blog (January, 2004)
detest tube
You can be dying of intestinal parasites in some hut in the Amazon, and if your felt quality of immediate experience is superior, then you're superior to the guy who's being chauffeured around in an air conditioned limousine in some urban center somewhere. Our whole cultural delivery system denies this, you know?
So we have the concept of entertainment, and of drugs -- I mean, to my mind, television is a far more insidious drug than heroin, and that they're very comprable; they're cousins. The difference between heroin and television is that at least on heroin you can think your own thoughts.
-- Terence McKenna, Global perspectives and psychedelic poetics (speech at Esalen seminar)
(my transcription and punctuation)
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