Word: mcluhanism
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...Marshall McLuhan says that "the essence of education is civil defense against media fall-out." College students might acquire defense against text books by spending a few months re-examining their own high school texts while reading the high school text books of ten, twenty, fifty and a hundred years ago, as well as the high school text books of French, East German, Egyptian, Indian and other school systems. They might also read ads and brochures of text book publishers. More than any explicit lesson. this would enable them to understand what textbooks are really about...
That is undoubtedly part of it. "The price of eternal vigilance," says Marshall McLuhan, "is indifference." In the same way, the cost of constant excitement, of a persistent and violent rearrangement of one's sense of order, results in surfeit. The mind is overcome by a kind of compassion fatigue. The events of the '60s have profoundly disturbed the American sense of reality. The longest war in the nation's history, with the American combat dead and wounded last week passing 300,000, seems at once horribly strange and grimly familiar. All too accustomed to daily deaths...
Like all magic, the attraction of the great city is, in the end, beyond analysis and beyond definition. Marshall McLuhan and the late Frank Lloyd Wright may have been right in arguing that the city should be replaced by smaller communities. But men, alas and thank God, are never strictly practical. Until people are known by numbers alone, the great city will continue to exist. F. Scott Fitzgerald was speaking of Manhattan, but he might just as well have been talking of London or Paris-or Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon or Justinian's Constantinople. Looking at it from afar...
...filled with the ecstasy of education, books that teach you how to make a whole environment out of any environment from commune to suburb. The reviewers of the products talk to you, not at you, and respect the things they are reviewing, whether it be Kalibab Boots or Marshall McLuhan...
...merchants realize that the floating variety show is the best way to maintain the integrity of the land. The fashionable theorists, particularly McLuhan, speak of the unprecedented-rate-of-apocalyptic-change. Yet after the Beatles, Che Guevara, the Civil Rights Act, and even the moon landing, social conscience may be developed so far beyond the power of people to change anything that the fiery political frustration is being mistaken for the reform. And television may be the cardinal source of this paradoxical feeling of unprecedented turmoil throughout an essentially sullen and unmoving nation. Arlen's most moving pages...