Resident Alien: A Media Ecology Primer

A Wayfarer and a Pilgrim

2011-12-27T16:22:00.000-06:00

But since it seems appropriate to say a word about The Moviegoer, it is perhaps not too farfetched to compare it in one respect with the science of pathology. Its posture is the posture of the pathologist with his suspicion that something is wrong. There is time for me to say only this: that the pathology in this case has to do with the loss of individuality and the loss of identity at the very time when words like the "dignity of the individual" and "self-realization" are being heard more frequently than ever. Yet the patient is not mortally ill. On the contrary, it speaks well for the national health that pathologists of one sort and another are tolerated and even encouraged.

In short, the book attempts a modest restatement of the Judeo-Christian notion that man is more than an organism in an environment, more than an integrated personality, more even than a mature and creative individual, as the phrase goes. He is a wayfarer and a pilgrim.

Walker Percy
Accepting the National Book Award
for The Moviegoer, 1962

A Culture of Death

2011-11-02T17:16:00.000-05:00

Wherever one looks, oneencounters this same intent: torestructure society without community.

Guy Debord

Society of the Spectacle

1967

McLuhan's Three Books

2011-10-20T12:07:00.000-05:00

With our accelerating cascade of new media it is borne upon us that each represents not an appendix to but a complete retranslation of the Book of the World, and of the reader. As W.B. Yeats sang, in 'Sailing to Byzantium':

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling...

Vico simply had not distinguished between first and second nature for separate study: nothing in his experience suggested such a distinction would be of any use. Second nature is nature made and remade by man as man remakes himself with his extensions. Separate them: the first is the province of traditional grammar; the second, that of Bacon, Vico, and Laws of Media.

Eric and Marshall McLuhan
Laws of Media

Liberty, Technology, and the Advent of Social Networking

2011-10-19T16:01:00.000-05:00

St. Michael the Boss

Interesting article by Harvad PhD candidate, Gladden J. Pappin, discussing the intersection of virtue, vice, and social media, with nods to McLuhan and Baudrillard.

How does technology recast the relationship between liberty and virtue?

"To fashion our network double we have to resolve ourselves into our constituent parts, advance some and suppress others, make ourselves the medium without making our souls the message.

"The community of the Internet is now as spiritual as the communion of saints once was, so it is fitting that McLuhan thought Thomas Aquinas's angelology was important in understanding the media. Through social networking we receive not prayers and graces but links and likes. The church triumphant appears in virtual reality, where all things are possible and everything is realized virtually in the mystical body of the web. As in the resurrection of the body, logging off from your account gives you your body back, this time not glorified but fraught with anxiety, the church suffering after triumph rather than the reverse. Signed off from your account, you are now unaccounted-for. Reality itself becomes the afterlife, the postmodern No Exit where hell is virtual people. The advent of virtual reality, not to say the beginning of modern politics itself, detaches human beings from the consolations of church, city, and family that wayfarers in this life once thought they had. A late-modern Augustine could not see technology as just another dimension of alienation from our heavenly home. We are now aliens twice removed."

I've Never Seen Anything Like It!

2011-09-28T15:36:00.000-05:00

Really, I haven't! The Fordham website for the Marshall McLuhan Centenary has posted the audio recording from a class McLuhan taught during his year at Fordham in 1967. Totally awesome!

Marshall McLuhan Lecturing at Fordham

Kill Your TV or it Might Kill You!

2011-09-19T10:44:00.000-05:00

Is too much TV as dangerous as smoking? Check out this article on the Australian research.

"every hour of TV watched after age 25 may slice about 22 minutes off your life, an effect equivalent to that of two cigarettes"

Marshall McLuhan's Unmediated Faith

2011-09-17T10:12:00.003-05:00

An interesting article on McLuhan's Catholicism, originally posted at the Catholic Herald, now reposted on Thirteen:

Marshall McLuhan's Unmediated Faith

St. Basil's at University of Toronto

The Medium and the Light

2011-09-14T11:05:00.001-05:00

Strange is the blindness of the intellect which does not consider that which it sees before all others and without which it can recognize nothing. But just as the eye, intent on the various differences of color, does not see the light through which it sees other things, or if it does see, does not notice it, so our mind's eye, intent on particular and universal beings, does not notice that being which is beyond all categories, even though it comes first to the mind, and through it, all other things.

St. Bonaventure

Itinerarium Mentis in Deum

The New Res Publica

2011-09-09T12:29:00.001-05:00

After the Second War, an ad-conscious American army officer in Italy noted with misgiving that Italians could tell you the names of cabinet ministers, but not the names of commodities preferred by Italian celebrities. Furthermore, he said, the wall space of Italian cities was given over to political, rather than commercial slogans. He predicted that there was small hope that Italians would ever achieve any sort of domestic prosperity or calm until they began to worry about the rival claims of cornflakes and cigarettes, rather than the capacities of public men. In fact, he went so far as to say that democratic freedom very largely consists in ignoring politics and worrying, instead, about the threat of scaly scalp, hairy legs, sluggish bowels, saggy breasts, receding gums, excess weight, and tired blood.

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media,
1964

Why Bother With Marshall McLuhan?

2011-08-18T08:48:00.000-05:00

Check out Alan Jacobs interesting and valuable meditation on the value (or lack thereof) in reading McLuhan:

"I have been reading McLuhan off and on since, at age sixteen, I bought a copy of The Gutenberg Galaxy. His centenary — McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta on July 21, 1911 — provides an occasion for me to clarify my own oscillating responses to his work and his reputation. I have come to certain conclusions. First, that McLuhan never made arguments, only assertions. Second, that those assertions are usually wrong, and when they are not wrong they are highly debatable. Third, that McLuhan had an uncanny instinct for reading and quoting scholarly books that would become field-defining classics. Fourth, that McLuhan’s determination to bring the vast resources of humanistic scholarship to bear upon the analysis of new media is an astonishingly fruitful one, and an example to be followed. And finally, that once one has absorbed that example there is no need to read anything that McLuhan ever wrote."

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-bother-with-marshall-mcluhan

Interview with Read Schuchardt

2011-07-28T16:42:00.000-05:00

Laureano Ralon has a great series of interviews over at his website, Figure/Ground Communications. His most recent interview is with my very own professor and mentor in media ecology, Read Schuchardt. Check it out:

http://figureground.ca/interviews/read-schuchardt/

Finding Your Way in a Sea of Information

2011-06-07T03:20:00.000-05:00

The goal of science and the arts and of education for the next generation must be to decipher not the genetic but the perceptual code. In a global information environment, the old pattern of education in answer-finding is of no avail: one is surrounded by answers, millions of them, moving and mutating at electric speed. Survival and control will depend on the ability to probe and to question in the proper way and place. As the information that constitutes the environment is perpetually in flux, so the need is not for fixed concepts but rather for the ancient skill of reading that book, for navigating through an ever uncharted and unchartable milieu. Else we will have no more control of this technology and environment than we have of the wind and the tides.

Marshall and Eric McLuhan
Laws of Media,
1988

McLuhan and the Eyes of Faith

2011-05-30T06:14:00.000-05:00

I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.

Marshall McLuhan

Marshall didn't publicly discuss his religion. His theory was that people who can see don't walk around saying, "I'm seeing things" all day. They simply see the world. And so, with religion, it was simply there with him. This unwillingness to discuss religion caused him much trouble. Some people perceived it as arrogance. Some people saw it is as weakness and shirking. Some people saw it was outdated and ridiculous. Some saw it as a wasted chance to make converts.

Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan:
You Know Nothing of My Work!
2009

Splitting the Etym

2011-05-28T01:23:00.002-05:00

The "etym" is the fundamental 'bit' in the Joycean world, just as the atom is in the physical world. For Joyce, TV's annihilating of the 'etym' is as significant as in the realm of culture as the potentiality of destroying the atom in the physical world. Since, however, neither etym nor atom disappears as a result of the contemporary challenge, the process is abnihilisation, not actually a destruction.

