Word: mcluhaner
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...only profoundly pessimistic but radically new in form. The well-made play with a beginning, a middle and an end is a thing of the past. It presupposes the leisure time of a leisure class, the idea of steady evolutionary progress and the information speed, as Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, of a railway system. Great Expectations epitomizes a 19th century mood, just as No exit reflects a 20th century mood. The well-made play assumes that everything is a problem capable of solution, as in a detective story...
Futurist Marshall McLuhan, who has written books such as Understanding Media to explain that books are extinct, used the medium of his mouth at the International P.E.N. Congress in Manhattan to tell the 600 assembled novelists, poets and playwrights just where they will stand in the future. "We are about to see an age where the environment itself is arranged as a teaching machine," he lectured delphically. "The author is going to be engaged in programming the teaching machine." McLuhan unsettled the writers further with a slogan: "Artists should go to the control tower, not the ivory tower." But they...
...population will have risen to about 330 million, and nine out of ten Americans will be living in supercities or their suburbs. But cities, like industry, will tend to decentralize; with instant communications, it will no longer be necessary for business enterprises to cluster together. Futurist Marshall McLuhan even foresees the possibility that many people will stay at home, doing their work via countrywide telecommunication...
None of the forecasters seem to have any good solution for the traffic problem, though they count on automated, and possibly underground, highways. McLuhan and others predict that both the wheel and the highway will be obsolete, giving way to hovercraft that ride on air. Planes carrying 1,000 passengers and flying just under the speed of sound will of course be old hat. The new thing will be transport by ballistic rocket, capable of reaching any place on earth in 40 minutes. In Rand's Delphi study, 82 scientists agreed that a permanent lunar base will have been...
...ELECTRONIC technology seems to have abolished time and space. Computers calculate inventories, bank balances and rocket orbits instantaneously, thousands of miles away from their "clients." Culture is transistorized and education telemetered. Tomorrow or the day after, according to Canada's Marshall McLuhan, the most provocative scientific prophet around, people will be able to perform their jobs or shop via television from their homes (if they and their wives can stand it, that is). Despite such present or potential miracles, the business of voting in America-the most important business in a democracy-is slow, cumbersome and primitive. Says...