Everybody else’s

— Essential McLuhan

Headlines - GAS

Body copy - Marshal McLuhan

What is this thing called Global Village?

The Global Village is not created by the motor car or even the airplane. It’s created by the instant, electronic information movement.

The Global Village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose in everybody else’s business.

The Global Village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else’s business and much involvement in everybody else’s life. It’s a sort of Ann Lander’s column writ large.”

Massaging the mass age

The title ‘Medium is the Massage’ is a teaser, a way of getting attention. The title is intended to draw attention to the fact that a medium is something neutral. It does something to people. It takes hold of them. It roughs them up. It massages them. It bumps them around as it were chiropracticly.

On those things about medium which can be scientifically proven

The laws of the medium are quite simply this:

that every medium exagerates some function;

they obsolesce another function;

they retrieve a much older function,

and they flip into the opposite form.

The simplest form I know to illustrate this principle which works for all media is money. Money increases transactions; it obsolesces barter; it retrieves potlatch or conspicous waste. and it flips into credit card which is not money at all.

(Note: Potlatch—‘Among some Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast of North America, a ceremonial feast at which possessions are givern away or destroyed to display wealth or enhance prestige.’— my dictionary)

Abstract yourself, Jack

One of the biggest impediments to studying media is the premature rush to moral judgment. And the moral judgment is always about the way the thing was used. Is it a good thing or is it a bad thing?

Total involvement, no way out

Literate culture is visual and detached. It creates the civilized man, the detribalized man, the man who is not involved. And the effect of the electric revolution is to create once more an involvement that is total.

Dicot-a-kill-me

I think the whole western world is re-tribalizing. We are going oriental with our own electronic technology while trying to foist western forms on Viet Nam.

Demolishing the world we know—Si or No

Do you remember a phrase from Edmund Burke ‘I do not know how to draw up an indictment against a whole people.’ Now I wouldn’t know how to value the western world we’re demolishing by our new technology or the oriental world which we are westernizing. We are demolishing the oriental world, and demolishing the western world. I don’t know if that’s good or bad because I wouldn’t know how to make a value judgment on it on such a scale.

All of use

and disabused

But the word ‘cool’ as used in jazz music, and the way I use it in it’s slang sense for the media, means a medium that uses all of you. It uses all of you, but leaves you detached in the act of using you.

‘One touch of nature makes the whole world kin’

What people see in the new is always the old thing, the rear view mirror. I was delighted to come across a passage in Shakespeare a few days ago that suddenly revealed the same message: ‘One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. That each, with one consent, chose newborn gods though they be made and molded on things past.’

Words of wisdom for today in America (Pan)

His son Eric (?) on his dad after he had a stroke: “When you can’t really communicate with people, all that is left is seeking peace.”

Above are the quotes frm ‘Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin’?’

Source: Snodger Media

Today beyond the paywall in Subscribers Reading Room, a poem about the above —