Donald Theall

Beyond the Word,

1998

Media as Cliché as Probe

2011-05-24T02:16:00.000-05:00

Any extension of man's sensory life such as the dog, or the motor car, imprints numerous clichés on any language, extending its range of probe. All media of communications are clichés serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of association and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness. The limits of our awareness of these forms does not limit their action upon our sensibilities. Just as the rim-spin of the planet arranges the components of high- and low-pressure areas, so the environments created by linguistic and other extensions of our powers are constantly creating new climates of thought and feeling. Since the resulting symbolic systems are numerous, they are in perpetual interplay, creating a kind of sound-light show on an ever-increasing scale.

Marshall McLuhan
From Cliché to Archetype
1970

The Perpetual Nomad

2011-04-29T17:22:00.000-05:00

All this information and more has overtly, osmotically, or perhaps inadvertently damaged a collective sense of time that has been working well enough since the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the middle classes. This "timesickness" is probably what killed the economy, and God only knows what it's up to next. Everywhere we look, people are making online links--to conspiracy, porn, and gossip sites; to medical data sites and genetics sites; to baseball sites and sites for Fiestaware collectors; to sites where they can access free movies and free TV, arrange hookups with old flames or taunt old enemies--and time has begun to erase the twentieth century way of structuring one's day and locating one's sense of community. People are now doing their deepest thinking and making their most emotionally charged connections with people around the planet at all times of the day. Geography has become irrelevant. Our online phantom world has become the new us. We create complex webs of information and people who support us, and yet they are fleeting, so tenuous. Time speeds up and then it begins to shrink. Years pass by in minutes. Life becomes that strange experience in which you're zooming along a freeway and suddenly realize that you haven't paid any attention to driving for the last fifteen minutes, yet you're still alive and didn't crash. The voice inside your head has become a different voice. It used to be "you." Now your voice is that of a perpetual nomad drifting along a melting landscape, living day to day, expecting everything and nothing.

Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan:
You Know Nothing of My Work!
2009

The Self Mover: Automobile

2011-04-21T07:09:00.000-05:00

Source

In the spring of 1928 when the Swiss art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker first visited James at his flat in Paris, their conversation included a highly suggestive interchange about technology. She reports that Joyce asked, "Tell me what sort of an idea do you think the word 'automobile' would have aroused in the middle ages," and without waiting for a reply, he continued, "Certainly only that of a divine being, a self mover, thus a god." ... Recollecting that original conversation, she observes that there is a cultural project central to the Wake by which, "from a key word and the conceptions it aroused, Joyce wanted to crystalize a cultural state, or better yet the cultural crisis of a century. For god and technology had moved critically close to each other.

Donald Theall, James Joyce's Techno-Poetics, 1997

The Medium is the Message

2011-04-18T21:03:00.000-05:00

On turning to the 'Work in Progress' [Finnegans Wake] we find that the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct expression--pages and pages of it. And if you don't understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless the form is so strictly divorced from the content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. ... Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read--or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.

Samuel Beckett, "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,"
in Our Exagmination Round His Factification
For Incamination of Work in Progress, 1929

Beyond Media

2011-04-16T12:52:00.001-05:00

In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan came to be for the populace the prophet of the death of the book, since many commentators transformed his observations on these problems into an unqualified prediction and endorsement of that death. What actually has been implied as taking place in this process is not the movement beyond a particular medium, such as the book or print, but a movement beyond the very idea of a unique communication medium. The appearance of new methods of technological production, reproduction, and distribution permitted the possibility of transcending traditionally recognized modes and returning to the original vision of the poetic as a concept which could simultaneously embrace various modes of communication, as in Aristotle's treatment of drama in the Poetics. Joyce represents a monumental movement beyond media--itself a comic commentary on McLuhan and his commentators.

Don Theall, Beyond the Word, 1995

The Role of Media Ecology in Church History

2011-04-14T16:16:00.000-05:00

I recently came across this well-written article by Michael Giobbe from the Media Ecology Association proceedings of 2009. It should be of special interest to those Christians interested in the intersection of faith, media ecology, and ecumenism.

How Wide and How Long,

How High and How Deep:

The Role of Media Ecology in Church History

Abstract:

"The leading figures in media ecology—Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, Harold Innis, and Elizabeth Eisenstein—have all commented on the influence of various media environments upon the unfolding of church history. Their observations on the topic, however, have not to date been specifically collected and set into perspective with a view toward understanding more recent developments in that history. In this article, I undertake a preliminary overview of the subject, leading to two conclusions: First, the role of media ecology in church history is more varied, pervasive, and influential than previously thought. Secondly, therefore, by teaching media ecology as a unifying discipline either at the church or seminary level, one could actually deconflict that history, potentially leading to greater unity between church communities."

Full Article: http://www.media-ecology.org/publications/MEA_proceedings/v10/10_How_Wide.pdf

The Limits of Knowledge

2011-04-10T23:27:00.000-05:00

To conclude therefore, let no man upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied moderation think or maintain, that a man can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God's word, or in the book of God's works; divinity or philosophy: but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in both; only let men beware that they apply both to charity, and not to swelling; to use, and not to ostentation; and again, that they do not unwisely mingle or confound these learnings together.

Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 1605

Understanding Poetry

2011-04-05T15:46:00.000-05:00

Because poetry--like all the arts--involves this kind of experiential knowledge, we miss the value of poetry if we think of its characteristic knowledge as consisting of "messages," statements, snippets of doctrine. The knowledge that poetry yields is available to us only if we submit ourselves to the massive, and subtle, impact of the poem as a whole. We have access to this special kind of knowledge only by participating in the drama of the poem, apprehending the form of the poem. What in this context do we mean by form? To create a form is to find a way to contemplate, and perhaps to comprehend, our human urgencies. Form is the recognition of fate made joyful, because made comprehensible.

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren,
Understanding Poetry,
1960

The Joyce of McLuhan Studies

2011-04-02T10:15:00.000-05:00

He [Marshall McLuhan] was never reticent about the debt he owed to Joyce in particular, and frequently uttered and published such statements as this: 'Nobody could pretend serious interest in my work who is not completely familiar with all the works of James Joyce and the French symbolists.' Such statements were intended to be taken quite literally: a full appreciation of McLuhan's work is impossible without the sort of perceptual training that such familiarity instils. ... He once remarked to me, as I know he did to many others, that his work on media and culture was, in the main, 'applied Joyce.'

Eric McLuhan, The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake, 1997

Technological Determinism

2011-03-31T20:01:00.000-05:00

The consequences for literature that stem from major changes in technology are only inevitable to the extent that they are unforeseen. Determinism is the result of the behavior of those who are determined to ignore what is happening around them. Recognition of the psychic and social consequences of technological change makes it possible to neutralize the effects of innovation. If we maintain lively dialogue with, and among, the technologies, we can enlist them on the side of traditional values instead of watching those values disappear while we play the helpless bystanders.

Marshall McLuhan, Letters of Marshall McLuhan

What the Public Wants

2011-03-29T20:49:00.000-05:00

Nobody wants a motorcar until there are motorcars, and nobody is interested in TV till there are TV programs. This power of technology to create its own world of demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of our own bodies and senses.

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

Education as Armour

2011-03-25T14:33:00.000-05:00

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know that the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalised in 1940 when men were sent to fight armoured tanks with rifles, are not scandalised when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smatteirng of "subjects"; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotised by the arts of the spell-binder, we have the impudence to be astonished.

Dorothy Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning, 1947

The Wild Broncos of Technology

2011-03-23T22:02:00.000-05:00

Harnessing the Tennessee, Missouri, or Mississippi is kid stuff compared with curbing the movie, press, or television to human ends. The wild broncos of technological culture have yet to find their busters or masters. They have found only their P.T. Barnums.

Marshall McLuhan
Explorations in Communication
1966

Pattern Recognition and a New Religion

2011-03-23T07:14:00.000-05:00

Suppose, then, that we view recycling as akin to a religious practice, an organized expression of widely held ecological values. The language and symbolism of recycling support this view. Any church needs ritual observances, and curbside recycling provides the opportunity for the weekly offering and collection. After collection there is the modern miracle of transubstantiation, as old packages and papers come to life again. In states that have deposits on beverage containers, it is common to speak of the process of redemption.

