r behind, as scholarship is launched at last into the post-Gutenberg galaxy (Harnad, 1991).Any of you familiar with the later writings of Marshal McLuhan (1965; 1969; 1989) should recognize the origins of the above quotation. Though less florid than some of McLuhan's prose, the passage nevertheless remains true to the type of deterministic, often nonsensical (Finkelstein, 1968) claptrap that has made Mcluhan a favourite among pseudo-intellectuals inheritors of his genius (for example de Kerckhove, 1995), popular gurus and media pundits alike. [20] Like McLuhan, Harnad is suggesting, and indeed never tires of promoting, a "fourth-revolution" in the "means of production" of knowledge and a fourth revolution in the way humans think. Harnad, like McLuhan before him, argues in generalities about the transformations wrought by the introduction of new media types. He figures that there have been three previous revolutions wrought on human consciousness: these are the historic shifts from preliterate to oral forms of communication, from oral to written communication, from written to printed, and finally from printed to electronic based (or skywritten) communication. He suggests that the transition from oral to written culture slowed down communication making writing "somewhat out of synch with thought." Because we could only read one book at a time rather than listening to tribal story teller, writing made "communication more reflective and solitary than direct speech." We became "less spontaneous...more deliberate...more systematic." All this changed with the introduction of print which "restored an interactive element, at least among scholars," and transformed scholarship making it a more "collective, cumulative, and interactive enterprise [like] it had always been destined to be." Harnad suggests that despite these transformation, all of these prior modes of communication placed limitations on human thought processes. The limitations emerged...
