. It's the words that matter, not what they're printed/displayed on.

My concern's with the economics of their distribution model. I too prefer book books to e-books, but if all the books are e-books, Half Price Books can't sell equivalent versions to cheapskates.

A similar argument prevails with the shift in video games to digital distribution, funnily enough; it's also motivated by the desire to control their stuff, and possibly to charge you repeatedly for the privilege of accessing it.

That's what it seems like the real model of the future is. It isn't a digital cloud; it's a series of endless recurring fees. But maybe I've just been radicalized.

Yeah, I cling to the rearview myself. Part of it is the genuine good taste of a mature intellect. Only a child would prefer Transformers to The Seven Samurai. But I also know that part of it is irrational nostalgia. I know this because it bothers me that comic books don’t smell like comic books anymore. Of course nobody ever bought them for the smell. Of course I know that it’s because they use better paper that won’t turn yellow and brittle, and better printing that can do painting-like gradations of color instead of big visible dots of that were noticeably out of register with inexcusable frequency. But for anyone who grew up before all that, the smell of a new comic book was something glorious, a sense-memory cue more powerful than the taste of a Madeleine, now almost lost to us. I can still catch a trace of it in the Sunday newspaper comic section. It isn’t quite the same, you get the cool clay-like notes of the ink, but even here the paper has been slightly upgraded and lacks the warm organic tone of the really cheap stuff.

Ebert: They don't read like comic books, either. It's as if, in graphic terms, narrative has been replaced by special effects.

I've often lamented that my children - who don't quite get why I'm lamenting - never knew the world without the Beatles, never got the chance to experience them for the first time, to have their bells rung by the opening of I Feel Fine or the emotional cacophony of I Am The Walrus. They're just furniture to them. Nor do they understand that people cried when they first heard Blowin' In The Wind or other songs that, if heard at all now, are heard as a means to sell something. They don't understand the excitemnet of experiencing Bonnie and Clyde (that ho hum chase flick), or how pleasantly jarring it was that George knew what Gracie was doing in the next room and addressed the audience about it. And it's kind of sad that the wonderful innovations they DO experience at their creation -- Skype, for instance -- are so quickly taken for granted.

"It is how it is about it, not what it is about."

Interesting. I need both. One of the things I like about your writing is the clarity and precision. I think Orwell would like your writing. To me it seems to fit the "What am I trying to say, then say it" approach. I recently attempted to read Atlas Shrugged, and within a paragraph or two it became quite apparent that she is a bad writer. Much to my surprise, for someone so revered. I might actually like some of her philosophy, but never could get through a book where she can spend a page describing someone, and I still have no idea what they look like. I'd swear she said someone had a "petulant instep". I may be wrong. (I apologize for the fragmentary sentences, I'm in a bit of a hurry)

Roger,

Excellent piece - as a late (1960) rather than early baby boomer I sometimes feel almost suspended between your generation and that of my young nieces for whom everything has always been bright and instantaneous and obsolete almost as soon as it arrives.

So I can appreciate video games and 3D blockbuster movies but still love the repeated radio shows and black and white movies of my own childhood.

For literally another angle on this generational perception gap are you familiar with Sartre's review of Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury:

Faulkner's vision of the world can be compared to that of a man sitting in a convertible looking back. At every moment shadows emerge on his right and on his left flickering and quavering points of light, which become trees, men, and cars only when they are seen in perspective. The past here gains a surrealistic quality; its outline is hard, clear and immutable. The indefinable and elusive present is helpless before it; it is full of holes through which past things, fixed, motionless and silent, invade it.

It's me again. I've read a couple of Henry James' works, and I do like video games. Some years ago my father told me he doesn't like MP3 players and the likes because he understands how phongraphs and cassettes work. I guess when I grow older, I'll feel the same way about new computers.

Oh and by the way, I've almost finished my first script now...

Hmm, I am not clinging to what I grew up with. At the age of 42 I just decided only recently to go completely paperless. I'm more than ready to get rid of, what feels like, ten tons of books. I grew up with books, LPs and movie theaters as well. My entertainment has become all digital/internet, etc. Haven't had a TV for fifteen years. Stopped going to movies years ago (However, that's mostly because of people's abominably rude behavior in the theater though.) Took playing video games only in the last 10-15 years. Hell, I can't wait until they can jack computers straight into our heads. I'll be first in line. Of course then again, I may be different than most about this. I've pretty much lived my whole life in my head anyway. The real world has never really felt quite real to me.

