We march backwards into the future

On the subject of mentalblog.com: McLuhan, the Playboy interview I want to dwell on the rearview mirror for a moment. I quote from the Basic McLuhan by Gingko Press: Marshall McLuhan and the Senses, Obsolescence is the Moment of Super-Abundance:

"All-enveloping environments permanently supersede each other, constantly shifting. They are difficult to pin down. The best way to detect them as mentioned above is to erect counter-environments. Failing that, the only other option is to recognize them in hindsight, when it is too late to ''sense'' them. We have the opportunity to see the old environment whenever any new environment emerges and eclipses it. The previous environment becomes a default counter-environment. This is hindsight, not insight. As the former environment obsolesces and slips into history, we suddenly see it for the first time, and clearly (yet tragically, much too late). We confuse this blast from the past finally emerging into the foreground as if it were the present. This is the condition of all media, to be imperceptible up to the moment of obsolescence, when a new technology takes hold, at which time it enters into the foreground and reveals its former powers. Insofar as it has not been percepted before, it may appear as new, but in fact it is long since pass�. As environments typically remain undetected until swallowed up by a new situation, we recognize them only in rear view, as clich�s, and begin to direct all our attention to them at that time, as if they were new. The effects of new technologies are naturally just as invisible as their predecessors, so we hardly ever get to talk about the present at all, let alone the future. The old environment becomes the content of the new invisible environment. Then everybody talks about it. The new environment is typically submerged by its pervasiveness, and will be scarcely noticed. Content is always whatever is in the foreground, predictably always the expiring environment. To discuss 'today's information environment', is to actually see it in rear view, as content only. Talking about it fifty years ago was obscure, and of course misunderstood. According to McLuhan's laws of media, an environment obsolesces or reverses at the moment of fever pitch. The information environment, during its moment of superabundance, becomes obsolescent. It has passed into cliche, if we can see it at all. "We see the world through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future."