Kill Your TV or it Might Kill You!

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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