Stephenson made the text of that work available online – google the title and it’s the first or second hit. Note that some of the technical bits are dated but relevant to the era when it was written.

Also of note – OS X, the operating system for Macs, features a GUI interface but the textual stuff is available with the click of a mouse. You don’t have to use this to operate a Mac – you could happily ignore forever – but it’s there.

I also think the Eloi-Morlock distinction may show some changes over time. The first generation of “Tunnel of Oppression” designers may be highly literate and text-oriented, basing their ideas on the reading of people like Foucault–but ten years later, the Tunnels of Oppression may well be designed by people whose own ideas were formed by earlier Tunnels of Oppression, films, and other sensial interfaces.

Then those second generation tunnel builders cease to be Morlocks and become Eloi who only think they know what is going on. That will work until there is a change in the foundation of the whole works and Eloi in charge will have no idea how to fix things.

Then the Morlocks can step in, set things aright and things will go on as before.

If the change of pace continues as it has for the last fifty years (or longer) the foundations of the tunnels will always be changing.

It’s a good era to be a Morlock.

McLuhan argued that the media society (television, at the time he wrote) was much closer to oral culture than to print culture.

Since McLuhan there’s been a substantial amount of quantitative work done in comparing the nature of consciousness in primary oral societies and literate ones. Walter Ong’s work, for example. Essentially what I’m thinking about is a combining of McLuhan’s thoughts with those of Ong.

Regarding the blogosphere, it seems to me closer to a print-based medium than to a visual-imagery-based medium. Perhaps it also has some characteristics of the (pre-printing) manuscript medium.