Frank Ackerman, Why Do We Recycle?
1997

The Medium is the Message?

2011-03-18T11:59:00.002-05:00

via: James Morrison

Second Nature

2011-03-17T22:28:00.000-05:00

The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature.

Marshall McLuhan
Explorations in Communication

The Answer of St. Thomas

2011-03-04T17:19:00.000-06:00

When we are confronted by the bold fraud dreamt up by men whose confusion and spiritual frustration is the fruit of Satanic pride, the truth that is in us is made alive and lancing; but when a triumphant technology croons the sickly boasts of the advertising men, when the great vaults and vistas of the human soul are obscured by images of silken glamor, and when it is plain that man lives not by bread alone but by toothpaste also, then we need the answer of St. Thomas. It is the answer of moral and intellectual discipline and ardor.

Marshall McLuhan,

"Education of Free Men in Democracy,"

in St. Louis University Studies in Honor of St. Thomas Aquinas,

1943

Ends and Education

2011-02-24T18:48:00.000-06:00

Every person is by nature capable of determining his or her aims. Anyone who treats a person as the means to an end does violence to the very essence of the other, to what constitutes its natural right. Obviously, we must demand from a person, as a thinking individual, that his or her ends should be genuinely good, since the pursuit of evil ends is contrary to the rational nature of the person. This is also the purpose of education, both the education of children, and the mutual education of adults; it is just that -- a matter of seeking true ends, i.e. real goods as the ends of our actions, and of finding and showing to others the ways to realize them.

Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 1981

Theory of Environments

2011-02-04T18:19:00.000-06:00

Pavlov was the man who tipped us off that our old mechanical environment and its consequences were yielding to a totally new environment created by an antithetic technology. His discovery about conditioning is quite trivial since all Western men have experienced this for centuries. The portentous discovery he made was that any controlled environment, any man-made environment, is a conditioner that creates non-perceptive somnambulists. The fact that a natural or non-controlled environment has quite different effects upon human perception has long agitated the anthropological world. Anthropologists have been led to study the patterns of culture of native societies and the wonderful results of native environments in shaping native institutions, without any corresponding increase of insight into their own culture.

Marshall McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968

Thus Spoke Marshall McLuhan

2011-01-27T22:33:00.001-06:00

Check this:

A compilation of videos featuring none other than Marshall McLuhan.

www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com

Go see and hear the man himself explain his sayings, prophecies, the electric age, television, and his own quirky methods!

Truth, Proclamation, and Authenticity of Life in the Digital Age

2011-01-25T10:01:00.003-06:00

St. Francis de Sales

The Vatican released yesterday Pope Benedict XVI's message in preparation for the 45th World Communications Day on the occasion of the Feast Day of St. Francis de Sales, the patron saint of journalists. The message, entitled Truth, Proclamation, and Authenticity of Life in the Digital Age encourages the faithful--especially the youth--to thoughtfully examine their own participation in the digital environment for the purpose of effectively proclaiming the Gospel in all areas of life.

Here are some highlights:

In the digital world, transmitting information increasingly means making it known within a social network where knowledge is shared in the context of personal exchanges. The clear distinction between the producer and consumer of information is relativized and communication appears not only as an exchange of data, but also as a form of sharing. This dynamic has contributed to a new appreciation of communication itself, which is seen first of all as dialogue, exchange, solidarity and the creation of positive relations. On the other hand, this is contrasted with the limits typical of digital communication: the one-sidedness of the interaction, the tendency to communicate only some parts of one's interior world, the risk of constructing a false image of oneself, which can become a form of self-indulgence.

Young people in particular are experiencing this change in communication, with all the anxieties, challenges and creativity typical of those open with enthusiasm and curiosity to new experiences in life. Their ever greater involvement in the public digital forum, created by the so-called social networks, helps to establish new forms of interpersonal relations, influences self-awareness and therefore inevitably poses questions not only of how to act properly, but also about the authenticity of one's own being. Entering cyberspace can be a sign of an authentic search for personal encounters with others, provided that attention is paid to avoiding dangers such as enclosing oneself in a sort of parallel existence, or excessive exposure to the virtual world. In the search for sharing, for "friends", there is the challenge to be authentic and faithful, and not give in to the illusion of constructing an artificial public profile for oneself.

For the full message, see catholic.org.

Via: Read Schuchardt, metaphilm.com

Education and Entertainment

2011-01-22T12:27:00.000-06:00

The Mechanical Bride

Few students ever acquire skill in analysis of newspapers. Fewer have any ability to discuss a movie intelligently. To be articulate and discriminating about ordinary affairs and information is the mark of an educated man. It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education and entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter. It's like setting up a distinction between didactic and lyric poetry on the ground that one teaches, the other pleases. However, it's always been true that whatever pleases teaches more effectively.

Marshall McLuhan, Classroom Without Walls,

Explorations in Communication, 1960

The End of Nature

2011-01-19T23:26:00.000-06:00

A Beehive of Satellites

The information environment and effects created by the computer are as inaccessible to literate vision as the external world is to the blind. For example, the computer has made possible our satellites which have put a man-made environment around the planet, ending "nature" in the older sense. The new information technology will shortly encompass the entire astral system, harnessing its resources for terrestrial use. The important thing is to realize that electric information systems are live environments in the full organic sense. They alter our feelings and our sensibilities, especially when they are not attended to.

Marshall McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968

You Know Nothing of My Work!

2011-01-18T17:08:00.002-06:00

Check out this excerpt from Nicholas Carr's review of You Know Nothing of My Work!, Douglas Coupland's new biography of McLuhan:

Neither his fans nor his foes saw him clearly. The central fact of McLuhan's life, as Coupland makes clear, was his conversion, at the age of twenty-five, to Catholicism, and his subsequent devotion to the religion’s rituals and tenets. Though he never discussed it, his faith forms the moral and intellectual backdrop to all his mature work. What lay in store, McLuhan believed, was the timelessness of eternity. The earthly conceptions of past, present, and future were, by comparison, of little consequence. His role as a thinker was not to celebrate or denigrate the world but simply to understand it, to recognize the patterns that would unlock history’s secrets and thus provide hints of God’s design. His job was not dissimilar, as he saw it, from that of the artist.

Click here for the rest of Carr's article
and here to buy the book on Amazon.

Discarnate Man and Natural Law

2011-01-10T19:29:00.000-06:00

On the telephone, or on the air, man is in every sense discarnate, existing as an abstract image, a figure without a body. The Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland is a kind of parallel to our state. When discarnate, man has no identity, and is not subject to natural law. In fact he has no basis for morals of any sort. As electric information moved at the speed of light, man is a nobody. When deprived of his identity, man becomes violent in divers ways. Violence is the quest for identity. In Canada there is pending a large body of nihilistic legislation dedicated to the ideal of freedom. No-fault divorce is being succeeded by no-fault murder!

Letter to Clare Boothe Luce, April 5, 1979, Letters of Marshall McLuhan

The Medium is the Message: Exercise in Gestalt Psychology

2011-01-07T23:26:00.001-06:00

If you speak of the car as a medium, you are no further ahead because the car is no more than a figure detaching itself from a service environment of expressways, oil companies, automobile assembly lines, etc. The real medium, in the case of the car, is the totality of services it creates, or, better yet, the huge change that it creates in the human community. The car as the figure is not the message.

For North Americans, the hidden ground, the real message, of the car is what it does with our sense of privacy. The effect is different in Europe, but the car for us has been largely created to insure our privacy; in other words, the car's message is privacy, intimacy, and solitude. Privacy is made possible by the large network of highways, the biggest architectural structure in the history of the world which, by contrast, makes the pyramids and the Great Wall of China seem small. The car itself is no more than a figure in this service environment.

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light, Second Conversation with Pierre Babin, 1977

The Human Equation

2011-01-04T20:53:00.002-06:00

From Eric McLuhan:
The Human Equation is out!

Here is the URL: It is offered through Amazon (or you can order directly from the publisher, BPS Books).

http://www.amazon.ca/dp/1926645340/ (Canada)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1926645340/ (USA)

The Human Equation is a completely new and different approach to the study of media and technologies. It does not rely on any previous theory of media or school of understandings about them. No technical expertise is necessary.

