Just a little Freudian slip from the column that I might have detected:
The Medium is the Massage
Hehe
McLuhan’s original saying was “the medium is the message.” The later book title really is “the medium is the massage.” He had a sense of humor, even if it was buried beneath a ponderous prose style.
More to Cecil’s point, genius consists in pointing out things that had not been thought before and making them seem obvious. Before Einstein, nobody had thought of E=mc2. Just after it came out, it was said that only half a dozen people in the world could understand it. Now, high school students can get it. McLuhan’s important ideas – that the medium is as important as the message, and that “hot” and “cool” media work differently – may not exhaust the subject, but they were important insights that hadn’t been thought of previously.
Wow, K43 & Cecil, that little piece of trivia has got to be a winner in bar bets. Thanks.
Link to article referenced:
Medium and Message Revisited: Was Marshall McLuhan a visionary?
It seems like Cecil overreached in the last paragraph. I guess that as a columnist, it is understandable that Cecil could believe that this age (or rather, blip in time) is post-industrial. I’d maintain, though, that information in the “information age” is just another industrial product.
What does this have to do with McLuhan? Not much, I guess. I could never slog through his stuff.
Thoughts:
-
“So much about the 60s turned out to be hype.”
“So much about the 60s turned out to be drugs.” -
“U.S. leaders kidded themselves into believing Iraqis were just like us and would embrace democracy as soon as Saddam Hussein was gone.”
I think the war in Iraq was a bad idea too, but this is an unthinking, simplistic statement. Should I presume that Cecil is spoiling for a fight because he’s frustrated in some other aspect of his life?
- There are 2 typos in the first bullet paragraph–extra space before the question mark and lack of what should be the second bullet point before the Hot versus cool media heading.
Someone seems to be a wee bit too anal.
Someone seems to be a wee bit too anal.
Thanks for the chance to vent, Cecil.
Whatever U.S. leaders may have kidded themselves and/or us into believing about Iraq, I don’t think it was that the U.S. “liberators” and the democracy they theoretically brought would be welcomed with roses, chocolate bars and/or the favors of the local maidens. If they had they wouldn’t now be performing the modern equivalent of sticking the enemy’s leader’s sons’ heads on pikes outside the Baghdad city gates.
I do think they kidded themselves into believing that the war and its aftermath would be less troublesome and costly than it was and is. That would explain why we had no real plans for restoring any kind of orderly government, be it democratic or otherwise, until very recently, for example.
Tom Friedman and others have it about right, I think. Iraq was not about restoring democracy or oil or liberating people. It certainly wasn’t about answering some immanent threat to the U.S. that couldn’t be dealt with in any other way. It was plainly and simply about kicking some Arab ass after 9/11, and Saddam’s was the best ass available for kicking. Does anyone seriously think that, absent Gulf War II, the Iranis would be cooperatively holding some al-Qaidistas for us rather than letting them run around at large planning whatever nefarious schemes they might plan against us?
So, am I nuts or is anyone else feeling that this week’s big raid was just a little anticlimactic? We’re still taking onesies and twosies, there’s no discernable local authority in the country and the wheels are coming off the publicly stated rationale for the late unpleasantness in Iraq. But we got a couple bad guys, hooray for our side, we now return you to your regularly scheduled lives.
And, what is this horse hockey about our putting a price on Saddam & Sons’ heads in the first place? Last I checked the guy was still de jure head of state; he hadn’t been replaced by any legal or electoral process; he’s not in custody or a convicted criminal and there are no particular legal charges pending against him in the U.S. anyway. So what’s with the big reward? What if Osama popped up and offered like US$50m for George II’s head on a plate?
While I’m on the subject, some numbnuts on NPR said today that it would be “impossible to say” who was behind the latest attacks on U.S. forces after this week’s big raid. I suppose it could have been the Baghdad League of Women Voters or the Save the Earth Society of Tikrit. What kind of idiots does that “news” organization send to Iraq anyway? It was the Baathists, you dope.
Thanks again, man, I needed that.
I agree with kelly5078, Cecil overreached in the last paragraph. His exact quote is:
Of course people doubt it. Even though I work for a company that doesn’t make anything, the non-stuff we make (software) is used to simulate real stuff (cars, airplanes, bowling balls). I guess that makes me “industrial twice-removed”, since I don’t work on something real, and I don’t simulate something real, but rather write the software which allows someone else to simulate something real. But that’s not the same as post-industrial.
OK, maybe Cecil himself is truly post-industrial (although I’d argue even that, because his column still appears in real, physical newspapers that have to be manufactured), but alot of the American economy is still tied to making stuff. (I’ll leave it to someone else to dig up what fraction.)
