The Business of School

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

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

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

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

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

via: The Thin Veil

Reading in the Middle Ages

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This just in:  


90% of Waking Hours Spent Staring at Glowing Rectangles




via: The Onion

On Aphorism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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