We begin with the announcement, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, that all media and technologies have their origins as extensions of the user's body and faculties, The Human Equation examines the process of extending and the various modes of innovation that are possible in each area of technology, given the human body's repertoire of actions and postures. Now, on the centenary of Marshall McLuhan's birth, we have reinvented the study of media in the direction that he pointed to in that seminal work, Understanding Media.

Since this book is being published over the Internet, we have to rely on personal recommendations to get the word out, so please share this with friends and any you know who might be able to use this new approach to media.

A Liberal Education

2011-01-02T06:56:00.000-06:00

All liberal arts, in both the sciences and the humanities, are animated by the fundamental human desire to know, the fulfillment of which is a good, even if it provides no economic or political benefit whatsoever. An education for economic productivity and political utility alone is an education for slaves, but an education for finding, collecting and communicating reality is an education for free people, people free to know what is so. Remember, knowing the real is a good before it is a power.

Scott Crider, The Office of Assertion, 2005

The Business of School

2010-12-29T07:18:00.000-06:00

The principal argument is that teachers are not competent to serve as priests, psychologists, therapists, political reformers, social workers, sex advisers, or parents. That some teachers might wish to do so is understandable, since in this way they may elevate their prestige. That some would feel it necessary to do so is also understandable, since many social institutions, including the family and the church, have deteriorated in their influence. But unprepared teachers are not an improvement on ineffective social institutions; the plain fact is that there is nothing in the background or education of teachers that qualifies them to do what other institutions are supposed to do. It should be clear, by the way, that in this argument the phrase "unprepared teachers," does not mean that teachers cannot do their work. It means they cannot do everyone's work.

Neil Postman, The End of Education, 1995

The Embodied Page

2010-12-27T08:56:00.000-06:00

In a tradition of one and a half millenia, the sounding pages are echoed by the resonance of the moving lips and tongue. The reader's ears pay attention, and strain to catch what the reader's mouth gives forth. In this manner the sequence of letters translates directly into body movements and patterns nerve impulses. The lines are a sound track picked up by the mouth and voiced by the reader for his own ear. By reading, the page is literally embodied, incorporated.

The modern reader conceives of a page as a plate that inks the mind, and of the mind as a screen onto which the page is projected and from which, at a flip, it can fade. For the monastic reader, whom Hugh addresses, reading is a much less phantasmagoric and much more carnal activity: the reader understands the lines by moving to their beat, remembers them by recapturing their rhythm, and thinks of them in terms of putting them into his mouth and chewing. No wonder pre-university monasteries are described to us in various sources as the dwelling places of mumblers and munchers.

Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 1993

The Varieties of Religious Experience

2010-12-25T06:21:00.000-06:00

As the discussion proceeds, important distinctions are made among the different meanings of "belief," but at some point it becomes far from asinine to speak of the god of Technology--in the sense that people believe technology works, that they rely on it, that it makes promises, that they are bereft when denied access to it, that they are delighted when they are in its presence, that for most people it works in mysterious ways, that they condemn people who speak against it, that they stand in awe of it, and that, in the born-again mode, they will alter their lifestyles, their schedules, their habits, and their relationships to accommodate it. If this be not a form of religious belief, what is?

Neil Postman, The End of Education, 1995

Modern Reading

2010-12-19T07:55:00.000-06:00

Modern reading, especially of the academic and professional type, is an activity performed by commuters or tourists; it is no longer that of pedestrians and pilgrims. The speed of the car and the dullness of the road and the distraction of billboards put the driver into a state of sensory deprivation that continues when he hurries through manuals and journals once he arrives at his desk. Like the tourist equipped with a camera, so today's student reaches for the photocopy to keep a souvenir snapshot. He is in a world of photographs, illustrations, and graphs which put the memory of illuminated letter-landscapes beyond his reach.

Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 1993

The Internal Palace

2010-12-16T17:01:00.000-06:00

The one most common method used by the Greeks to achieve this purpose was the mental construction of a memory palace. ... To become the student of a reputable teacher, the pupil had to prove that he was at home and at ease in some vast architecture that existed only in his mind, and within which he could move at an instant to the spot of his choice. Each school had its own rules according to which this edifice had to be constructed. It had to contain several visually distinct classes of features such as columns, angles, rafters, rooms, archways, niches, and thresholds.

Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 1993

The Digital Story of the Nativity

2010-12-14T23:03:00.001-06:00

via: The Thin Veil

Reading in the Middle Ages

2010-12-11T12:12:00.000-06:00

There are some of a dozen rules of a general character that Hugh [of St. Victor] gives for the shaping of those habits which the reader must acquire so that his striving lead him to wisdom, rather than to the accumulation of knowledge pursued for the purpose of showing off. The reader is one who has made himself into an exile in order to concentrate his entire attention and desire on wisdom, which thus becomes the hoped-for home.

Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 1996

The Technological Dragon

2010-12-08T16:41:00.000-06:00

The conviction was growing in me that the besetting problem was our culture's blindness to the distinction between the tool and the automatic machine. Everyone tended to treat them alike, as neutral agents of human intention. But machines clearly were not neutral or inert objects. They were complex fuel-consuming entities with certain definite proclivities and needs. Besides often depriving their users of skills and physical exercise, they created new and artificial demands--for fuel, space, money, and time. These in turn crowded out other important human pursuits, like involvement in family and community, or even the process of thinking itself. The very act of accepting the machine was becoming automatic.

Eric Brende, Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology, 2004

After Virtue

2010-12-04T09:35:00.000-06:00

The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on and on -- although they do -- but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture.

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 1981

The End of Education, pt. IV

2010-11-30T21:37:00.000-06:00

It is a matter of the greatest urgency that our educational institutions realize that we now have civil war among these environments created by media other than the printed word. The classroom is now in a vital struggle for survival with the immensely persuasive "outside" world created by new informational media. Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery--to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967

Glass House Living

2010-11-28T16:19:00.002-06:00

Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community's need to know.

--Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967

For an interesting perspective on social and electronic media, check out The Public Isolation Project. Cristin Norine has devoted the entire month of November (even Thanksgiving!) to living in a glass storefront, only able to communicate with others through electronic media. CNN featured her last week:

Her time is coming to a close, but check out her blog for some thought-provoking meditations on what it is like to interact only through social media. One commenter compared her undertaking to Joshua Slocum, Sir Francis Chichester, and Amelia Earhart, showing us that now that we have conquered the natural environment, our media environment is the true frontier.

Via: Read Schuchardt

The Religious Literature of Commercials

2010-11-21T23:07:00.000-06:00

"It's time for a phone to save us from our phones"

But the TV commercial does not present products in a form that calls upon analytic skills or what we customarily think of as rational and mature judgment. It is not facts that are offered to the consumer but idols, to which both adults and children can attach themselves with equal devotion and without the burden of logic or verification. It is, therefore, misleading even to call this form of communication "commercials," since they disdain the rhetoric of business and do their work largely with the symbols and rhetoric of religion. Indeed, I believe it is entirely fair to conclude that television commercials are a form of religious literature.

Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood, 1982

Acoustic McLuhan

2010-11-17T22:00:00.001-06:00

I recently posted a clip of an interview with Marshall McLuhan in which he explained his conversion to Catholicism (link). The clip came from an interview with Nina Sutton in 1975, which the Library and Archives of Canada have put out on the web (link). Unfortunately, they have the interview available only as Windows Media files, so here is a link to the rest of the clips you can find on their website:

Interview with Nina Sutton

The topics include:
+The relationship between "the medium is the message" and the figure/ground concept,
+The influence of New Criticism on McLuhan media studies,
+The relationship of poetry and media,
+The Press,
+Visual and Acoustic Space.

Be sure to check it out, there are some rare gems here!

The End of Education, pt. III

2010-11-13T20:22:00.000-06:00

What students do in the classroom is what they learn (as Dewey would say), and what they learn to do is the classroom's message (as McLuhan would say). Now, what is it that students do in the classroom? Well, mostly, they sit and listen to the teacher. Mostly, they are required to believe in authorities, or at least pretend to such belief when they take tests. Mostly, they are required to remember. They are almost never required to make observations, formulate definitions, or perform any intellectual operations that go beyond repeating what someone else says is true.

