4 ms·

I am sorry to have to write this comment as reading the works of Marshall McLuhan or other hack-ish folks like him can upon the first read feel illuminating. I

I am sorry to have to write this comment as reading the works of Marshall McLuhan or other hack-ish folks like him can upon the first read feel illuminating. I felt the same way when first reading Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guttari, Micheal Foucault, or Lacan, or Derrida. After a cursory rereading at an age older than 18, I realized how badly I had been deceived. I just do not buy this idea of "hyperreality", or that somehow media representations meaningfully "distort reality". Actually, the gulf war DID happen (Baudrillard thinks that it didn't because of the media). The map is NOT the territory. The medium is NOT the message (or even a "massage", but maybe a "mass age"). I do not deny that a medium has impact on the message, but this notion of it being identical or even worth speaking about as though they are identical is so alien and absurd to me I cannot even figure out where it started. I will give credit to Marshall Mcluhan for not writing in an insufferable or "fashionable nonsense" style like the others I have compared him to. He is a fine but definitely overrated author.

handrous 5y ago
My grasp on "the medium is the message" is that it's in part a technological-determinism argument. The message a medium will convey, or perhaps the space of messages it may end up conveying in practice, is determined by the nature of the medium itself—how it's created, how it's distributed, how it's experienced—resisting attempts to use it for other purposes. That aspect of it, at least, seems useful and to have some truth to it.
u385639 5y ago
This is interesting - provoking. Can you share some authors/material that has influenced your awakening, so to speak?
- pphysch 5y ago
  I agree with the GP; my view is that virtually all 20th/21st century philosophers dug up classical German/Western philosophy from its grave and made their careers out of it. That philosophy had nowhere to go, so its adherents could take it anywhere in the service of their -- to be frank -- grifting. All it takes is a clever tongue capable of generating "fashionable nonsense" and a lack of intellectual integrity (see: Sokal hoax). Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886) by Friedrich Engels, published after the death of Karl Marx, is one of the best summaries of the late development of classical German philosophy in particular. It's written in a fairly accessible style as long as you grok the Hegelian/Marxist idealist/materialist definitions. This revolution in Western thought is best summarized by Marx in his final Thesis on Feuerbach (1845): "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." The upshot is that the best way to understand writers/philosophers like McLuhan is rather to understand their audience. Which bits of "fashionable nonsense" is sticking, and how does this reflect the conditions and interests of the audience? Presume market forces before presuming intellectual rigor.
  - poetically 5y ago
    So you don't think the medium has an effect on how people think about and perceive the world?
    - pphysch 5y ago
      I'm not convinced it's a useful abstraction. It is obvious that text vs. pictures vs. sound and so on have different semantic capabilities, e.g. try describing a new color to someone who has never had functional eyes. However, it is not something I would read or write books exclusively about. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Insight%20Porn https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Insight%20Po...
      - poetically 5y ago
        What exactly is the abstraction here? McLuhan is describing something very concrete that is not obvious to most people.
      - waserwill 5y ago
        I'm interested in how culture changes and where it can go/is going. Knowing about what ideas or forms of thinking different media favor -- this seems useful to me. It's part of the 'selective landscape' of culture.
cbreynoldson 5y ago
McLuhan speaks in exaggerated language - it's important to not take everything he says too literally, and to instead judge the essence of the ideas. "The Medium is the Message" because without context (the media), messages are just noise. McLuhan was all about seeing the contexts we live in, how they shape our reality, etc.
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
There's a quote I only half remember and am probably misattributing, but my memory is Bruce Sterling saying something like "I used to get excited by reading French postmodern philosophers until I realized they were actually saying something."
pnathan 5y ago
I would put it this way: his theory would predict that 140-character twitter would result in a different culture and thought process than Livejournal, and both would be different from Tiktok, which would in turn be different than Twitch - all entirely due to the constraints on the medium. that is a useful theory. (do I think he probably took too much LSD and got high on his own theories? yes. but its at least adequate as a predictive starting point - and what more can we ask of any model?)
mountain_peak 5y ago
Love the 'fantasy' scene [0] in Annie Hall where Woody Allen's character 'pulls out' Marshall McLuhan to put an intellectual blowhard back into place. McLuhan says, "I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work - you mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing." Maybe a cameo in a movie meant that McLuhan didn't take himself too seriously. I find his ideas relatively 'approachable', although I'm fairly skeptical whenever reading any philosophical work. Just recently, I had to deal with phenomenological and heuristic approaches to qualitative studies. I see some value, but (as a scientist) the lack of rigor and consistency makes my head spin. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRcMsqCbzWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRcMsqCbzWk
okareaman 5y ago
After listening to The Medium is the Massage, I thought he was prescient on several things, like everything happening in the now, more information means more patterns to discern, the global village and the ill effects of everyone getting into everyone's business. I didn't follow a few others, like young people really getting into roles because of TV (Shakespeare said it better) and getting the story out of the way to the point of not even having a story somehow leads to more involvement by the viewer and more understanding of the material. That last one is really suspect.
pjc50 5y ago
> Actually, the gulf war DID happen (Baudrillard thinks that it didn't You're going to have to explain this one with a quote from him.
- rchoudhury 5y ago
  Baudrillard doesn't actually think the Gulf war didn't literally occur. He was using trollish language deliberately to highlight his more subtle (but, perhaps, relatively straightforward) ideas that televising the war meant that Americans learning about the wildly mismatched militaries' engagements via TV did not receive in their minds an accurate representation of what really was going on out there. While Baudrillard had a cogent point to make, putting it in these terms all but ensured perpetual confusion about what he meant (as demonstrated by the commenter above you). Here's the Wikipedia summary of Baudrillard's writings: Baudrillard argued the Gulf War was not really a war, but rather an atrocity which masqueraded as a war. Using overwhelming airpower, the American military for the most part did not directly engage in combat with the Iraqi army, and suffered few casualties. Almost nothing was made known about Iraqi deaths. Thus, the fighting "did not really take place" from the point of view of the West. Moreover, all that spectators got to know about the war was in the form of propaganda imagery. The closely watched media presentations made it impossible to distinguish between the experience of what truly happened in the conflict, and its stylized, selective misrepresentation through simulacra. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Place https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Pl... Baudrillard's concept of "simulacrum" is connected, and perhaps more interesting, even if attempting to apply it to the world results in weird claims like this one about the Gulf war.
johnchristopher 5y ago
You should give Wittgenstein a try :).