"I do not make the mistake of believing my experience is better than those raised in digital immersion. Nor should they believe theirs is superior to mine. We are simply different; "

Astute observation. That's what I've always said about this kind of thing, "It's not better or worse, just different."

As I write this, there are 119 comments. I don't have the time nor inclination to read all of them. My cooment may very well have already been made. If so, my apologies.

You write you may never read another novel on Kindle. Isn't it ironic that your essay, wonderfully written as it is, will never be read in print by anyone? Well, never is a long time. Perhaps someday someone will collect all your essays and put them in book form. Perhaps ... but until that happens, and even if it does happen, for the great majority of folks, your essays will only exist on a computer screen.

Yes, the medium truly is the message.

As always, you have given us something to think about that would have possibly never crossed our minds. I love it.

The comment about Charles Chaplin instantly brought to mind that he embraced one forward thinking event, the onset of motion pictures, but shunned the follow-up evolutionary step of having talking motion pictures. Given that these two steps were very close to each other, isn't it amazing how we can be so quickly entrenched?

The Kindle (or other e-book reader of your choice) has a number of converts and energized groups of traditionalists that miss the tactile feedback of the physical book. I see both sides and respect their decisions, but I'm just so fascinated by how the Kindle can change the writer and reader culture. First and foremost, publishing is wide open; there is no longer a guardian at the gate because the publisher is no longer the grand decision maker of what is published and what is not. For those that like the idea of free speech, great! For others, it means there are less reasoned educated people to filter the trash that does not bear worthiness to be published. My decision for a Kindle is simple and practical, however. As one of those challenge by sight, the ability to size the print to my liking enables me to a much greater selection that oversized print copies ever were.

This is a relatively new situation. After all, as little as a couple of centuries ago, people went whole lifetimes without seeing a significant change between the beginning of their lives with the end of their lives. As recent as a handful of decades, it may have happened rarely. It is only going to happen more and more frequently. As much as we may be tugged by the rear view mirror values, we should give pause to one thing: won't it be fun to find out what is coming to pull us away from looking backwards?

Enough of the past. We all must bravely focus on the future.

Roger, been hoping to team up on a business venture for awhile now. Think I've hit pay dirt this time. Bigger potential even than my earlier Fried Australian Cane Toad Legs proposal. Had an endless supply of product. (A tragedy the damn toads turned out toxic)

However this is the big one - Corpse Eating Mushrooms franchise chains.

Definite ground floor opportunity. 50/50 split right down the line. Unlimited client base. And we don't have to worry about our customers getting poisoned on this deal. They'll already be dead, right? Hee. Hee.

I couldn't empathize with you more on this.

I grew up with the notion that the only constant in life is change. From a very early age I knew that everything I knew – family, friends, home – everything would eventually decay, and so would I.

Being aware of my own eventual demise doesn't stop me from living in the present, but it does make me appreciate the retrospect quite a bit. You might call it nostalgia to a fault, but there are many things I do appreciate in my past that no longer exist in this current present. Probably the most memory inducing habit is when I look at old photographs and videotapes my mother took when me and my brothers were children.

There's a surreal, sad nature to watching old videotapes of yourself or going through physical albums your mother so carefully put together. You see these recorded memories flashing before your eyes: a picture of you smiling, crying, laughing, playing, sleeping, eyes wide and filled with unfathomable curiosity – it's there, yet you can't reach out and touch it, to feel the physical, tangible sense of a past now gone. It's something real, documented, yet nonexistent at the moment; you see ghosts of yourself, your old self in a time before you know the things you know now. After awhile, it can become almost heartbreaking to see how much things have changed far beyond the foreseeable and that, in the scheme of things, all your memories, even your very footsteps, will be nothing but a minuscule existence in a changing universe. Nothing is forever.

I find that, unlike most of my peers who continuously see life in the present, I tend to see life in the sense of ghosts: I know that in due time, what I'm familiar with now will become another ghost of the past, overtaken by something newer, more modern, more fit for the needs of the future. Maybe that's why I never understood the appeal of shopping sprees, or celebrity gossip, or even staying updated about every new and novel development: it's so easy to get wrapped up in our own present sense of greatness that we easily forget what it's like to appreciate every present moment before it becomes a thing of the past.

