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The North American intellectual tradition | page 1, 2
The North American synthesis of the pragmatic and the visionary in McLuhan, Fiedler and Brown is uniquely suited for analyzing the swifly changing present of our age of technology. Mass media and communication, which were developed and refined in the U.S. since the 19th century rise of mass-market newspapers, cannot be fully understood with European models. It was McLuhan who forecast what my generation lived, from transistor radios and stereo headphones to today's 100 cable channels. Education must be purged of desiccated European formulas, which burden and disable the student mind. We must recover North American paradigms and metaphors, to restore the North American idiom to academic discourse. Media and Internet communications are a Jamesian and Joycean "stream of consciousness," fluid and mercurial, and our young people -- from the brilliant Web entrepreneurs to the ingenious pirate hackers -- occupy a radically different mental space than the valley of death of pre- and postwar Europe. As I know from my work with Salon, McLuhan's "global village" has come to pass. Every day, the Web is fulfilling the 1960s dream of expanded perception or cosmic consciousness. Camille Paglia Camille Paglia's column appears in Salon People every third Wednesday.
In his 1837 lecture "The American Scholar," Emerson says, "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe." Of Americans, he vows, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak with our own minds."
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