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 1969

The Poetry of Life

2010-11-11T18:04:00.004-06:00

Recently seen on the Media Ecology Association listserv:

They are giving out these for free over at http://burningbooksposters.blogspot.com/, or you can buy one of their other interesting posters.

via: Read Schuchardt

The Future of the Book

2010-11-09T16:49:00.001-06:00

The future of the book in school or outside of school is a service. You will go to the phone, or use some other means of announcing your interest, and say "The history of Egyptian arithmetic" and that you know a little Sanskrit and a lot of French and a lot of this and that and, "Please send me the latest." You will receive in an hour or so a package with all the latest studies on Egyptian arithmetic from every journal in the world, and custom-made for your resources and your means. The idea of just having mass-produced books the same for every one, and just going out and buying one, is automatically liquidated by Xerox. Xerox makes the book into a service industry--information service--and entirely tailor-made, custom-built.

--Marshall McLuhan, Education in the Electronic Age,

in The Best of Times/The Worst of Times:

Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education, 1970

Tickled Ferocious

2010-11-06T23:52:00.001-05:00

If you tickle the sole of the foot of a sane man he temporarily loses his reason. When excited, confused, worked up, drugged, and shrieked at by the magnate and his press for a few weeks, 'mankind' becomes ferocious, that is all.

--Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, 1926

The New Nomads

2010-11-03T15:11:00.004-05:00

The most disadvantaged part of our culture is the suburbs--the rich suburbs--because these are the people who have plunged into the most primitive modes of awareness, thanks to electronics and thanks to the latest in everything. In other words the suburbs are more in contact with the 20th century than any other part of our culture and they are therefore the most primitive in the sense of Paleolithic hunter-oriented man.

The Wilderness Downtown

In educational terms you have this paradox: that the most economically advantaged part of our community is the most disadvantaged culturally in terms of the sensory life. Now these people are in trouble. They are torn because they want to belong to the establishment--in fact they think of it as theirs--and yet they are, in terms of their new century involvement in the electric age, so deeply involved that their capacities for establishing contact with the visual world of rational order and visual connectives, their capacities for making that adjustment are just about zero.

--Marshall McLuhan, Education in the Electronic Age,

in The Best of Times/The Worst of Times:

Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education, 1970

A Very Bad Idea

2010-10-31T14:29:00.000-05:00

Although, to be sure, there are many positive aspects of new and emerging technologies, I am not the best person to answer your question. I have concentrated my attention on the possible negative consequences, mostly because everyone else seems to speak about the advantages technology will bring. Someone needs to mention what may be lost. Of course, one of the problems is that what I would judge to be a negative consequence, someone else might see as a positive consequence. For example, telephones in automobiles seem to me a very bad idea. So does spending a lot of hours "communicating" on the Internet when one could use that time reading Cervantes' Don Quixote.

--Neil Postman, 1996, in response to the question:
What are the positive effects of new and emerging technologies? Are there ways to maximize the benefits of the Internet and e-mail while minimizing the possible negative effects on society?

See the rest of his answers here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/january96/postman_1-17.html

Entering Through the Back Door

2010-10-28T13:58:00.000-05:00

Here is a fragment of an interview with Marshall McLuhan by Nina Sutton in 1975, in which they discuss his conversion to Catholicism. Enjoy!

This clip is made available by the Library and Archives of Canada at the following link:

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/innis-mcluhan/030003-2000-e.html

via: Read Schuchardt

The End of Education, pt. II

2010-10-28T13:42:00.001-05:00

Education plays, and will continue to play, a much more important part in government than physical and exterior force. Force is a passing and precarious thing, whereas to get inside a person' mind and change his very personality is the effective way of reducing him and making him yours. Merely to chain him up like a dog or a slave is meaningless. To kill him is equally meaningless. It is by taking him when he is very young, and educating him, that you can secure him to yourself.

--Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, 1926

Grammar and the Laws of Media

2010-10-25T16:25:00.000-05:00

The very events of history are a gigantic and complex statement to which the methods of grammatical exegesis are applicable; and this point of view is as helpful for the understanding of Dante as of Milton, not to mention subjects of greater extent.

Marshall McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 2006

Magical Rectangles of Light

2010-10-23T09:27:00.000-05:00

This just in:

90% of Waking Hours Spent Staring at Glowing Rectangles

via: The Onion

On Aphorism

2010-10-20T15:45:00.000-05:00

But the writing in aphorisms hath many excellent virtues, whereto the writing in Method doth not approach. For first, it trieth the writer, whether he be superficial or solid: for Aphorism, except they should be ridiculous, cannot be made but of the pith and heart of sciences; for discourse of illustration is cut off; recitals of examples are cut off; discourse of connexion and order is cut off; descriptions of practice are cut off. So there remaineth nothing to fill the aphorisms but some good quantity of observation: and therefore no man can suffice, nor in reason will attempt, to write aphorisms, but he that is sound and grounded. ... And lastly, Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Method, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest.

Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 1605

On Writing and Reading

2010-10-18T11:24:00.000-05:00

There are two kinds of writing:

A. Books a man reads to develop his capacities, in order to know more and perceive more, and more quickly, than he did before he read them.

B. Books that are intended and that serve as REPOSE, dope, opiates, mental beds.

--Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, 1934

History

2010-10-16T09:42:00.000-05:00

Not to study what happened before we were born is to always remain a child.

--Cicero

To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.

--John Henry Cardinal Newman

The Art of Being Ruled

2010-10-13T19:49:00.000-05:00

Could this be published today? Wyndham Lewis' introduction to The Art of Being Ruled:

Most books have their patients, rather than their readers, no doubt. But some degree of health is postulated in the reader of this book. Its pages are not intended to supply the figurative equivalent of Kruschen Salts or an enema. Nor is it the intention of its author to open a clinic or a nursing-home, or an institute for the half-witted, nor yet a beauty-parlor. Understanding on that point with the reader at the start will be an advantage.

A book of this description is not written for an audience already there, prepared to receive it, and whose minds it will fit like a glove. There must be a good deal of stretching of the receptacle, it is to be expected. It must of necessity make its own audience; for it aims at no audience already there with which I am acquainted. I do not invent (or if that was not an invention, then I am not happy enough to know) a class of esprits libres, or 'good Europeans,' as Nietzsche did. I know none.

Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, 1926

The Humiliation of the Word

2010-10-10T13:24:00.000-05:00

Culturally, then, we are no longer careful, close readers of texts, sacred or secular. We scan for information, but we do not appreciate literary craftsmanship. Exposition is therefore virtually a lost art. We don't really read texts to enter the world of the author and perceive reality through his vantage point; we read texts to see how they confirm what we already believe about reality. Texts are mirrors that reflect ourselves; they are not pictures that are appreciated in themselves. This explains, in part, the phenomenon that many Christians will read their Bibles daily for fifty years, and not have one opinion that changes for the entire fifty-year span. Texts do not change or alter or skew their perspective; texts do not move them or shape them; they merely use them as mnemonic devices to recall what they already know.

--T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach:

The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, 2009

via: Read Schuchardt

The End of Education

2010-10-07T17:39:00.000-05:00

Q. Do you think it is our job as educationists to increase the capacity of the student to come to grips with this new experience of a new technology?

A. They are totally at grips with it and what we want to give them is some detachment.

--Marshall McLuhan, Education in an Electronic Age,

in The Best of Times/The Worst of Times:

Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education, 1970

Intellectual Thuggery

2010-10-04T07:40:00.000-05:00

Source

I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon.

--Marshall McLuhan, Letter to Ezra Pound, 1951

Educational Hypocrisy

2010-10-02T09:12:00.000-05:00

If you wanted the kids to withdraw from involvement in the new electric environment, you should just programme it in your school system as necessary for examinations. Put the hit parade on the examination and all the comic books and all the movies and all the TV shows and examine every week in them and you will find a total desertion of the whole enterprise. If there is anything but hypocrisy in our protest about the vulgarity of our programming, we would do this. We are pure hypocrites. We can stop them from looking at every one of those shows by the simple gesture of using our school system. It works for Shakespeare; why shouldn't it work for Bonanza?

