La (non tanto strana) coppia

Ho appena finito di leggere l'ultima biografia di Norbert Wiener (Dark Hero Of The Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener The Father of Cybernetics). Interessante e molto utile. Fra le molte cose che ho imparato mi hanno colpito in modo particolare un paio di pagine che parlano del rapporto fra il padre della cibernetica e Marshall Mcluhan. Secondo quanto riportano gli autori citando le parole di Donald Francis Theall, un ex-studente americano della University di Toronto, McLuhan avrebbe avuto accesso tramite questo studente fin dall'estate del 1950 a Cybernetics e The Human Use of Human Beings.

In 1953, McLuham lanuched his celebrated seminars on "culture and communication" at the University of Toronto. A decade later, he would use Wiener's idea liberally, but without attribution, in his own watershed word, Understanding Media, wich dissected the effects ot television and every other medium of communication on human consciousness and culture. The book subtitle, The Extension of Man, and its oracular pronouncements that "the medium is the message" and that electronic media had turned the world into a "global village" echoed Wiener's words in The Human Use of Human Beings that "the transportation of messages serves to forward and extension of man's senses... from one end of the world to another" and that "society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities wich belong to it". (p. 277)