David Foster passes along this essay about McLuhan from the Free Press from their series The Prophets. It includes a clip that is quoted in the article, and I could quote from it here, but watching is more amazing. I could just post that and leave it here also, but I think the full package is important. I will quote another part instead.
Something about Marshall McLuhan has struck a chord—has resonance, as he liked to say. (He believed the electric age was fundamentally acoustic; a confusing concept, but roughly meaning that everything occurs simultaneously.) The long-deceased Canadian scholar—he died in 1980—who first blew people’s minds in the mid-1960s, is blowing people’s minds again.
This is not because he predicted specific devices or apps, but because he understood, with a poet’s intuition, the effects of the electronic age on human psychology.
He describes what my nostalgia means to me incisively. In his words I hear The Seven, Hayek and Friedman, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Greg Cochrane and a great many of you, frankly.
I have now also included Tom Wolfe (indirectly here) in two successive posts and am wondering if I should go read something of his that I have not to date. I have found his fiction entertaining and definitely insightful, but somehow not compelling to my own life. I have done better with his nonfiction.
"The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged and poking his nose into everybody else’s business. The global village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else’s business. And much involvement in everybody else’s life."
ReplyDeleteThat definitely sounds like me. I have come around to the view that 'minding your own business' is a first-rate ethical duty that was somehow missed by most of philosophy.
I think it is both worse and better than what you, or even McLuhan is saying, though he comes close.* While the erosion of privacy has likely been driven mostly by the percentage of us who are busybodies, it is the ubiquity, the offhand invasions even by those who are not especially intrusive that are the major change in the culture. The amount of knowledge we can have about each other wildly exceeds what a busybody of 60 years ago could have imagined. (And yet they are not satisfied, which tells you that there are some very dark underpinnings to the desire at its worst.) But intrusion is now part of the air that all of us breathe. It comes with the territory with these technologies, which McLuhan foresaw. Quite prescient.
ReplyDeleteIt illustrates how such changes can bend whole societies and generations out of shape. Minding ones own business is not a Christian doctrine (nor is its opposite). Jesus, Paul, John the Baptist - they are sometimes intrusive, sometimes hands off. Yet not only the most recent technologies, but such things as printing, portraiture, photography and rapid transportation have all pulled us into greater and greater temptations to intrude. Some of us have collapsed and become dangerous, but all of us have been slowly affected. McLuhan's comment that the 21st century's main lesson might be that we cannot withstand the new everyday temptations is quite compelling.
*Amazingly close. He hung out with science fiction writers. Maybe he had time trvel, eh?
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