McLuhan, hot & cool - Gerald Emanuel Stearn

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

1967

CONTENTS

PART ONE: THE NEW WORLD OF MARSHALL McLUHAN

Tom Wolfe

Kenneth £. Boulding

PART TWO: THE HONEYMOON OF THE MECHANICAL BRIDE

Walter Ong

PART THREE: EXPLORATIONS IN THE NEW WORLD

PART FOUR: THE GALAXY RECONSIDERED

PART FIVE: UNDERSTANDING M.

Susan Sontag

PART SIX: A DIALOGUE

*I am an investigator. I make probes. I have no point of view. I do not stay in one position. Anybody in our culture is regarded as invited as long as he stays in one fixed position. Once he starts moving around and crossing boundaries, he's delinquent, he's fair game. The explorer is totally inconsistent. He never knows at what moment he will make some startling discovery. And consistency is a meaningless term to apply to an explorer. If he wanted to be consistent, he would stay home. Jacques Ellul says that propaganda begins when dialogue ends. I talk back to media and set off on an adventure of exploration

INTRODUCTION

1 THE WORLD OF MARSHALL McLUHAN

*The writers of the essays and articles in Part One have used Understanding Media as a vantage point from * which to discuss McLuhan's ideas in a general way.

Tom Wolfe

Kenneth E. Boulding

*YOU CAN SEE WHY THE MIGHTY WOULD BE CURIOUS. * --HOWARD LUCK GOSSAGE

*Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media has possibly the least catchy title for an important book since Principia Mathematica; however, it is somewhat easier to read once you have got the hang of it. The hard part is getting into it.

*One school of thought says that you should start at page 77, or wherever, and then sit through it again the way you do when you come in on the middle of a movie.

*It is quite possible, I think, to start cheerfully at the beginning, provided one has some notion going in of what McLuhan is up to.

*To begin with, what Professor McLuhan means by a "medium" is any extension of man--whether it be a book, an automobile, an electric light bulb, television, or clothes. His theory is that the media a man uses to extend his senses and his faculties will determine what he is, rather than the other way around. To give a simple example: a car is cer- tainly an extension of a man's legs. Moreover, when he drives a car he has in a sense amputated his legs. He is an amputee just as surely as though he had lost his legs first and then looked for a way to get around.

*Incidentally, we are used to thinking of clothes as some- thing we wear next to our bodies. Objectively, however, clothes are an extension of our skins.

SUPPOSE HE IS WHAT HE SOUNDS LIKE, THE MOST IMPORTANT THINKER SINCE NEWTON, DARWIN, FREUD, EINSTEIN, AND PAVLOV--

WHAT IF HE IS RIGHT? --TOM WOLFE

*IT IS PERHAPS TYPICAL OF VERY CREATIVE MINDS THAT THEY HIT VERY LARGE NAILS NOT * QUITE ON THE HEAD. --KENNETH E. BOULDING

*IN A WAY, THE ANGELS HAVE A GREATER SOCIAL PROBLEM THAN EVEN INDUSTRIALIZED * MAN. --WALTER ONG, SJ.