| Another way of understanding the focus of the five books in Fischer's series is the resolution of the 30 paradoxical laws which serve as a framework for this book. Those laws are framed more in the tradition of the probes of McLuhan than the propositions of Euclid and there is no attempt to organise them into a hypothetical-deductive system. Designed to enlighten, by triggering thought, rather than to explain, each stands on its own, balanced on a fulcrum between two contradictory statements. Together, they nicely capture the complexity (and hence chaos) of our times. It's a relief to read a book on the social sciences not based on the Standard Social Science Model, which treats the mind as a tabula rasa. The paradoxes Fischer introduces reflect the chaos produced when the complexities of the human mind are augmented by the complexities of a media system which is a simulacrum of the human mind. Multimedia for storing information and the internet for transmitting information constitute an extrasomatic analogue of our own memory and speech systems.
Organisation around paradoxical laws is only one of a number of innovative design features of this book. The enigmatic epigraphs heading each chapter - e.g. Memory is life. The future is death. Or vice versa - also serve to tease. They are somewhat redundant and could perhaps be better incorporated into the paradoxical laws or replaced by epigraphs from other sources to tie in to other traditions. The subheadings peppered throughout the chapters are also somewhat awkward and redundant and are perhaps a residue of the fact that the book was originally published on the internet (an interesting innovation in itself) and reflects the need to reduce text to bite-sized pieces for easy consumption on the screen by netizens with shorter reading spans. |
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