Straightening the Maelstrom: McLuhan, the “New Columbuses” and Media Ecology

The article is a reflection on Varvara Preter’s (Chumakova) book In the Center of the Cyclone, which reveals the possibilities of instrumentalizing M. McLuhan’s theory to study contemporary media realities. The format of “reflections on the book” is used to trace non-obvious but relevant and heuristic connections and contexts. One of them is the work of P. Sorokin, which anticipates M. McLuhan’s initial position on the universality of media. In the logic of V. Preter’s book, the effects of oblivion, characteristic of the circulation of scientific knowledge, appear as a reaction to information overload. The idea of information aggregation as a form of creativity, which actualizes the authorship of “secondary” genres, is discussed as a productive one.