blog (October, 2004)
M. mcLuhan
McKenna talked about McLuhan Talking about Hot vs. Cold media.
Hot provides an extreme depth in sense: hifi: full of data: -- Cold means lo-definition.
Kids grown on TV look hard into the page of a book trying to tear out high-definition sensation, but the book won't give it.
I always took time with sunday funnies, whereas mom and dad /read/ straight flash through it -- and, yes -- they got the joke -- they read it. But I sat on my knees on the kitchen chair, elbows on the table, playing through a miniaturized paper Cartoon in my head.
A radio provides definition of sonic sensation: it's hotter than a cool telephone whose message leaves space between words.
So books and phones ::words,words:: grew in physical terms into buildings and interchangeable parts; reached their peak at that industrimechanical time.
McLuhan said electric media is constructing a tribalism similar to ages ago -- Our Hot media drives us to L O O K and take In, we are discarding the read mentality.
Back to lOOk, like in pre-gutenberg -- <pre>-cookie-cutter-letter manuscripts, with individual author character on the page and sensory definition.
But we're not just sEEing what's directly around us, (only to the innermost obstruction of our vision and its peripheries) -- now we're seeing the whole world globally, and from many, eventually any/all, perspectives at once. Loss of identity.
Global village. global one.
ay, doug.
..
public identity
So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, nonindividual activities that this age forces on all of us.
-- George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1946
The violence that all electric media inflict on their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their phyiscal bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the phyiscal bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience of their private, individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity.
-- Marshall McLuhan, "Violence of the Media," Canadian Forum, 1976
emphasis is mine
We rolled through the downtown Cleveland night, lounging sideways across the trolley seats, laughing and talking loudly over its engine.
The friends/acquaintances I was with received a call from their college-days friend, and passed the phone amongst themselves, taking turns inquiring into his latest designs. When they closed the window to his universe and rejoined that of the trolley, I tried to get a better idea of who this was that they were obviously impressed with.
A citizen of the world, as they put it; he didn't live in any one place. And a brilliant one -- though their praise was twinged with a bit of contempt. I've forgotten his specific successes they bulletted, but my eyebrows might've scraped the trolley ceiling if we hit a bump.
"He's a megalomaniac though," she said, tempting me with scent of fault, so gratifying to find in those you envy. "He's got his own web site, and all this... Who wants to read a list of every book he's ever read?"
I defended him quietly and vaguely, then turned toward the window to follow the streetlights pass by.
I thumbed his web address into my phone's notepad, but blanched from revealing myself as one interested in what he's read, where he's been, or what he might want to say. I wanted to explain that it's not megalomania, just a point of contact, but I'm not yet confident enough in that to defend it.
The alphabet (and its extension into typography) made possible the spread of the power that is knowledge and shattered the bonds of tribal man, thus exploiding him into an agglomeration of individuals. Electric writing and speed pour upon him instantaneously and continuously the concerns of all other men. He becomes tribal once more. The human family becomes one tribe again.
-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964
string of pearls
from On McLuhan: Forward Through the Rearview Mirror:
I have always, as I read a great man's life, compared it to my own up to now and as it may be. I experience odd and inexplicably involved sensations of jealousy etc. Generally it leaves me with a hopeless feeling of incompetence. These men have always been precocious or gifted, yet I wish that I may one day attain their heights.
-- Marshall McLuhan, journal excerpt, January 7, 1930
through Emergic.org through Innovation Weblog quoting Gerry McGovern:
Being busy is often an excuse for not doing something you should be doing. For me it has often been an excuse for not thinking, managing, and planning properly. Working hard is no longer the route to success it once was perceived to be. In an era of outsourcing and offshoring, success definitely does require hard work, but what is way more important is smart work. Basically, all the hard work will be outsourced, with just the smart work remaining.
-- Gerry McGovern
from Brewed Fresh Daily quoting managementprof quoting Anna Quindlen:
The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
-- Anna Quindlen
amor fati
My formula for greatness in man is amor fati: that a man should wish to have nothing altered, either in the future, the past, or for all eternity. Not only must he endure necessity, and on no account conceal it -- all idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity -- but he must love it.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo