A Wayfarer and a Pilgrim

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

Finding Your Way in a Sea of Information

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

Media as Cliché as Probe

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

Pattern Recognition and a New Religion

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

Theory of Environments

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