Beyond Hive Consciousness, Part 2

Jaron Lanier ends his long awaited first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by trying to explain his gig as a philosopher of the early 21st Century. In doing so, he cannot help but allude to Marshall McLuhan:

The phase of life we call "childhood" was greatly expanded in connection with the rise of literacy, because it takes time to learn to read. [...] It has even been claimed that the widespread acceptance of childhood as a familiar phase of human life only occurred in conjunction with the spread of the printing press. (180)

Lanier takes pains to show a physiological basis for metaphor, for metaphor is the route by which we get closer and closer to the nature of consciousness, and that brings us full circle to Chapter 1.