In which a schedule, delays, & the upcoming Marshall McLuhan ("The Media is the Message") Book Club is announced.
(But we're reading "Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man," not "The Media is the Message.")
1. Marshall McLuhan, where were you all my life?!?
If I’d even heard of “media studies” by age 21, I assumed that it was something for “easy A’s”—not serious academic study.
But after surviving a decade or more of e.g. Facebook repeatedly changing its environment on its users in a pernicious manner—I began to see a point in such analysis.
There are so many questions:
How did the innovation of TV affect Presidential debates? Or the way that Americans “processed” major events like JFK’s assasination or 9/11 together?
Today, are various types of social media “polarization engines”?
What characteristics of the internet made it such that “Rickrolling” could possibly “take over” as the Internet Prank Du Jour? (Praise God! Unironically!)
McLuhan also dives into things I would never think of as “media”—and how they alter (or have altered!) the human experience.
He’s got analyses / chapter titles like these:
The Printed Word: Architect of Nationalism
Radio: The Tribal Drum
Ads: Keeping Upset with the Joneses
(And this was him writing in like 1964!!)
Here are a few samples of McLuhan’s thought:
…language is a human technology that has impaired and diminished the values of the collective unconscious. It is the extension of man in speech that enables the intellect to detach itself from the vastly wider reality. Without language, [Henri] Bergson suggests, human intelligence would have remained totally involved in the objects of its attention. Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties.
Connected to that, here is the example (or, as I now notice, perhaps the metaphor) of a surgeon—for how one kind of intense focus may demand that we become creatures who are mentally compartmentalized:
Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting. The advantages of fragmenting himself in this way are seen in the case of the surgeon who would be quite helpless if he were to become humanly involved in his operation. We acquired the art of carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete detachment.
Here, McLuhan speaks fiercely about the state of the world and what he intends to do about it:
I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of goodwill is the enemy of society. [Wyndham] Lewis saw that years ago. His ‘America and Cosmic Man’ was an H-bomb let off in the desert. Impact nil. We resent or ignore such intellectual bombs. We prefer to compose human beings into bombs and explode political and social entities. Much more fun. Lewis clears the air of fug. We want to get rid of people entirely. And it is necessary to admire the skill and thoroughness with which we have made our preparations to this.
…the word has been used to effect a universal hypnosis. How are words to be used to unweave the spell of print? Of radio commercials and “news”-casts? I am working on *that* problem. The word is now the cheapest and most universal drug.
—Marshall McLuhan, in a letter to Ezra Pound, via
Book Club will be right here on this substack. (“Like and subscribe!”) There will be SO much to talk about! For Part I, just understanding what he’s trying to say will be the focus. For Part II, application.
Here is a random (no, not really random) video. I like to think about how before this media existed, there was no way to put the ideas and images all in one place in a way that is anything like this:
(The language below the Chinese Pinyin is Bahasa Indonesia. “Hi ne ni” is in neither of those languages. (: )
2. The promised schedule:
9/6/23
8/30/23- Charity/Agape post. (“The Four Loves” Book Club.)9/13/23
9/6/23- 1 week break!9/20/23
9/13/23- Marshall McLuhan Intro post. (you are not expected to read anything by this date.)9/27/23-11/8/23
9/20/23-11/1/23- M.M. Book Club - Part I chapters—7 weeks. (1 chapter per week of “Understanding Media.”)11/15/23-12/20/23
11/8/23-12/13/23- M.M. Book Club - Part II chapters—5 weeks. (about 5 chapters / 50 pages per week.)
One week break for Thanksgiving—no post on 11/22/23!
And everyone’s thinking “Okay, Theodicy is planning 12/13 weeks for Marshall McLuhan book club… so it’ll be 15-24 weeks?” (Reasonable inference! There is no money-back guarantee that I will keep this schedule perfectly—see below.1)
3. Delays
Sorry I keep not getting posts out in recent weeks!
I recently found myself (in a private e-mail) saying:
I wish I had met something closer to the schedule for book club I originally planned, but... I'm understanding that one of my "struggles I've not yet overcome" is something along the lines of procrastination / failing to keep commitments on the timeline I wish to.
Yet... in the choice between delivering an excellent post and delivering it on time, I will usually aim for an excellent post. (:
So that’s how it is. (C’monnnn, excellent posts!)
FINAL NOTE: I will run a Book Club on its own Discord server2 relatively simultaneously with that!
Email me at “wedotheodicyinthishouse” (g) to get a link.
So yeah, choosing a schedule keeps me dishonest, but trying to keep a schedule helps me get much more done than I would otherwise.
As I did with “The Four Loves” and Athanasius.