That's why the ending scene of A.I. Artificial Intelligence is so incredibly striking. It allows David to revisit one a relic of the past, to live and love every moment of it before invariably, Monica must perish once again. This one day is when David can relive his memories again, to interact tangibly with something that no longer exists; Monica, a ghost of the past, comes back with the magic of technology, only to disappear into nonexistence again because that same technology cannot overcome the limits of our own mortality and vulnerability to time and the changing universe. It's an incredibly moving scene, and one that still haunts me to this day.

People will always talk about the future as if it will bring a new sense of utopia to one field or another, as if the past no longer has any value. I think they are gravely mistaken; and while I can hardly imagine going back to the time before internet became so readily accessible (and I do remember that the time quite vividly), I find myself rather content with what people otherwise deem as old school in many other respects. Maybe it's the medium; or maybe it's just knowing that many of these new novelties will, in due time, be collecting dust on the shelf as skeletons of a more recent past. Like you, I'll continue to relish the past in a more tangible sense tangible sense: dog-eared, yellowed, coffee stained pages and all.

Roger you may find this article about McLuhan and his Catholicism interesting. It was published in the Canadian magazine The Walrus:

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.07-media-divine-inspiration

If we could peer into the future we could see the present as if it were the past. We could then analyze the present with 20/20 hindsight. I think McLuhan had an epiphany which didn't amount to much. The present is never fully formed until it's become a memory. Memories seem more solid than reality. Reality is never finished.

McLuhan termed television a 'cool' medium. He didn't think it was very involving. It might not have been to him because he might not have known what he was seeing while he was observing. His analysis is very personal and certainly doesn't apply to me.

Brilliant people are often wrong. I enjoyed McLuhan when I was in college. He was the stimulus for many discussions about the times in which we lived. He was a very intelligent person and his analysis of his topics of interest were as thought provoking as anyone's.

I still don't know what 'the medium is the message' means. I've heard so many folks repeat that phrase with such gravity and certainty. Yet, it means nothing to me. The medium is the medium and the message is the message. The medium may say something of our state of technological advancement, but I'm not sure that's a terribly important thing. When I'm reading one of your fabulous posts I quickly fade into it and forget where it's coming from. Could be a magazine, newspaper, computer screen, whatever. The words are the message.

Dear Roger,
Did you ever read Marshall McLuhan?
What exactly does he say that you find nonsensical?
People could say that a lot of what you wrote/write is nonsense, although I would disagree strongly.
I disagree with your judgment that a good percentage of McLuhan's writing is nonsense. His theory makes total sense and he has contributed amazingly to our ability to understand how media changes our environment, how technology itself is the medium we live in and how it, technology, not its content, molds our human experience.
Why must you low-rate and dismiss McLuhan? Why must you patronize him, giving him credit in a single (exceptional) instance, saying that in the mass of nonsense he wrote, one time McLuhan's theory holds up?
You don't even quote him correctly.
The quotation is actually: "the medium is the massage." The difference of a vowel.
Don't worry about it, the press didn't get it right either. And strong opinions are what you need to be a movie critic, and the daring to go out on a limb.

You are a fine film critic, Roger, but please take it easy when you are putting down a theorist of Marshall McLuhan's statue.

For the record, my 35 year old Dolby sound system is superior to anything on the general market today.

What happened to http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/politics/-beck-not-only-compared.html?

Ebert: Sorry. I pruned it.

Ebert: They don't read like comic books, either. It's as if, in graphic terms, narrative has been replaced by special effects.

This demands a follow up question from way back in the day after Watchmen came out: Did you ever get around to reading Alan Moore's Promethea? Thumbs up or down? Granted, it's a far cry from a Scrooge McDuck comic.

Roger:

Consider yourself lucky. Your at just the right age to feel behind the times. I'm 31, still collect vinyl records, love Cole Porter and Burt Bacharach, hate rap music, and I don't think I could read a book on a Kindle if I tried.

If there's a movie i really want to see, or even just kind of want to see, I'll go out of my way to see it in the movie theater. If someone turns on their Goddamned cell phones during the film, I tell them to turn it off. Someone did this during "Midnight In Paris". How anyone can play with their phone during any movie is beyond me, especially a movie where we get to travel back to Paris in the 1920's.

That said, I don't really resent any of todays technology or fads (though I do think reality television is nothing but a caner on society). I love reading wikapedia, but I haven't signed on to face book. I finally got a smart phone and can now download music. I love it, though nothing can replace a great vinyl LP IMO. And while I grew up watching movies on a VCR, I fell head over heels in love with DVD's and find tapes almost impossible to watch now (on the other hand, I look at Blue Rays and I think they're TOO perfect looking. Maybe if I get a new computer with a Blue Ray drive I'll change my mind).