--Marshall McLuhan, Education in an Electronic Age,

in The Best of Times/The Worst of Times:

Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education, 1970

The Education of Mike McManus

2010-09-30T07:43:00.001-05:00

The following is a clip of an interview with Marshall McLuhan which aired on TVOntario in 1977. The description:

Mike McManus talks to Marshall McLuhan, the internationally-known critic of the media. McLuhan discusses modern regionalism and separatism, nostalgia, violence and identity, television as an addictive tranquilizer, propaganda, and his reasons for becoming a Roman Catholic.

While all of that sounds fascinating, the clip is only three minutes and doesn't capture the whole interview. TVOntario won't let me access the interview on their site, because I'm in the US, but I'd love to get my hands on the whole thing--especially the part about his reasons for becoming a Roman Catholic.

Here is a link to the full length video, if you are in a place where you can watch it:

http://www.tvo.org/TVO/WebObjects/TVO.woa?videoid?76058196001

McLuhan's Sexual Ethics

2010-09-27T09:49:00.000-05:00

The word "sex" is wrong to begin with because it is fragmentation. It automatically creates pornography. If you want to create pornography you just separate some aspect of sex and life from everything else. That is pornography. It is fragmentation. Sentimentality is the same way. Take a rich emotion, break it up into bits and you have sentimentality. Sex is fragmentation. The mere abstracting of the word or the concept from the whole complex of lived social existence is unreal. So it is a very good point to begin the investigation by simply challenging the right of that word to exist except as a classification of male and female. Otherwise it probably has no right to exist.

--Marshall McLuhan, Education in the Electronic Age,

in The Best of Times/The Worst of Times:

Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education, 1970

Eric McLuhan @ Pattern Recognition

2010-09-25T17:39:00.000-05:00

Read Schuchardt has posted a transcript of Eric McLuhan's Wheaton College presentation from several weeks ago. Even if you've heard the talk, it's worth the read.

http://trueslant.com/readschuchardt/2010/09/24/a-wee-sip-from-the-fire-hose/

The Business of Art

2010-09-25T07:24:00.000-05:00

The doctrine of names is, of course, the doctrine of essence and not a naive notion of oral terminology. The scriptural exegetists will hold, as Francis Bacon held, that Adam possessed metaphysical knowledge in a very high degree. To him the whole of nature was a book which he could read with ease. He lost his ability to read this language of nature as a result of the fall; and Solomon alone of the sons of men has ever recovered the power to read the book of nature. The business of art is, however, to recover the knowledge of that language which once man held by nature.

Marshall McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 2006

The Dark Night of the Soul

2010-09-20T14:48:00.003-05:00

You're bored? That's because you keep your senses awake and your soul asleep.

-- St. Josemaría Escrivá, The Way, 1939
Via: Ruth Miller

The Great Blackout

2010-09-18T10:20:00.000-05:00

Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us their unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act--the way we perceive the world. Were the Great Blackout of 1965 to have continued for half a year, there would be no doubt how electric technology shapes, works over, alters--massages--every instant of our lives.

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967

On Two Natures

2010-09-16T11:57:00.001-05:00

Aristotle first noted that the Greek invention of Nature was made possible when they had left behind a savage or barbaric state (first nature) by putting on an individualized and civilized one (second nature). And A.T.W. Simeons has discussed at length how disruptive the second nature has been to the first. Made discarnate by our electric information media, the west is furiously at work retrieving its obsolesced organic first nature in a spectrum of new aesthetic modes, from feminism to phenomenology. As our second nature consists entirely in our artifacts and extensions and the grounds and narcoses they impose, their etymologies are all to be found in first nature, the wild body.

Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media, 1988

The End of the Landline

2010-09-14T17:45:00.000-05:00

This just in from Wheaton College (not sure how many other campuses have already gone the same route):

Re: Elimination of Phones in Residence Halls

There are no longer active phone lines in residence hall rooms. Due to the fact that the vast majority of Wheaton students have cell phones, advancement in technology, and other reasons, it was decided to have the land lines discontinued. Phone lines remain in campus apartments and houses. Phones remain in the residence hall lobby areas for general student use with a prepaid calling card or for emergency 911 use. The Resident Assistant on each floor will also have a phone in his/her room for emergency purposes.

Please follow this link to the Residence Life website for more information on alternative communication systems which students can use: http://www.wheaton.edu/studentlife/reslife/policies-financial-faq/faq#idqo4dRzonbp96pM-Hp7afkQ

We understand that room phones have been a traditional way in which parents, professors and off-
campus community members have been directed by the switchboard to reach you. It will, therefore, be important for you to distribute your cell phone number accordingly. If you live in a residence hall, the College will NOT give out your cell phone number but rather your College email address.

If you live in a residence hall, please discuss ahead of time with your parents how to proceed if they need to contact you in case of an emergency and your cell phone is not available. If it is a true emergency, please have your parents contact Public Safety, who can put them in touch with the on duty Residence Life staff member in your building. If your parents desire contact information of other people, we suggest you give them your roommate or close friend's cell phone. If you have concerns that have not been addressed in this email please contact either --- or ---.

Thank you

The link provides this information:
How can I make phone calls if I do not have a cell phone?

Our residence hall rooms no longer have College provided phones. There are phones in the main lobbies and floor lounge areas where students will be able to dial 800 numbers, campus numbers and 9-911 in case of an emergency. Listed below are some communication options that students can use. These alternate methods of communication are not endorsed by Wheaton College, but are listed for your convenience.

Magic Jack- www.magicjack.com

Skype- www.skype.com

IChat- www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macsx/ichat.html

Google Voice- www.google.com/voice - Save cell phone minutes by using Google Voice

Calling Cards

Total War

2010-09-11T08:19:00.000-05:00

Time August 21, 1995

Real, total war has become information war. It is being fought by subtle electric informational media--under cold conditions, and constantly. The cold war is the real war front--a surround--involving everybody--all the time--everywhere. Whenever hot wars are necessary these days, we conduct them in the backyards of the world with the old technologies. These wars are happenings, tragic games. It is no longer convenient, or suitable, to use the latest technologies for fighting our wars, because the latest technologies have rendered war meaningless. The hydrogen bomb is history's exclamation point. It ends an age-long sentence of manifest violence!

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967

Technological Pollination

2010-09-08T10:12:00.001-05:00

It is because our lives are so attached to and involved with the evolution of our machines that we have grown to see and feel everything in revolutionary terms, just as once the natural mood was conservative. We instinctively repose on the future rather than the past, though this may not yet be generally realized. Instead of the static circle of the rotation of the crops, or the infinitely slow process of handiwork, we are in the midst of the frenzied war of machines. This affects our view of everything; our life, its objects and uses, love, health, friendship, politics; even art to a certain extent, but with less conviction.

Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, 1926

Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

Catholicism and Protestantism in the Global Village

2010-09-06T07:38:00.000-05:00

For the Catholic, the revealed Word of God is not the Gutenberg Bible, not the King James Version. But the Protestant cannot but take a different view of the passing of preeminence of the printed book, because Protestantism was born with the printing press and seems to be passing with it. There again, the Catholic alone has nothing to fear from the rapidity of the changes in the media of communication. But national cultures have much to fear. In fact, it is hard to see how any national culture as such can long stand up to the new media of communication. ... It is not markets we now invade but the cultures and the minds of men. And this process is furthest advanced here in North America.

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light,
from a lecture delivered at St. Joseph's College,
West Hartford, CT, 1954

The McLuhan's at Wheaton College

2010-09-04T07:37:00.000-05:00

This week at Wheaton College my peers and I had the delightful privilege of hosting Eric and Andrew McLuhan. They were quite gracious with their time, and we greatly enjoyed their company. Apart from hanging out and talking media ecology (and Catholicism), Eric participated in a roundtable discussion on the greatest moral challenges of the next decade, discussing the transformations caused by electric technology. A recording of the roundtable can be streamed or downloaded here:

- Presentation (Eric's is the second presentation)

- Discussion

Check them out, and enjoy the discussion.

