.. ok the blog software got updated to Ella already a few days ago (so i hope for less spelling mistakes .. ; )), but more importantly – this time, when visiting an event the images I imagined to take with my mobile I then indeed took home with me. (The last time I had just blanks from the Kaprow exhibition in Munich – so against my plans it never got posted .. )

This time de Kerckhove passing through Berlin to pay a short visit to the newly installed McLuhan Salon and giving a quick, or better to say fast (in terms of speaking and riding through the material) and strikingly loaded lecture, which I am happy to have been able to visit. The speech was a quick ride through the McLuhan universe based on a profound knowledge which it – just in the imagined manner – an entertaining, as well as highly interesting excursion. Giving a short introduction to the importance McLuhan puts on the phonetic alphabet and literacy for the interpretation of electricity and its marriage to language de Kerckhove persued to raise his own thoughts in continuation of the subject as invented by McLuhan.

Richard Cavell, Derrick de Kerckhove Marshall McLuhan, Derrick de Kerckhove

Lots to think, lots to read as well .. I guess .. and left at least me with the feeling that it must be fun to run further into this discourse in a pace which seems at least more appropriate to the velocity of development of new media as usually perceived and practiced here … That there is still also to adopt much more an associative and interdisciplinary way of thinking / approaching .. and synthesising to catch up to NOW. In the following discussion part of the audience just laid bare that the understanding of media in even a minimal McLuhanesce way* to think of it as extension of men, who influence culture as much as the culture which developes them still can not be understood as a broadening, but just as a minus in specializing. That not necessarily gave a real smart impression for the understanding of media theory here on this side of the atlantic … * I mean here – he does not have to be taken as ‘a master’, but some of his thoughts just have shown major ways of understanding quite in advance …