Pg. 23
The “content” of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print in the content of the telegraph.
Pg. 24
The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or page or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.
Use every medium to expand the hours in which we can consume until consumption is a 24-hour-a-day activity. Night games, late night drive-through windows, 24 hour grocery stores/health clubs, shift work makes many of these things a matter of equality and necessity.
We consume, consume, consume, and all we are asked to do in response is to expend the excess. Don’t consume and then put something forth with those energies derived from your consumption. In fact, make what we consume filling, yet void of any useful properties. Substance. Keep us hungry and lonely and needy and dependent.
Pg. 24
It is only too typical that the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.
“In modern thought, (if not in fact), nothing is that doesn’t act, so that is reckoned wisdom which describes the scratch and not the itch.” Anonymous
I cannot read too much McLuhan in a single sitting before my brain goes numb with misunderstanding. I am reading “Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man” which is © 1964. This writing is 40 years old, but is saturated with universal truth (or are they discovered laws?) that it could be published today with nothing changed but non-antiquated references to the instruments of the technology of the time.
This writing is rich in a way I have only experienced in Lewis, Merton, and L’engle (2 Catholics, 1 Anglican, 1 mutt). I routinely push through a paragraph without grasping completely the concept being put forth. And the subsequent 2nd (sometimes 3rd) reading of the paragraph yields ideas so fresh and insightful that they must immediately be underlined on the page and written in my journal. This is my meat to digest until the next opportunity for a meal. This is good for which tastes great fills completely and goes straight to the intellectual muscles and results in very little waste. These authors hold for me the keys to understanding my life. They provide the fuel and the exercise for my intellect.
Pg. 32
The designation of a numerical value as a measure of intelligence (IQ test) shows that our testers are “unaware of our typographical cultural bias” and subsequently they “assume that uniformity and continuous habits are a sign of intelligence, thus eliminating the ear man and the tactile man.”
“Slang offers an immediate index to changing perception. Slang is based not on theories but on immediate experience. The student of media will not only value slang as a guide to changing perception, but he will also study media as bringing about new perceptual habits.”