That said, I do think a little skepticism is just fine. Remember, there was a time when people though every car in America would be equiped with a CB radio and an 8-track player. Like you, I knew this 3-D hype would pass. And while people may continue to read books on a Kindle, I don't believe for a second that people are going to watch a whole movie on their iPhones.

I wish there was a "like" button at the bottom of the page. I would have clicked it.

By the way, not every young person loves 3D films and video games. Lately, I've been preferring books to any movie. You can't sit outside and watch a movie like you can read a book.

Tonight, I'll be reading "Indignation" by Philip Roth. He should have made your list.

Ebert: Huh. I'm re-reading Letting Go right now.

Ebert: Sorry. I pruned it.
You hid it, you coward. And to think you pretend to be a journalist and have scads of admiring suckers who buy that con. But you and I know better, don't we.

Ebert: Watch your language. It hadn't had a single hit in two days. I have more than 400 web pages online. I regularly prune them.

What I don't understand is how I could be telling a lie when I linked the man's own words on his radio show.

Here's a new link you may enjoy:

http://huff.to/mOwSuu

this may be the most beautiful thing you will ever hear:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMznNlfLXP4

I've just read 1930s poet Edwin Muir's Scottish Journey where he rails against the radio and the Hollywood movie as the great threats to authentic national and local cultures everywhere.

In the 1950s for Richard Hoggart it was TV that would systematically undermine everything true and local and human - and over the next 30 or 40 years this was an almost universal refrain from left-leaning academics with an interest in popular culture.

But now we look back with nostalgia on the days when there were only a few TV channels and they served as a cultural unifier.

FWIW IMO technology has wrought the exact opposite to the dreary homogenisation and massification that Muir, Hoggart et al imagined - now the problem is one of self-defining and hermetically sealed communities of belief occupying their own little (or huge) silos engaging in cultural war without end with each other.

And this epistemic closure is every bit as rampant on the left as it is on the right and goes far beyond politics into every aspect of our ever-more fragmented global culture.

Also, thought this dialogue from Dragnet is pertinent to the changes between generations.

Sergeant Joe Friday: I don't know, maybe part of it's the fact that you're in a hurry. You've grown up on instant orange juice. Flip a dial - instant entertainment. Dial seven digits - instant communication. Turn a key - push a pedal - instant transportation. Flash a card - instant money. Shove in a problem - push a few buttons - instant answers. But some problems you can't get quick answers for, no matter how much you want them. We took a little boy into Central Receiving Hospital yesterday; he's four years old. He weighs eight-and-a-half pounds. His parents just hadn't bothered to feed him. Now give me a fast answer to that one; one that'll stop that from ever happening again. And if you can't settle that one, how about the 55,000 Americans who'll die on the highway this year? That's nearly six or seven times the number that'll get killed in Vietnam. Why aren't you up in arms about that? Or is dying in a car somehow moral? Show me how to wipe out prejudice. I'll settle for the prejudices you have inside yourselves. Show me how to get rid of the unlimited capacity for human beings to make themselves believe they're somehow right - and justified - in stealing from somebody, or hurting somebody, and you'll just about put this place here out of business!
Officer Bill Gannon: Don't think we're telling you to lose your ideals or your sense of outrage. They're the only way things ever get done. And there's a lot more that still needs doing. And we hope you'll tackle it. You don't have to do anything dramatic like coming up with a better country. You can find enough to keep you busy right here. In the meantime, don't break things up in the name of progress or crack a placard stick over someone's head to make him see the light. Be careful of his rights. Because your property and your person and your rights aren't any better than his. And the next time you may be the one to get it. We remember a man who killed six million people, and called it social improvement.
Sergeant Joe Friday: Don't try to build a new country. Make this one work. It has for over four hundred years; and by the world's standards, that's hardly more than yesterday

Soruce: tvtropes.com

You know, Roger, you have awfully good luck with books. Me? At this moment there are two halves of a book sitting next to my Reading Throne. Page 36 is followed by page 77, but I've read this book a few times before. Anyway I think I know where pages 37 to 76 probably are. This book fell apart after a mere 20 years.

Then again, I once had a copy of a book published in 1865, MYTHS OF THE RHINE, by M. Xavier. It was hemp paper with gold leaf. Perfect condition. Great book. Found it in an attic 110 years after it was published. I didn't lug it around with me for the next umpteen years, so I don't know how it would have fared.

