To say that Marshall McLuhan was incidentally a Christian, or that his Catholicism was just part of his private life, is a little like saying that Karl Marx was only incidentally a Marxist.

In proposing the imitation game as a stand-in for another definition of thought or intelligence, Turing does more than deliver a clever logical flourish that helps him creatively answer a very old question about what makes someone (or something) capable of thought. In fact, he really skirts the question of intelligence entirely, replacing it with the outcomes of thought--in this case, the ability to perform "being human" as convincingly and interestingly as a real human. To be intelligent is to act like a human rather than to have a mind that operates like one. Or, even better, intelligence--whatever it is, the thing that goes on inside a human or a machine--is less interesting and productive a topic of conversation than the effects of such a process, the experience it creates in observers and interlocutors.

This is a kind of pretense most readily found on stage and on screen. An actor's craft is best described in terms of its effect, the way he or she portrays a part, elicits emotion

APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, a century after his birth in 1911, Marshall McLuhan has found a second life on the Internet. YouTube and other sites are a rich repository of McLuhan interviews, revealing that the late media sage still has the power to provoke and infuriate. Connoisseurs of Canadian television should track down a 1968 episode of a CBC program called The Summer Way, a highbrow cultural and political show that once featured a half-hour debate about technology between McLuhan and the novelist Norman Mailer.

Both freewheeling public intellectuals with a penchant for making wild statements, Mailer and McLuhan were well matched mentally, yet they displayed an appropriate stylistic contrast. Earthy, squat, and pugnacious, Mailer possessed all the hot qualities McLuhan attributed to print culture. 

The Internet, arguably the most influential digital medium, has sparked an explosion of debate throughout recent years, regarding its economic, political and social status; a space where its structure is constantly criticized and its potential nurtures new and contradicting ideas. British scholar Richard Barbrook (University of Westminster) is the instigator of one of such ideas, which finds its groundwork on Marxist critical analysis of capital. According to Barbrook, the new economy of the Internet era is called "the digital economy"; its workers are "the digital artisans," and their "tools" the new technologies, that is, computer networks. [2] Barbrook believes that this is a mixed economy that fosters a successful symbiosis of the public, the market and what he calls the "gift-economy," which he understands as a representation of anarcho-communism in cyberspace.

I am looking for writings on mimesis in regards new, digital, hypertext and hypermedial technologies and cultures. I am following the redefinition of mimesis. From Plato's disregard of oral culture, through his mimesis of Socrates' dialogues in writing. Following Plato, Aristotle's theory was always a written mimesis, thus the order and processes of representation and mimicry were fundamentally written.

In essence, I am interested in how the artefacts of oral culture differed in their mimesis to written culture, and thus, how our modern move from a written to a digital/hypertextual culture will similarly impact on mimetic embodiment.

(I am also concerned with the terms 'digital' and 'hypertextual' - perhaps they are too narrow. Oral, written cultures and then XXXXX? The terms 'Cybertext' and 'Ergodic' do not seem to cover the ground wide enough.)

I have been reading Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Gunter Gebauer's and Christoph Wulf's Mimesis: Culture--Art--Society. I am looking for writings on digital, hypertextual mimesis, and how it differs, how it has altered, the theoretical embodiment of representation in thought, artefacts, language and culture.

Your help, ideas and advice are much appreciated, as always