Word: mediums
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After Understanding Media, with its overpowering documentation and illustrations, The Medium is the Massage appears to be some sort of joke. Everything from the trick of its title to the contrived pictorial gags and New Yorker cartoons suggests that McLuhan is pulling someone's leg. And that is probably his intention...
...other hand, was a high definition figure, whose features were too stark and hard for television. It was too obvious to the viewer what sort of man Nixon was and this reduced the interest in intensive participation. But if the debates had been broadcast on radio-a medium which requires much less participation than television-Nixon would have won easily...
...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...
...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...
...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 repetitiveness does not become unbearable, and the continual restatement of the principles makes them lucid and unforgettable...