O’Reilly Network: Marshall McLuhan vs. Marshalling Regular Expressions [Jul. 08, 2002]
What does the success of regular expressions have to do with McLuhan? Simply put, the technology and Friedl’s book seem to embody everything McLuhan said was passé: they celebrate and support a reverence for text that McLuhan expected current generations to abandon. The actual message, as I will show, is more subtle and enhances McLuhan’s work substantially.
At first, I was pleased to see that Jeffrey Frield’s book on regular expressions had come out in a second edition: I was a reviewer on the first edition, but until I read this article, I had no idea how popular the book was. It is a great reference, and I know the author has been scrupulous on tracking and fixing errata: one of the reader reviews at Amazon.com claims the book has no errors, which doesn’t surprise me.
But back to McLuhan. It’s been a while since I read any of his books, but this article refreshes the core ideas well enough. One of the aspects of hacker culture or at least of the smarter ones I have known is the high level of literacy and of literary proficiency. They read and write well, and as anyone who has worked on UNIX systems knows, the text processing tools in that environment are the most powerful to be found anywhere. emacs, TEX, SGML and its better known offshoots of HTML and XML are all text processing tools. And why has it been necessary to create these tools? To write programming language source code, which is far more rigorous than human language,and requires more powerful, more finely controllable tools. Where most of us can get along quite well with simple search and replace in a word processor, reqular expressions make a myriad other text management tasks not just possible but simple.
Perhaps this is where the irony of using the word “programming” to describe producing televion, a passive non-creative activity, and producing software, its polar opposite, makes itself most keenly felt.
A closed, unprogrammable device fits McLuhan’s most dire assessment of automation and its numbing effect. But once a hacker breaks open the device and reprograms it, he reclaims not only the device itself but all media with which it comes in contact.
Reclaiming media is what the FCC hearing at the UW (was that just yesterday?!) was all about. There’s something very meme-ish about all this.