“McLuhan’s Wake” notes
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” (Kirkegaard)
The E. A. Poe theory (“The Maelstrom”)
We must free ourselves from “oblivion” by abandoning our ship and “studying the action” of the maelstrom. That way we survive.
“The human vortices of energy created by our media present similar possibilities of evasion, consequences and destruction. By studying the pattern of the effects, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival.”
The four big questions
What will this technological tool enhance?
What will this technological tool obsolesce?
What will this technological tool retrieve from all the things we’ve lost?
How will this technological tool reverse on you when it’s pushed to its outer limit?
“The things you make, they mimic you”
Every tool extends your body, your senses, your mind, your fingernails, your skin
Containers extend your arms
The chair extends your bone and spine
Tools change the way you touch and are touched
The alphabet extends the eye
The printing press extends the alphabet
Literacy
Literacy marches steadily in the direction of classifying data.
Highly sequential, rigid: We arrange our whole lives this way without being aware of this
The visual (literate) world is connected, homogeneous, rational, logical, private, individualistic, civilized, integrated
The myth of Narcissus
Narcissism means narcosis, numbness, drugged
That image outside himself was something else; he did NOT fall in love with himself
We are just like him
We don’t think gadgetry is just a part of ourselves
When we extend a new part of ourselves into a new technology, we protect ourselves by numbing that area. Why?
Who was the real McLuhan?
He had to go back and study everything from the beginning
Loved literacy, civilization, literature
He came to believe the history of culture was the struggle between three alternate ways of looking:
Rhetoric, logic and grammar
Grammarians look at the world as a book
More on McLuhan
Intensely religious -- Catholic
Believe in two books:
the Bible and the World
When he started teaching, he realized he was a “dweeb”
The way to get their attention was to show them things they thought they knew and show them they didn’t
What did he want?
“I’d like to be in any period as long as we stay in it for awhile. I’m opposed to all change, but I want to understand it. Anything I talk about is something I’m resolutely against, but the best way to understand it is to study it.”
The maelstrom
Poe’s story is about a place that’s always moving, and you’re being massaged, but you don’t know how. You can’t stand back. You can’t see the pattern.
Something ventured, something lost
You do away with the ancient rhythms of day and night every time you flick on an electric light. This environment alters all human affairs. Do you still recall the mystery of the dark?
The Internet?
“What we’ve done is put our nervous systems outside ourselves globally and stuffed our physical selves inside. Every private operator can own a hunk of our nervous system. He can stand on our eyes, nose and manipulate them. We now have media that use up all our senses and we have no education to cope.”
Back to the tribal cycle
We’ve become involved with each other. It’s anarchy. The right hemisphere is “way up.” The “old left hemisphere” world looks very foolish.
Not everything about tribalism is positive
The world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum where everybody gets the message at the same time
Our ancestors lived in a mythic world because they had no literate means of classification
Jeans are a tribal costume
Wins and losses
Speech retrieves old stories as adventures -- much more than when they were lived
The things you used to to just get by come back to you as art
The more you get the faster you go -- The more you strive to retrieve a time before any you have ever known.
Bonanza-land
If you’re curious about the future, study the present because what we see is really what appears in the rear-view mirror. Content is always the previous medium and that is all that we can see. We can’t look straight at the present. It’s too terrifying. We look at the wake and we see troubled waters. We live by the revival. It tells us who we are -- or were.
The individual
The user of electronic media loses his privacy and physical body
TV is a serious, inner medium. You are the vanishing point. It’s a trip.
Technological determinism: the machines make the rules
When everybody becomes totally involved in everybody else, how is one to establish identity?
The laws of media
There ARE laws, and if we can discover them, we can control the media
Be able to answer the four questions about every technology and act on the answers
We MUST disengage in order to stand back and see how the media work
We need to develop a media ecology or equilibrium
Reversals
The speed and freedom of your auto starts to reverse the minute you leave the commercial
Too much of anything, however sweet, will bring you the opposite of what you thought you were getting.
All those bricks (books) in the castle of knowledge reverse into best-sellers that crush all the rest
The satellite is a proscenium arch that turns the globe into a stage. You become an actor
Violence
Violence is the only way people have ever learned how to assert or define identity. Hijackers, terrorists are people without identity. They are determined to make it somehow to get coverage, to get noticed.
