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First read this in the early 2000s in college and honestly didn’t quite grasp it. Revisited it later, and still didn’t quite grasp it. Was only a few years back

by gdubs 5y ago

First read this in the early 2000s in college and honestly didn’t quite grasp it. Revisited it later, and still didn’t quite grasp it. Was only a few years back, when I looked at social media through the lens of the book that I finally got the “ah ha” moment. I can’t say how much it holds up overall, but it’s definitely mind-expanding.

briga 5y ago
McLuhan isn't really an author to grasp so much as he is an author to be grasped by. He's often difficult to understand but I think the point isn't so much to understand so much as, like you said, to expand your mind to new possibilities. His most powerful writing has an aphoristic, koan-like quality designed more to be provocative than to say anything specific. This can be mildly infuriating but at its best it's visionary stuff.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Philosophy is arguably better conducted showing rather than telling. Plato did this by asking questions, others do it with poetry. It's easy to construct refined models of the world, but it ultimately isn't particularly useful and readers often get lost in this world of ideas and end exploring things they've been told rather than things they've seen. You eventually end up with something akin to scholasticism. Once you start to notice it, we use a lot of very complicated terms and ideas in our daily language, but it's often not immediately obvious what we mean. I often come across people talk about ideas as though they had wishes and intents. Peculiar thing. Anyway I don't think adding onto that pile of long complicated words makes the situation better.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
Tom Leykis, who was basically the Howard Stern of LA in the late 90s/2000s, gave a good interpretation of McLuhan. He saw (in his case) talk radio's typical audience as a father who's outside on a ladder cleaning his gutters listening to a radio that's face down in the lawn so he only hears every 4th or so word. Taking that into account, he modeled his cadence and his entire radio show (and later his call-in podcast show) around that kind of premise.

by gdubs 5y ago

briga 5y ago

McLuhan isn't really an author to grasp so much as he is an author to be grasped by. He's often difficult to understand but I think the point isn't so much to understand so much as, like you said, to expand your mind to new possibilities. His most powerful writing has an aphoristic, koan-like quality designed more to be provocative than to say anything specific. This can be mildly infuriating but at its best it's visionary stuff.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
Philosophy is arguably better conducted showing rather than telling. Plato did this by asking questions, others do it with poetry. It's easy to construct refined models of the world, but it ultimately isn't particularly useful and readers often get lost in this world of ideas and end exploring things they've been told rather than things they've seen. You eventually end up with something akin to scholasticism. Once you start to notice it, we use a lot of very complicated terms and ideas in our daily language, but it's often not immediately obvious what we mean. I often come across people talk about ideas as though they had wishes and intents. Peculiar thing. Anyway I don't think adding onto that pile of long complicated words makes the situation better.

JohnWhigham 5y ago

Tom Leykis, who was basically the Howard Stern of LA in the late 90s/2000s, gave a good interpretation of McLuhan. He saw (in his case) talk radio's typical audience as a father who's outside on a ladder cleaning his gutters listening to a radio that's face down in the lawn so he only hears every 4th or so word. Taking that into account, he modeled his cadence and his entire radio show (and later his call-in podcast show) around that kind of premise.