----

Bonus! Let me share with you a nugget which Andrew shared with me. Again, a big thanks to you both!

The Guy:

via: Andrew McLuhan and WETN

Man: An Instrument of Efficiency

2010-09-01T21:15:00.001-05:00

Advertisers have been reading up on their media ecology this summer. Then, they turn it around and try to use it to get you to buy stuff. Jacques Ellul's biggest social critique was that technology (both hardware and software) was making us less human by making us servants to efficiency. Now that we live in the 21st century and have gotten past all that Luddite mumbo jumbo, we can switch these arguments around and use them to sell stuff. Buy a Droid: because your goal in life is to be "an instrument of efficiency."

Peep this:

via: Nicholas Oswald

The Things We Make, Make Us

2010-08-29T16:59:00.000-05:00

Jeep's commercial, released earlier this summer, wants to convince you that media ecology is true. Why? So you'll buy a Jeep. Because "The things we make (read: buy), make us."

A Conspiracy for Truth

2010-08-25T14:40:00.002-05:00

The Catholic Monitor blog recently featured an older interview with Fr. John Hardon. It is a worthy read, but of particular interest is the following:

Well, on that day when my confessor and I were in conversation, Father Mole showed me the letter which he had just received from McLuhan, and in the postscript of that letter McLuhan wrote this statement, "The modern media are engaged in a Luciferian conspiracy against the truth." Certain statements you never forget. And that was prophetic. Since I've been with the Holy See, from Pope Paul VI to the present pope, John Paul II, the popes have wanted Catholics to change that. Imagine the alternative: "The modern media are engaged in a Christlike, shall I use the word, conspiracy, for the truth."

Read the rest of the interview to see what else he has to say about media and martyrdom in our age.

via: Dr. Read Schuchardt

Media and Magisterium

2010-08-22T16:37:00.000-05:00

The conditions attending the exercises of the magisterium of the Church in the twentieth century are such as to present an analogue with the first decade of the Christian Church. There is, on the one hand, the immediacy of interrelationship among Christians and non-Christians alike in a world where information moves at the speed of light. The populations of the world now co-exists in an extremely small space and in an instant of time. So far as the magisterium is concerned, it is as if the entire population of the world were present in a small room where perpetual dialogue was possible.

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light, 1973

The Patron Saint of TV

2010-08-18T16:34:00.000-05:00

Did you know that TV has a patron saint? St. Clare, companion of St. Francis of Assissi and the foundress of the Poor Clares, is the patron of television. Why? Be enlightened by this video:

The Lonely Crowd

2010-08-15T23:28:00.000-05:00

The reigning economic system is founded on isolation; at the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins all technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to television, also serve as weapons for that system as it strives to reinforce the isolation of "the lonely crowd." The spectacle is continually rediscovering its own basic assumptions -- and each time in a more concrete manner.

--Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967

Inside the Whale

2010-08-10T15:18:00.000-05:00

This day in history:

Source

One thing that comes to mind that is not in that volume (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man) concerns the habit of new media in swallowing older media, transforming them strangely. Perhaps the latest example is the swallowing of film by TV. The press had swallowed the book, and film had swallowed the press earlier. This had gone on since the origin of script, as is magnificently illustrated by Eric Havelock in his Preface to Plato. When swallowed, the older media tend to become high-class art forms. The new medium is never considered an art form, but only a degradation of the older form. This piece could be called "Inside the Whale."

Marshall McLuhan, Letter to Ashley Montagu, August 10, 1964

Letters of Marshall McLuhan

The Lonely Parish

2010-08-08T08:40:00.000-05:00

The following says more about airplanes than parish life, but it certainly does raise questions about the nature of parish community:

In Canada, the old parishes depended on horse and buggy to bring in the neighbouring farmers. Then suddenly the car appeared, and yesterday's communities disappeared because people no longer came together long enough to get to know each other. What sort of parish did that create? Made up of individuals who didn't know each other? Little by little we became like strangers at an airport waiting for the same airplane. And once in the airplane, we tended not to talk to our fellow passengers. To separate us better, we were supplied with headsets which, instead, put us in touch with the rest of humanity.

Marshall McLuhan, interview w/ Pierre Babin, The Medium and the Light, 1977

Explaining Media Ecology

2010-08-04T07:35:00.000-05:00

Source

The electric transformation causes us to resist and to reject the old visual culture, regardless of its value or relevance. These kinds of psychic oscillation resulting from large environmental change are no longer necessary, any more than the plague. Psychic diseases can now be treated for what they are, namely manifestations of the response to man-made technologies. Environmental noise and disturbance can be controlled as readily as the unhygienic conditions that prevailed until recent times. The psychic effects of TV are no more necessary than the physical effects of polluted drinking water. As long as people persist in ignoring the subliminal and hidden effects of media on psyche and society, they will attribute these things to the "will of God."

Marshall McLuhan, Letter to John W. Mole, O.M.I., The Medium and the Light, 1974

Marshall McLuhan: Enemy of Society or Intellectual Thug?

2010-08-01T17:57:00.001-05:00

Source

I’ve already mentioned the recent post over at The Heresy Hunter, naming Marshall McLuhan an enemy of society, a “mass media mystifier,” and a Gnostic. The author of the hefty post, TH2, draws from a wide selection of McLuhan’s work, but unfortunately arrives at the conclusion that Marshall McLuhan is who all the techno-savvy people think he is: a technological prophet who foresaw and embraced a future, post-singularity world.

Most problematic in TH2’s analysis of McLuhan is his misunderstanding of several of McLuhan’s key ideas, especially “the medium is the message.” TH2 sees McLuhan’s (in)famous aphorism as an epistemological fallacy:

Note here that McLuhan's equalization of information with the commodity intimated his famous dictum "the medium is the message", i.e. medium = message, commodity = information or, philosophically abstracted, the thing is equal to the sign which represents that thing. The "medium" belongs to objective reality, and the "message" is the formal signification of that medium. Yet if a thing is made equivalent to a sign that represents that thing, all kinds of quandaries emerge in the area of epistemology. If the sign represented to the mind cannot be differentiated from thing in the world, if the message is not seen as really distinct from the physical medium, this would make understanding impossible. The distinction between the intelligible and sensible, the mind and the world, therefore become blurred, fused into one unit so to speak.

Yet this is not at all McLuhan’s goal. In saying “the medium is the message,” McLuhan hoped to shift the focus within the realm of media studies from the content of media to the media themselves. What is significant about watching television isn’t whether you are watching The Real World, Hannity & Colmes, or Monday night football, it is how the television affects what you are doing, how you think, and the social relationships between people. Thus, McLuhan said that “the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” We often ignore the medium itself as we investigate the content.

To explain why the medium is the message, McLuhan’s favorite illustration was the electric light:

The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it can have no 'content'. And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all. For it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is notices as a medium. Then it is not the light but the 'content' (or what is really another medium) that is noticed. (Understanding Media)

Unfortunately, TH2 misunderstands McLuhan again:

If "electric light" has no "content", if it is not substantial, then what is it? If it is not something that can be perceived (whether biologically or with some technical instrumentation), what is it? It cannot be something and nothing at the same time, as this is in defiance of the principle of contradiction.

McLuhan uses the word “content” in the common understanding: something contained within something else. In the context of media studies, the word refers to the information or subject matter contained within a medium. For television it is a television show; for the Internet, a website; for the telephone, a conversation; et cetera. McLuhan used the example of the electric light because it has no content in the traditional sense. This allowed McLuhan to show just how much influence the medium itself can have, without considering the content.

Further, his example of the electric light demonstrates his broad understanding of technology as “extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed.” TH2 seems to think that McLuhan “did not see a real distinction between man and his technological ‘extensions,’” for which he accuses him of ascribing mysterious qualities to technology (“a sure sign of Gnosticism”). Yet is this really mystifying? It is somewhat obvious that our tools increase the power and speed of some activity performed by our natural body (i.e. consider a shovel as an extension of your hand). Why does this become mystifying when applied to electric technology?