The E. A. Poe theory (“The Maelstrom”)
We must free ourselves from “oblivion” by abandoning our ship and “studying the action” of the maelstrom. That way we survive.
“The human vortices of energy created by our media present similar possibilities of evasion, consequences and destruction. By studying the pattern of the effects, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival.”
The four big questions
What will this technological tool enhance?
What will this technological tool obsolesce?
What will this technological tool retrieve from all the things we’ve lost?
How will this technological tool reverse on you when it’s pushed to its outer limit?
“The things you make, they mimic you”
Every tool extends your body, your senses, your mind, your fingernails, your skin
Containers extend your arms
The chair extends your bone and spine
Tools change the way you touch and are touched
The alphabet extends the eye
The printing press extends the alphabet
Literacy
Literacy marches steadily in the direction of classifying data.
Highly sequential, rigid: We arrange our whole lives this way without being aware of this
The visual (literate) world is connected, homogeneous, rational, logical, private, individualistic, civilized, integrated
The myth of Narcissus
Narcissism means narcosis, numbness, drugged
That image outside himself was something else; he did NOT fall in love with himself
We are just like him
We don’t think gadgetry is just a part of ourselves
When we extend a new part of ourselves into a new technology, we protect ourselves by numbing that area. Why?
Who was the real McLuhan?
He had to go back and study everything from the beginning
Loved literacy, civilization, literature
He came to believe the history of culture was the struggle between three alternate ways of looking:
Rhetoric, logic and grammar
Grammarians look at the world as a book
More on McLuhan
Intensely religious -- Catholic
Believe in two books:
the Bible and the World
When he started teaching, he realized he was a “dweeb”
The way to get their attention was to show them things they thought they knew and show them they didn’t
What did he want?
“I’d like to be in any period as long as we stay in it for awhile. I’m opposed to all change, but I want to understand it. Anything I talk about is something I’m resolutely against, but the best way to understand it is to study it.”
The maelstrom
Poe’s story is about a place that’s always moving, and you’re being massaged, but you don’t know how. You can’t stand back. You can’t see the pattern.
Something ventured, something lost
You do away with the ancient rhythms of day and night every time you flick on an electric light. This environment alters all human affairs. Do you still recall the mystery of the dark?
The Internet?
“What we’ve done is put our nervous systems outside ourselves globally and stuffed our physical selves inside. Every private operator can own a hunk of our nervous system. He can stand on our eyes, nose and manipulate them. We now have media that use up all our senses and we have no education to cope.”
Back to the tribal cycle
We’ve become involved with each other. It’s anarchy. The right hemisphere is “way up.” The “old left hemisphere” world looks very foolish.
Not everything about tribalism is positive
The world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum where everybody gets the message at the same time
Our ancestors lived in a mythic world because they had no literate means of classification
Jeans are a tribal costume
Wins and losses
Speech retrieves old stories as adventures -- much more than when they were lived
The things you used to to just get by come back to you as art
The more you get the faster you go -- The more you strive to retrieve a time before any you have ever known.
Bonanza-land
If you’re curious about the future, study the present because what we see is really what appears in the rear-view mirror. Content is always the previous medium and that is all that we can see. We can’t look straight at the present. It’s too terrifying. We look at the wake and we see troubled waters. We live by the revival. It tells us who we are -- or were.
The individual
The user of electronic media loses his privacy and physical body
TV is a serious, inner medium. You are the vanishing point. It’s a trip.
Technological determinism: the machines make the rules
When everybody becomes totally involved in everybody else, how is one to establish identity?
The laws of media
There ARE laws, and if we can discover them, we can control the media
Be able to answer the four questions about every technology and act on the answers
We MUST disengage in order to stand back and see how the media work
We need to develop a media ecology or equilibrium
Reversals
The speed and freedom of your auto starts to reverse the minute you leave the commercial
Too much of anything, however sweet, will bring you the opposite of what you thought you were getting.
All those bricks (books) in the castle of knowledge reverse into best-sellers that crush all the rest
The satellite is a proscenium arch that turns the globe into a stage. You become an actor
Violence
Violence is the only way people have ever learned how to assert or define identity. Hijackers, terrorists are people without identity. They are determined to make it somehow to get coverage, to get noticed.
posted by Louise Mengelkoch at 1:33 PM
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