As long as we have hands and feet, and use them, someone somewhere will still be manufacturing real stuff. And someone somewhere will be designing that stuff, and someone will be designing and manufacturing the robots that make the stuff, etc.
My, my, if that isn’t the sweetest thing I’ve heard all week! Of course I’m anal, and proud of it. I wear my anality as a shining badge upon my brow, I proofread 200-page documents for extra spaces between sentences, I’ve had three years of anal-ysis at the graduate level. (Graduated with honors, licensed and insured.) No detail is too small, no typo too unimportant, to escape my flashing blue pencil. I eat subject/verb errors for lunch and spit out extraneous appostrophes like hail. Look on me and tremble, newbie, for I am critic, copyeditor and upholder of standards, and will not be turned from my appointed rounds.
You double posted.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Throw a million darts in random directions in a room with a dartboard and you can be quite certain of accidentally hitting the dartboard. You can be fairly certain of accidentally “scoring” a bullseye. Genius is managing to say one or two things that can post hoc be interpreted as “correct” so long as one ignores the vast majority of what one claims.
Einstein said far more than the energy equation that the ignorant think of as the sum total of his work. Likewise, unlike McLuhan, he didn’t have to rely on a bunch of others to rationalize his work after the fact–he was quite good at defending it, himself.
As for medium vs. message: Scholars as far back as Plato realized that there was an important difference between written and spoken communication. McLuhan went so far as to say that medium replaces message. This rubbish was believed by low-grade nineteenth-rate web “designers” who built a lot of pages that ended up being ignored.
Whatever happened to the “New Economy”–an expression of McLuhanism if ever there was one? It’s being used to line the birdcages of the “Old Economy”.
rotflmoa
appostrophe?
I may be a newbie, but I do realize and accept we are only human and do make mistakes. Thankfully we are not subjected to such errors, omissions and corrections on a daily basis.
As for my double entry, you can blame IE for that, got to “love” MicroSoft.
Now back to the subject at hand. McLuhan had a knack of making the obvious seem nouveau. His talent was more communicative than anything else, hence his topic of choice. If anyone were to delve into the media/information highway as he did, they probably would have come up with similar thought.
He was certainly a bullshitter, but doubtless also one of the most important artists of the 20th century…
Lo, I have wrapped myself in the cloak of Gaudere’s law, which the slings and arrows of the carpers may not penetrate. It is my sword and my shield, my lot and my portion, and I am not afraid.
[sub]I’m yankin’ your chain here, newbie, tryin’ to lend some levity to the proceedings, ya know.[/sub]
Tom A: that’s roflmao.
Best add some emoticons here–don’t want to be misunderstood or anything: 
Alas, with such well versed tongue it is hard to discern wit from sarcasm or even a proper thrashing.
Dogface said:
Depends on how it’s broken. If I break a hand off an analog clock, it will never be right. That cliche is overused and has lost much of the basis for use in our digital world anyway. A broken digital clock is as likely to be blank as to display a constant time.
As for “post-industrial”, I think some of you are harping too hard on a literal use of that word. As an example, people still use rocks to build things, like decorative landscape pieces and fountains or houses, yet we certainly aren’t in the stone age.
I believe it’s a shame that McLuhan is no longer taught in school. Genius may be far too generous a word to use in describing him, but I’ve also found that most people who trash McLuhan never read him (as one poster put it, his style is ponderous). How can you attack a philosopher without reading his work? What McLuhan did do better than anyone before him, as I see it, was to make it plain to people that they were, in fact, being HIGHLY manipulated by mass media. What I find peculiar about today’s 20-30 year olds is that they seem unaware of this. Yes, they recognize that advertising is “hype,” but they do not seem to understand the significance of the McLuhan message, which was far more than that. Nowadays, we educate young people in school classrooms with plenty of commercial messages (thanks to folks like Channel One, or Pepsi and Coke). Since we are starting the brainwashing of consumers at younger and younger ages and extending “The Message” to every physical space that they might occupy, the message becomes indistinguishable from the environment. This has obvious ramifications; that is what McLuhan was attempting to demonstrate.
Some of his ideas might seem extreme at first glance (“The medium is the message” being one such example). He was trying to illustrate the idea that we become enraptured by the delivery technology so readily that we MISS (on a conscious level) the content of the message…yet the message seeps through subconsciously.
I believe that there are large numbers of Americans (including some fairly well educated ones) who are virtually unaware of the extent to which advertising and marketing manipulation drives the choices that they make in their lives. However ponderous his style, the value of McLuhan’s work to me was in bringing a more sophisticated awareness to the way we experience mass media and pop culture.
I think Cecil missed the boat on this one. I’ll bet he’s never read much of McLuhan, either. Maybe he’s been too manipulated by the media? <G>