McCloud on Laurel

My hero Scott McCloud (okay, he's one of my heroes) offers a graphical commentary on some themes of Brenda Laurel’s recent Utopian Entrepreneur at the MIT Press website. (There’s an explicit allusion to McLuhan’s graphical turn in there to delight Jim.)

I’m a resolutely anti-commercial theologian—y’all may have been able to guess that from my harangues about copyright—but I insist that theologians, especially media-literate theologians, need to pay attention to marketers and entrepreneurs. We (and I’m not talking about the participants here) who typically treat different media as more or less neutral modes presentation stand to learn how these media look to people who dedicate their lives’ energies to using media in non-neutral ways. Jim, I think, made the point that the mode of presentation itself communicates much significant information (“information” as opposed to “noise,” not necessarily information-as-content). He was speaking in reference to PowerPoint, at which point several of us chimed in, and of course it’s an utterly McLuhanian premise.