Salient Points from "McLuhan's Wake"
Notes from “McLuhan’s Wake” Video
- McLuhan’s laws of media
- Attempted to invent a new science
o A “tool maker”
- Scene with Hunters: Tools extend senses
- Tools: extend touch and the sense of touch
- Alphabet: Made up of bits that are meaningless
- We shape tools in our own image, and in turn they shape us (i.e. reflection of glass on window, car seats, etc.)
o Ex.: “Shhh! The library is not a skating rink!”
- The things you make, they sometimes mimic you. Extensions of ourselves (i.e. cars)
- Definition of “Narcissus”: Drugged; Numb
o Narcissus fell in love with the image of himself, as a result of seeing his reflection, (though it was not actually himself he was falling in love with)
- Skyscrapers and architecture: We build and erect extensions of ourselves
- McLuhan: Concentrated on grammar, rhetoric, logic—considered himself a “Grammarian”
- Grammarians looked at the world as a book
- Thomas Aquinas: “Trust the senses”
- McLuhan: “If you just saw and felt you could perceive correctly”
- Taught freshman literature through advertisements
- McLuhan felt that people are robotically conditioned to advertisements
- “Robotic Bride”
- He was resolutely opposed to technology and change
- McLuhan: “Best way to oppose it was to understand it”
- Edgar Alan Poe’s “Into the Maelstrom”
o Environment is always moving
o People are constantly being “massaged” and don’t even realize it
o The medium is in the “massage”
- Old tools may hang around for a long time, but if you want to get the job done you have to get the latest thing
o However, then you won’t be able to find a blacksmith (no more horse-drawn carriages as a result of automobiles slowly replacing carriages)
- A car becomes your legs and moves the body
- In essence, only one city on the planet will be the planet itself
- We reshape the world around us every time we flick on a light
o We can create environments anywhere now because of electricity and power
o “Mystery of the dark” and “light of the moon” are expressions that are no longer accurate as a result of being able to create any environment that we desire
- We’ve put our nervous systems outside of ourselves
- All technologies are languages;
o All languages are technologies
- Any specialist is going to try to protect their specialist skills
- “Brainiard(?) of doom” is what McLuhan was called by media personalities
o McLuhan affirmed that “Literacy was on the skids”
- “No one can make out more than 10% of what McLuhan says.”
- Finn’s cycle
- Pervasive medium is always beyond perception
o McLuhan: “We don’t know who discovered water but we know it wasn’t a fish”
- “Two minds trying to reach a balance”
o The left side of the brain is linear
o The right side is holistic
- Speech retells all adventures:
o Ex: Guy shoots buck while stooping by a tree to take a crap
- If you want to study the future, just study the present
o What we think as the present is really the past
- It is so impossible for us to look at the present
- McLuhan: “We live by the revival of clothes, fashion, music, etc.”
- Electronic media brings us news from the village of the past
- The “global village”: You no longer have to be anywhere to be able to do everything
- We keep hearing a beating drum:
o A princess in England gets married and the drums start to beat to tell us about it
- Media has no homogeneity no stasis
o Always is changing
- Same shift Alice made in “Through the Looking Glass”
- Electronic media retrieves old media
- We live in a mythical world
o TV is a mythic form
- Media: Number of people covering Vietnam War was more than the number who were fighting it!
- Recognize a pattern before it is complete
o No “pattern of laws” of media
- Media are like languages:
o They are much more powerful than they were intended for
- A global village is programmed to reverse
- How is one to establish and identity?
- McLuhan: “Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards”
- Public consensus: Was McLuhan for real or was he a charlatan?
- McLuhan was a “technological determinist”