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