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