Book technology has deteriorated, a victim of devolution. Acid paper, which they've been using for too long, deteriorates into dust after 50 years. Hemp lasts some thousands, as old Egyptian papyrii show. We're not going to read from a Kindle again, either. Sending the thing back for repairs twice in a few months was enough for us. Anyway I hear they're going to be giving them away free. Could it be they've already saturated the market? I read on my 'puter virtually all day long. A lot from Gutenberg Project and Bartleby.com as well.

My 'puter is about the same as the way I read books when I was an intellectual teen. I removed my bed frame and left the box springs and mattress on the floor. I surrounded the bed with stuff I was reading, a good deal of that simply stumbled across, not chosen. I'd pick up one or another to read while loafing or before sleeping.

Computer, same thing. Can just browse around until something just shows up. Kindle, you have to think about. Don't wanna think about. Just wanna read.

Good morning! (show b&w photo of a pair of fried eggs here)

Ebert: Watch your language. It hadn't had a single hit in two days. I have more than 400 web pages online.
Apparently the Internet is broken, since I was checking that page regularly (read: several times a day) for new comments.

I regularly prune them.
You regularly prune pages in which you have been caught lying? And you do so without correcting the record? That's not pruning; that's Pravda.

What I don't understand is how I could be telling a lie when I linked the man's own words on his radio show.
Since you seem to have trouble with the concept that lies that are combined with truths still add up to lies, let's say that someone wrote:
"Roger Ebert is a convicted rapist.
Roger Ebert is child molester.
Roger Ebert is a film critic"

And when he was called out on those egregious lies, said:
"How I could be telling a lie when I linked the man's own words on his Twitter homepage, 'Film critic since time immemorial'"?

Oh, and thanks for the link. Its final line gets to the crux of your 5-days-and-counting lie. You wrote, "Glenn Beck adds, the Norway shooter was 'right'"; the link you shared ends, "He [Beck] denounced the gunman, who he said 'is just as bad as Osama bin Laden.'" See the difference? I know it's subtle.

At the time of this writing, there are 136 "comments" ahead of this one. I don't know you; and you don't know me.I am writing to a void. This is the digital age. It's the CGI of participation. It's not "fan mail" like the previous age. I don't want an autographed photo. This is a "comment." It's part of "Web 2" where people "share" to no one. Digital music is a "sampling" of the original analog sound. The digital world is thin --it's a sample. A "comment" is only a sample of a relationship. You will probably never read this, so why does it exist? In the digital world, it's a virtual relationship --like a video game. No wonder us old timers don't get it. we only get real relationships with real things like people.

Well, all I can say is, if you only look in the rear-view, you will almost certainly hit a wall. It's important to enrich and enhance our lives with our memories and the life we've lived. But we should never forsake the future and what lies ahead nor forget to live fully in the present. It is all we really own.

Here’s something that might interest others who enjoyed this journal entry. It’s from Adam Parrish who teaches the computer programming language as a form of creative writing at NYU

• Teaching Creative Writing with Python

Be sure to check out his syllabus.

I read Balzac's Lost Illusions last year and loved it. Be sure to read the sequel Scenes from a Courtesan's Life for the rest of Lucien's story. If you weren't so averse to reading on a Kindle, you could get it free from Project Gutenberg.

There's little more enthralling than watching a classic movie on my laptop. Fortunately Hulu and Netflix have allowed this for those who've left Blockbuster and Mr. Movies to ruin.

On my laptop -- MY laptop -- it's really something.

Sitting so close to the screen, able to scrutinize, even touch, the faces of actors and actresses long dead, able to personally treasure every directorial decision as though it were effected for my appraisal alone. It's as though Fellini were a good friend, and sent me a project of his in order to see if I thought anything of it. But then I remind myself, Fellini was friend to all with eyes to see and ears to listen [to Nino Rota], and that this little luminescent square of glinting, living art's been christened beautiful by humankind. And now, to have it in my arms is like having the Sistine Chapel in my bedroom. It's apotheosized something as unrefined as my bed and made it into an artistic sanctuary -- just proving that under the thin surface of quotidian life are all those very same wonders, spectacles, philosophies and beauties we think exist only under rare and adventitious circumstance, with the assistance of clunky projectory equipment and a great many square feet.

Honestly, it's like opening a treasure chest.

"why can't i post a comment??"

"Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition." (Marshall McLuhan)

This exchange is typical of why I find myself unable to stop reading this blog and its comments - I'm honestly not sure whether I'm intelligent or cultured enough to comment here. Best on the web by a country mile.

"There are times when I feel as if I'm occupying a closing scene in Spielberg's "AI: Artificial Intelligence." You know, the scene where the elongated, ethereal robots of the future study the artificial child David. They want to learn all they can from him, because "he's the last one who knew humans.""

Ah, my friend, I cannot begin to tell you how many times I've tried to explain this feeling to my daughter and other youngsters. Why "backstory" matters, and informs "now" far more than they think. And how the sights, sounds, tastes, smells...experiences of my past and the pasts that were described to me by elders ARE important. And how today, for me, feels like a cleverly written, fun but forgettable movie.

I guess you had to be there. Or maybe not. It's up to the whippersnappers to decide what to carry on from here. But...I feel you. I totally feel you...

Roger, one of my greatest pleasures in these dark (political) days is reading your blog (of course, only made possible by technological advance). You seem to have adjusted to that "new" world quite nicely.

As this discussion wanes, I wish nere to cling, but merely mention the important findings of yet another recent rear end viewing. Captured live from Paris France, Mr. Methane sets his incredible record.

THE LONGEST FART IN THE WORLD
youtube.com/watch?v=XCpPEnwQe3Q

Note: Mr. Methane is NOT Ron Weiner.

"Ebert the Liar!" Another fine epithet. I'm still chuckling about "Ebert the Hypocrite." I get an image of Zero Mostel playing a village gadfly strolling the neighborhood, lying or hypocritizing or whatever, in song.

I get worse stuff, you know. I called the cops only once, not for fear of the death threat, but to shut his face. Anyway he got 6 years in a federal pen for other reasons. Lately some obsessive is peppering me on my blog. I'd leave 'em in, but a just objectivity says they're more boring than what is accused about my thinking. How many times must I see "who cares" and "nobody cares," before one realizes the attacker cares too much?

Much of this tech talk, it seems to me, goes far afield from yours and McLuhan's intents both. Is the main point too abstract? I do see one reader who's got it. It isn't the finery of the new! improved! technology or the loss of the good old days with Fred and Barney and Wilma and Betty, but the (theme music) message of the medium.

Can't remember the title or author of the book -- hardcover -- by a computer expert of the 90s. He asked, how will the electronic medium change our thinking? Could we tell how what he was writing was edited?

There are lots of differences. Take a look at a Mark Twain page and see how he scratched out this and that after having first written the thing off the top of his head. The new-fangled typing machine didn't change that procedure much, but with these e-z keyboard things, I see two major differences: people start out with a lot more verbosity than they used to, and they leave in words that don't belong there because, in buzzing along with a rather shallow set of thoughts, they get careless.

What is the message of the keyboard medium itself? Is it saying "think less, write more?" And "write more, read less"?

The most repeated and most ignored historical sentence not in the Bible or HUCKLEBERRY FINN is "know thyself." Has this sentence gained any more purchase among the vast jabberings on the internet? Discuss.

Your essay reminded me of this quote from Douglas Adams:

"There’s a set of rules that anything that was in the world when you were born is normal and natural. Anything invented between when you were 15 and 35 is new and revolutionary and exciting, and you’ll probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things."

For me, I miss watching movies on network TV. It was always so exciting when a good movie would be shown on television. Before video players, you had to watch what was available, and if you missed it, it might be a long while before you had another chance to see it. Seeing classics like Lawrence of Arabia was an event, and the commercial breaks were useful for discussion and bathroom breaks, or grabbing snacks. On demand viewing and rentals are great, of course, but the serendipity of the event is gone.

I'd like to read what you originally thought was the meaning of McLuhan's "The medium is the message."

I believe he was either so concise that it rendered him vague or simply wrong.

Slightly off topic, but do you have any news on the forthcoming Lars von Trier biography of Fulton J. Sheen, with the late bishop to be played by distant cousin Charlie.

I'd say we're not quite used to the ethereal digital age. It's something so recent that we still cling to the tangible, it's a safety net, and it's what we know. Most of human history, pre-civilization to the present, has been tangible, a rock, a weapon, a book, a vase, all of it held in our hands, manipulated by our direct action. Now it's all in the Cloud. We've made the sky, but we don't yet no how to fly in it. It's not a bad idea though to do what my English Professor told me, what his professor, W.H. Auden told him, "to keep one hand in the sky, and your two feet on the ground."

