The Medium is the Massage

Ordered and read during my Week (actually it became two) of McLuhan in Mid-March 2011. Gorgeous paperback.

Bibliographic Deets

 * McLuhan, Marshall & Fiore, Quentin 1967. The Medium is the Massage. Penguin Book, New York.

Content
''God, how can you even summarize this book? It's very much a medium as message and message/massage as medium text. It's a manifesto. It's visual and design as much as it is intellectual and theoretical. Needs to be seen to be understood, as I can only quote McLuhan's text not Fiore's work.''


 * An opening McLuhan quote: "The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur" from A.N. Whitehead


 * "Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. ... Electronic technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. " (8)


 * "Youth instinctively understand the present environment- the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth." (9)


 * "Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view- the witless repetitive response to the unperceived." (10)

Structures

 * McLuhan quickly uses a raw taxonomy to move thru ideas:
 * you
 * your family
 * your neighborhood -> "electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of 'time' and 'space' and pours down upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men" (16)
 * your education
 * your job
 * your government -> "the living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television in Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing everything" (22)
 * "the others"

Further

 * " all media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical" (26)
 * in many ways THE MARSHALL MCLUHAN MISSION STATEMENT


 * "electric circuitry, the extension of the central nervous system" (40)
 * "Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act- the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, MEN CHANGE" (41)


 * "Until writing was invented, men lived in an acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind... the goose quill put an end to talk ... the hand that filled the parchment page built a city" (48)


 * "printing, a ditto device" (49)


 * "We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay" (63)


 * "When information is brushed against information ... the results are startling and effective. "


 * "Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of environment- of what's really going on- affords us our most appealing anti-environment tool. It does not deal in theory but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions"


 * "Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society."


 * "Science fiction writing today presents situations that enable us to perceive the potential of new technologies"


 * "Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing..."


 * "Art is anything you can get away with"