March 8, 2002

Continuing the Work of 'Media Ecology' Theorists; Documenting How Humans and Animals Interact

By DAVID GLENN and PETER MONAGHAN

ATTENTION-DEFICIT DISORDER: "Today children have to have radio or gramophone playing in order to attend to visual tasks of reeling and writhing, rocking and rolling, reading and writing."

That gnomic pronouncement was made by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan in 1967 -- a time of innovation in both writhing and rocking. Scholars often wonder what McLuhan (who died in 1980) would have made of the World Wide Web, which has scrambled our experiences of text, sensory perception, and