Once we've had a couple hundred, or maybe thousand years of this, it'll all be old hat. We'll have slipped into the ethereal, become part of the Net (see Ghost in the Shell), and be able to pass between this world and that. But we still need, what they call in Ghost in the Shell, external memory devices, things of tactile resonance that ground us, and comfort us. We've only always known what we touched until recently. It's a habit, and old habits die hard. Thank goodness. Now I'm off to read Keats' poems--in good ol' fashioned hardcover.

Roger,

I found this to be an especially interesting time for you to evoke Marshall McLuhan because just recently I mentioned "the medium is the message" in regard to you. When people were crying out for your head for your twitter comments about Ryan Dunn's death, I was a little surprised both that you chose to make them on twitter to begin with and that you seemed not to notice that it was not merely your opinions that people were responding to but also your method of delivering them.

Just think about how much more disgusting Sarah Palin's opinions are we they are succinctly stated via twitter, leaving no room for rebuttal or even supporting evidence. The more important the subject, the more irritating it is to have it addressed using such an inadequate form of communication.

Personally, I think twitter is a great way to let the world know that you are craving a cheeseburger, but matters of any gravity, even if it is only making a statement about drunk driving, would be better suited in practically any other medium.

That said, I enjoy your site and hope that was not taken as an attack.

There is a quote in "Blade Runner" that sums it up - it goes something like "All these moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain...". Sad, but true - Thank you!

Belated News Alert -

Just checked my old tweets. On August 1, 1861, the Times published the first ever weather report. Admiral Robert FitzRoy was the world's first weatherman. He headed the Meteorological Department at the London Board of Trade. The Admiral predicted in that day's paper that tomorrow would be a jolly good day. It was. Tragically five years later, he would commit suicide. Some say this was caused by the constant ridicule the poor man received for his future, often faulty, forecasting.

On the same date 110 years later, weatherman David Letterman predicted next day's rainstorm would become a hurricane and drop hail stones the size of hams throughout Indianapolis. It didn't. His career soon ended. Letterman however survives.

I am not able to find a (Paperback or hardcover) copy of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. None the less I have easy access to all his e-books. So I guess Kindle scores over “Real books” here.

Ebert: I have become a real fan of Alibris:

http://bit.ly/oNyHau

Roger Ebert is bar none the most comforting and rational journalist I can find anywhere. He is incisive without being mean, deep without being inaccessible, funny without being a showboat. He manages a warmth without compromising hard truths. There are so few people like this. Carl Sagan was one of them. Please keep going for a long, long time Mr. Ebert. The analogs have gone cold, but with you around we'll never freeze to death. Definitely buying your book.

I just finished Bleak House on my Kindle. I had read it many years ago in in old Signet paperback at 500+ pages in 7 pt. type -- and though I have dipped into it for a quote or two in the years since, I was never tempted to re-read it in that format, which seemed too daunting.
I downloaded it, and a lot of other free classics, on my Kindle, and when I opened it last week I just started reading. The type was clear, the pages flowed one into the next, one was not daunted by the length -- in fact I would have had no idea where I was in it had I not read it earlier.
I love physical books, but to my chagrin I found electronic ones have their place, and the idea of being able to carry a complete library with me in one volume (Dickens, Melville, Dostoevsky, Brontes, Conrad, Twain, etc.) is just to cool!

To me, a person who feels no need to tack a texting plan onto his cell phone package or pick up a Kindle, I think it comes down to how a person learns to live. When we're growing up, we learn to navigate our lives using the tools at hand, and by the time we've figured how to live using these tools, the technology that comes after feels extraneous to us. We can more or less find our way in the world without these new developments, so we don't feel any urgent need to keep up with them.

Of course, there are certain technologies that become unavoidable, and that one must adapt to in order to remain relevant in the world. I know a number of fiftysomething professionals who have almost no computer skills, which is a big hindrance to their performance on the job. I guess it all comes down to deciding what technologies are inescapable and must be learned, and which are simply a new convenience and can be avoided.

I still like books & almost nothing written after 1982. See Robert Coover's Pricksongs & Descants (1969), w/ its YouTube-lich paragraphs.
Movies? TV; I have VHS, DVD but seldom play them anymore. I actually like YouTube for bits & pieces: a 12-part The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. You can also find McLuhan lecturing Tom Brokaw & Edwin. M. Newman after the 1976 Carter-Ford debate (when the sound went out). Brokaw & Newman plead out: "They're not much, but they're the best we have. Don't you think so?" McLuhan reduces them to dust.