One particularly mystifying aspect that TH2 points out is McLuhan’s concept of the ‘global village,’ which he compares to the idea of monopsychism found in the work of Islamic philosopher Averroes. McLuhan:

Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. (Understanding Media)

The difference between electric technology and all previous technology for McLuhan is that where as non-electric technology extended our physical bodies, electric technology extends our consciousness. In fact, he went as far to say that computer technology was our externalized centralized nervous system. Many like to point to the combination of the Internet and the computer as embodying this exact notion (consider Wikipedia and IBM’s Watson). The Internet is a huge store of human knowledge, collectively developed and available to many. This is not really a mystical explanation. Though the technology that allows me to write this and you to read it would seem magical to anyone not born in the last century, it is old hat to us. McLuhan’s writing helps us to step back and consider our technology for how strange they really are.

Further, when you consider McLuhan’s more personal and religious writing (and interviews), it is clear that he was not the techno-prophet the singularity-types would like to make him:

Electric information environments being utterly ethereal fosters the illusion of the world as a spiritual substance. It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body, a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ. After all, the Prince of this World is a very great electric engineer. (The Medium and the Light, 72)

In fact, McLuhan undertook the study of media not because he wished to mystify the new electric technology, but because he thought that if we could understand our older media and the principles by which they operate, then “we could reduce or even eliminate the electric factor from our lives.” (Understanding Media, 131)

This deals with TH2’s main contention with McLuhan: “his prioritization of sensation and negation of linear/logical thought/understanding.” McLuhan saw linear thought, visual space, and individualism as functions of the phonetic alphabet and the printing press. With the introduction of the telegraph and the rest of the electric media, McLuhan saw us returning to an acoustic concept of space and tribal involvement with each other, so that individualism “has been scrubbed right off our culture.” He saw this change as problematic:

Christianity definitely supports the idea of a private, independent metaphysical substance of the self. Where the technologies supply no cultural basis for this individual, then Christianity is in for trouble. (The Medium and the Light, 85)

Though McLuhan’s work often focused on electric technology, his body of work, especially his letters and interviews, reveal that not only was he wary of electric technologies and the changes that they would bring to linear thought and the private individual, but through his study hoped to better our cultural education and provide a “civil defense against media fallout.”

Initially, his work is hard to understand, but given time and patience McLuhan provides a helpful framework for encountering our mediated society. Is he an enemy of society? I think not.

Advertising and Automation

2010-07-29T21:16:00.001-05:00

Many people have expressed uneasiness about the advertising enterprise in our time. To put the matter abruptly, the advertising industry is a crude attempt to extend the principles of automation to every aspect of society. Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness. When all production and all consumption are brought into a pre-established harmony with all desire and all effort, then advertising will have liquidated itself by its own success.

-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

The Heresy Hunter Hunts McLuhan

2010-07-26T19:38:00.001-05:00

The Heresy Hunter

The Heresy Hunter has a long (and when I say long, I mean L-O-N-G) post on why McLuhan the Mass Media Mystifier was Gnostic and a heretic (available here). The author has put some serious research. I don't agree with many of his conclusions, but I will quote what stood out to me on my first read, and in a couple of days try to draft a response.

"McLuhan was unmindful to this because he, like Hume, wrote that "the effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinion or concepts" [the mind], but at the level of "sense ratios or patterns of perception" [the body].

If "electric light" has no "content", if it is not substantial, then what is it? If it is not something that can be perceived (whether biologically or with some technical instrumentation), what is it? It cannot be something and nothing at the same time, as this is in defiance of the principle of contradiction.

Moreover, McLuhan wrote that light and power "eliminate" time and space.[29] But do they really? No. They only lessen the scales of "time and space factors" involved. They do not completely remove, effectuating an entire change in the character of technology. Rather, they noticeably reduce quantifiable magnitudes in a biological-sensorial sense.

As is now being evidenced, all kinds of fallacies are coming to the fore. This is simply because McLuhan presumed the medium to be equal to the message. When one really ponders the phrase "the medium is the message", it is classic Humeanism. The messages that man relays around the world are in themselves irretrievably tied in with the physical/technological contraption utilized to emit these messages or information, be it via satellite, television, radio, fax machine, internet, and so forth. The message, represented by universal signs, are fashioned to be equivalent to the medium, which is a singular thing or device. Information (in the forms of language, alphanumeric codes, graphical images, and so on) then become, not representations of commodities (things); instead, they are converted into commodities as such. To McLuhan there was, à la Hume, no distinction between the sensible and intelligible. The signs that communicate ideas to the mind, and the thing in the world as a really distinct existential unit from the mind, were not deemed as such by Marshall McLuhan. Again: he made understanding equivalent to technologically heightened sensation.

Thus TH2 [author of the post] concludes that Marshall McLuhan was a gnostic who mystified mass media. This is straightforwardly confirmed with the following:

The main obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of the new media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of view.[82]

As with any gnostic, ancient or modern, philosopher or scientist, the remission of specificity or "a fixed point of view" is an error betraying a propensity towards relativism, leading inescapingly to obscurantism. "

My response will follow, soon.

Discarnate Man is Not Compatible with an Incarnate Church

2010-07-25T08:04:00.006-05:00

When people are on the telephone or on the air, they have no physical bodies but are translated into abstract images. Their old physical beings are entirely irrelevant to the new situations. The discarnate user of electric media bypasses all former spatial restrictions and is present in many places simultaneously as a disembodied intelligence. This puts him one step above angels, who can only be in one place at a time. Since, however, discarnate man has no relation to natural law (or to Western lineality), his impulse is towards anarchy and lawlessness. Minus his body, the user of telephone or radio or TV is also minus his private identity, an effect that is becoming increasingly relevant.

-- Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media, 1988

Guy Debord and the Return to Normalcy

2010-07-22T16:52:00.004-05:00

A not-so-recent article in the New York Times by Clive Thompson (Web Ushers in an Age of Ambient Intimacy) discusses how new media like Facebook and Twitter have given us an “ambient awareness.” The multiple and often mundane updates we publish online provide us with “a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of our friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.” It is remarkable that we can be so intimately aware of the daily lives of any of hundreds of friends, family, and acquaintances that may be scattered over the globe, and it is very reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan's observation that electric technology involves "the family of man in the cohesive state of village living."

In fact, one of Thompson’s sources for his article described Facebook in this same way:

It's just like living in a village, where it's actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already," Tufekci said. "The current generation is never unconnected. They're never losing touch with their friends. So we're going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that's very new. It's just the 20th century."

So, in the broad sweep of history, we are finally returning to normalcy. Yet clearly, we are living in an entirely different environment. There is a qualitative difference between meeting your fellow village-folk at the well and discussing the events of the day and sitting in front of your computer or on your handheld of choice and being confronted with a list of updates. Twitter and the Facebook news feed both embody an evolution of our news media more than any other medium (it’s called a news feed). From the village herald to the newspaper to television news networks to electronic newspapers to Twitter, news has reversed from its pattern of broader and broader coverage to about as personal as it can get.

Yet is this really a return to normalcy? Guy Debord, a noted French social critic, wrote his esoteric critique of the technological society in The Society of the Spectacle. He claimed that the Spectacle—described variously as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” “a worldview transformed into an objective force,” and the “chief product of modern day society”—is the preeminent factor organizing society today. It manifests itself in the content of news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment, and in the forms of the mass media and technology. Debord noted that though our technology may unite us, it “unites only in its separateness,” as he saw it reinforcing the isolation of the lonely crowd.

The question is then, does his critique stand? Tufekci says that we are returning to normalcy in our social interactions while Debord says that everywhere he looks he sees the same intent: “to restructure society without community.” There seems to be truth in the fact that our online personas require a little more personal consistency in as much as they disallow us from really leaving behind any social group. On the other hand, though our news media have reversed into the personal village gossip, we are involved in the village only as long as we sit in front of our computers.

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Eternal Vigilance

2010-07-21T21:37:00.001-05:00

The price of liberty and even of common humanity, is eternal vigilance.

--Aldous Huxley

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

--Marshall McLuhan