Symbiosis between computers and humans

Something I've been thinking about (the relationship between people and media):

Bolter and Grusin write: "Computer programs may ultimately be human products, in the sense that they embody algorithms devised by human programmers, but once the program is written and loaded, the machine can operate without human intervention. Programming, then, employes erasure or effacement" (27).

Two observations on this quotation:

1. The blog seems to be one big exception to B&G's assertion that all computer programs can function without human intervention. You can't have a blog unless you have a human interacting with the computer software-- and frequently. The same goes for 'online community' sites like MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook. Because the purpose of these sites is to extend the human processes of talking to other people and making friends into a technological world, they do not function unless people interact with them and input information into them. Even computer-programmed chatbots rely on actual human beings talking to them in order to learn the patterns of human speech. They can't be programmed with everything they need to know and then left alone.

2. McLuhan would read the B&G quotation and respond that although "once the program is written and loaded, the machine can operate without human intervention," the reverse is not true. Once the program is written and loaded, the human cannot operate without the intervention of the machine.

Something that confuses me about this point of McLuhan's (that once humans create a technology, they can't live without it) is that I can't figure out if he thinks this is a completely bad thing, or if he thinks it can be a neutral, or even positive, development. Sometimes he seems to think of media as positive, as in his (somewhat morally suspect) discussion of how media could influence a group of people: "Whole cultures could now be programmed to keep their emotional climate stable" (28). Also, when he describes media as "staples or natural resources" (21), he seems to indicate that they are necessary to us like grain or cattle are.

On the other hand, when he describes the development of new media as massive social surgery performed on a society without anaesthetic (I can't for the life of me find the page right now), that seems pretty darn negative.

Has anyone else been able to encapsulate McLuhan's attitude toward media better than I have? Or is this piece just so all-over-the-place that it's impossible to come up with a coherent, inclusive opinion?