Roger, it's your fault that I'm sneezing tonight!

After looking at that great picture of the turntable in your article, I went out into my garage and found an old box of LP albums that I haven't had out in at least the 10 years that I've lived in this house. Probably even before that.

I catalogued the 80 albums I found in that box on my blog.

Click on my name for a list of the LPs in my garage.

Note to self: go buy a turntable...

Quote Roger;Ebert: I have become a real fan of Alibris.

I concur. Alibris almost never lets me down, and I've searched for some pretty obscure titles.

Tweet To Alec Baldwin,

"What's your favorite movie about a horse?"

"The Godfather."

Okay, so nobody wants to discuss how or whether this media has enhanced anyone's inclination to know himself. Either I'm a discontinuable artifact of another, slower, less nifty age, or, being that much closer to DEATH (boyoyoyoooooing!) the question naturally takes on a more pertinent hue.

Anyway, those of you interested, we've been growing technological limbs for some time now. Horses (which I've come to hugging affectionately) were once a part of us. But then came the automobile, and that became a part of us. Computers and such the same, but more rapidly, since we were already used to giving our tin lizzies names. My computer's name is "Old Harold." I think.

In our public mass dreams, movies, inanimate things that buzz when they go and pop when they stop and whirrrr when they stand still have been sharing our consciousness. We've been developing technological souls. We share dream-visions of part human part machine, and what rights, pains and pleasures we have as such.

Isn't that more the message of the medium, rather than whether some new gizmo tweezes better than an old one?

Once again I am reminded why for 30+ years I have read and appreciated Roger Ebert. I remember anticipating Fridays and grabbing up the Sun Times' movie reviews and reading them avidly on the train to work. I often felt as though here is someone who takes the time to think and write beautifully, to reflect, to give of his own real individuality and insight. Thank you! Even the comments here are actually worth reading.

Been thinking about both McLuhan and "A. I." William Hurt would make a good McLuhan.

McLuhan was to the media what Mordred was to the legal system. Inherent truth is unimportant. Perception becomes reality. Megalomania media created "God is dead" to warp humans into soulless receptacles. Presstitutes misinform the populice to advance the marxist agenda. The message is a lie. Our govenment is the liar.

Dear Roger... you don't quite focus on the heart, the intimacy of printed book reading. Sans the manuscript, the book is the closest you can get to the privacy of a one-on-one relationship with the writer. He or she speaks to you in your mind, and you listen, and speak in return. It creates a friendhsip that has your sweat and sometimes tears on the paper pages and often mirrors the same from the writer. After all, they write alone for themselves just the way you read what they wrote. It is a life-long friendship and it cannot be reproduced on a computer screen.

Hot Off the Press!

Bernie disses Warren Jeffs. A mad Madoff says he'd never share a cell with that child molester. This reporter thinks they'd make a nice couple.

Roger, thank you, yet again, for letting me know that I'm not alone.

This is a fairly irrelevant question but it suddenly came to my while I was reading the comments.
Why does the year 1995 seem closer to us in 2011 than 1945 apparently did in 1961? People now still treat the 1990s as if they were fairly recent - I mean, we tend to assume that the culture then was the same as it is now, or nearly enough. And in a sense it was. But whenever you see or read or hear something from the early 60s and they talk about the 40s its as if it were ancient history.
Why does the 1960s seem closer to the 2010s than the 1910s did to ''60s, for that matter? Why are we still expected to be nostalgic for b&w TVs and the Beatles, when you weren't expected to be familiar with Edison cylinders and Sophie Tucker then (or, put another way, you weren't you expected to identify with them)?

+jeff c -- I read it; your message landed here. I sometimes think we're writing streams like these for the future, when our intelligence will have grown to be able to appreciate the works of art they represent. It's hard to keep up, yes, but the thought has always been there -- we've just never been able to see *how much* of it there is before now. It's amazing, scary, overwhelming and beautiful. Don't stop!

Reading through all these comments, a point about McLuhan comes to mind that for me is always counterintuitive given how excitedly he talked about the new age. I have to keep reminding myself that he said, "Almost anything I talk about is almost certainly something I'm resolutely against." He didn't think these were positive changes (or negative, necessarily--just changes). He notes that in a global village, for instance, gossip is rampant. You gain and lose with each modality.

What an amazing thread to read and be a part of. I've learned as much again from the comments as I have from Roger's original post (which was already a lot). Thank you!