Many of our institutions suppress all the natural direct experience of youth, who respond with untaught delight to the poetry and the beauty of the new technological environment, the environment of popular culture. It could be their door to all past achievement if study as an active (and not necessarily benign) force. -Marshall McLuhan, The […]
“It isn’t that I don’t like current events, there have just been so many of them lately.” -Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage This little saying appears as the caption to a cartoon, and I couldn’t have put it any better. John Piper says ‘don’t waste your life.’ I say don’t waste your life […]
Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception. Anti-environments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly. -Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage Like the fish […]
Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass. In another place, he puts it this way: The new feeling that people have about guilt is not something that can be privately assigned to some individual, but is, rather, something shared by everybody, in some mysterious way….This feeling is an aspect of the new […]
This week I will begin blogging through The Medium is the Massage (Message) by Marshall McLuhan (written in the 1960’s). McLuhan is considered one of the fathers (probably the father) of Media Ecology, a subject that I am quite interested in. Media Ecology, in a nutshell, is the idea that forms of media affect, and […]
Our culture’s most impressive achievements usually have to do with technology: the space shuttle, advances in digital communications, instant availability of information via the internet. Albert Borgmann speculates that one ‘reason for embracing technology might be the understandable desire to embrace what’s distinctive about our culture. It’s difficult to accept the notion that the things […]
At one point in his career, Marshall McLuhan was fond of using the analogy of the rear-view mirror as a metaphor for humanity’s propensity to live in the past. He would say that many of us live in the rear-view mirror, meaning that we are out of date. But later on, as you can see […]
Tides and Turning 