double-dog darin' the sun

[Muchasmasgracias at cs.com]

Do we do requests around here?  Cause I've got this idea that I wanna just 
throw out a few quotes and then sit back and watch you folks jazz away with 
some funky mumbo-jumbo-ized jiving on them.  And no I don't have a term paper 
coming up, FYI.  I honestly think listening to your riffs on this stuff is 
like meat and potatoes of the mind, no offense meant to vegetarians of 
course.  So y'all ready?

First, a bit of GR:

"Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern.  He learns how to 
make contact with other kinds of electric appliances, in homes, in factories 
and out in the streets.  Each has something to tell him.  The pattern gathers 
in his soul (Seele, as the core of the earlier carbon filament was known in 
Germany), and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron 
gets.  Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before.  
His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in the world seem impossible 
now--the Grid is wide open, all messages can be overheard, and there are more 
than enough traitors out on the line.  Prophets traditionally don't last 
long--they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to 
make them stop and think, and most often they do pull back.  But on Byron has 
been visited an even better fate.  He is condemned to go on forever, knowing 
the truth and powerless to change anything.  No longer will he seek to get 
off the wheel.  His anger and frustation will grow without limit, and he will 
find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it. . . ."

and now some McLuhan:

"The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because 
it has no 'content.'  And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people 
fail to study media at all.  For it is not till the electric light is used to 
spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium.  Then it is not the 
light but the 'content' (or what is really another medium) that is noticed.  
The message of the electric light is like the message of electric power or 
industry, totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized.  For electric light 
and power are separate from their uses, yet they eliminate time and space 
factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone, and 
TV, creating involvement in depth" (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 9)

"Such was never the case in the mechanical systems.  The power and the work 
done were always in direct relation, whether it was hand and hammer, water 
and wheel, horse and cart, or steam and piston.  Electricity brought a 
strange elasticity in this matter, much as light itself illuminates a total 
field and does not dictate what shall be done.  The same light can make 
possible a multiplicity of tasks, just as with electric power.  Light is a 
nonspecialist kind of energy or power that is identical with information and 
knowledge.  Such is also the relation of electricity to automation, since 
both energy and information can be applied in a great variety of ways" 
(Understanding Media, 350).