Word: mcluhaner
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...become faster. Telstar and Early Bird make it possible for Americans and Japanese and Russians, without even leaving their homes, to watch a soccer game in London while it is being played. Moving information at the speed of light has reversed the trend toward expansion of the world, and McLuhan suggests that the world will continue to shrink until we all live in a village again, a single, global village...
...shrinking world and the revival of the Catholic ethic are desirable goals for McLuhan, he is apparently not at all sure that they can be achieved quickly and without pain. The danger arises from mankind's obsession with the past. We look at life through a rear view mirror, McLuhan says, and we are unprepared for the roadblocks ahead. The real hero of Understanding Media and The Medium is the Message is James Joyce...
...McLUHAN believes that Joyce, because he was an artist, understood the importance of media, and he regards Finnegans Wake as a textbook for the electronic...
...method by which Joyce presents his data is nearly as significant as the data itself, for the method is the electronic joke, and Joyce uses is masterfully. In The Medium is the Massage McLuhan explains that "older societies thrived on purely literary plots. They demanded story lines. Today's humor, on the contrary, has no story line-no sequence. It is usually a compressed overlay of stories." The electronic joke, in other words, is the pun. The humor arises from the superimposition of different ideas. The book-age man, listening with eyes that can only focus on one idea...
...McLuhan has a sense of humor that is somewhat zany and heavy-handed, and he has a prose style to match.Understanding Media violates many of the traditions of linear prose, and it need not be read from beginning to end. McLuhan makes every page stand on its own and the pages can be read in almost random order. But to accomplish this he is forced to repeat again and again his basic principles. The aphorisms, particularly "the medium is the message," are recited with such frequency that they become completely unchallengeable. The material presented, however, is sufficiently interesting that this...