handrous 5y ago

My grasp on "the medium is the message" is that it's in part a technological-determinism argument. The message a medium will convey, or perhaps the space of messages it may end up conveying in practice, is determined by the nature of the medium itself—how it's created, how it's distributed, how it's experienced—resisting attempts to use it for other purposes. That aspect of it, at least, seems useful and to have some truth to it.

u385639 5y ago

This is interesting - provoking. Can you share some authors/material that has influenced your awakening, so to speak?

pphysch 5y ago
I agree with the GP; my view is that virtually all 20th/21st century philosophers dug up classical German/Western philosophy from its grave and made their careers out of it. That philosophy had nowhere to go, so its adherents could take it anywhere in the service of their -- to be frank -- grifting. All it takes is a clever tongue capable of generating "fashionable nonsense" and a lack of intellectual integrity (see: Sokal hoax). Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886) by Friedrich Engels, published after the death of Karl Marx, is one of the best summaries of the late development of classical German philosophy in particular. It's written in a fairly accessible style as long as you grok the Hegelian/Marxist idealist/materialist definitions. This revolution in Western thought is best summarized by Marx in his final Thesis on Feuerbach (1845): "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." The upshot is that the best way to understand writers/philosophers like McLuhan is rather to understand their audience. Which bits of "fashionable nonsense" is sticking, and how does this reflect the conditions and interests of the audience? Presume market forces before presuming intellectual rigor.
- poetically 5y ago
  So you don't think the medium has an effect on how people think about and perceive the world?
  - pphysch 5y ago
    I'm not convinced it's a useful abstraction. It is obvious that text vs. pictures vs. sound and so on have different semantic capabilities, e.g. try describing a new color to someone who has never had functional eyes. However, it is not something I would read or write books exclusively about. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Insight%20Porn https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Insight%20Po...
    - poetically 5y ago
      What exactly is the abstraction here? McLuhan is describing something very concrete that is not obvious to most people.
    - waserwill 5y ago
      I'm interested in how culture changes and where it can go/is going. Knowing about what ideas or forms of thinking different media favor -- this seems useful to me. It's part of the 'selective landscape' of culture.

cbreynoldson 5y ago

McLuhan speaks in exaggerated language - it's important to not take everything he says too literally, and to instead judge the essence of the ideas. "The Medium is the Message" because without context (the media), messages are just noise. McLuhan was all about seeing the contexts we live in, how they shape our reality, etc.

TigeriusKirk 5y ago

There's a quote I only half remember and am probably misattributing, but my memory is Bruce Sterling saying something like "I used to get excited by reading French postmodern philosophers until I realized they were actually saying something."

pnathan 5y ago

I would put it this way: his theory would predict that 140-character twitter would result in a different culture and thought process than Livejournal, and both would be different from Tiktok, which would in turn be different than Twitch - all entirely due to the constraints on the medium. that is a useful theory. (do I think he probably took too much LSD and got high on his own theories? yes. but its at least adequate as a predictive starting point - and what more can we ask of any model?)

mountain_peak 5y ago

Love the 'fantasy' scene [0] in Annie Hall where Woody Allen's character 'pulls out' Marshall McLuhan to put an intellectual blowhard back into place. McLuhan says, "I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work - you mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing." Maybe a cameo in a movie meant that McLuhan didn't take himself too seriously. I find his ideas relatively 'approachable', although I'm fairly skeptical whenever reading any philosophical work. Just recently, I had to deal with phenomenological and heuristic approaches to qualitative studies. I see some value, but (as a scientist) the lack of rigor and consistency makes my head spin. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRcMsqCbzWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRcMsqCbzWk

okareaman 5y ago

After listening to The Medium is the Massage, I thought he was prescient on several things, like everything happening in the now, more information means more patterns to discern, the global village and the ill effects of everyone getting into everyone's business. I didn't follow a few others, like young people really getting into roles because of TV (Shakespeare said it better) and getting the story out of the way to the point of not even having a story somehow leads to more involvement by the viewer and more understanding of the material. That last one is really suspect.

pjc50 5y ago

> Actually, the gulf war DID happen (Baudrillard thinks that it didn't You're going to have to explain this one with a quote from him.

rchoudhury 5y ago
Baudrillard doesn't actually think the Gulf war didn't literally occur. He was using trollish language deliberately to highlight his more subtle (but, perhaps, relatively straightforward) ideas that televising the war meant that Americans learning about the wildly mismatched militaries' engagements via TV did not receive in their minds an accurate representation of what really was going on out there. While Baudrillard had a cogent point to make, putting it in these terms all but ensured perpetual confusion about what he meant (as demonstrated by the commenter above you). Here's the Wikipedia summary of Baudrillard's writings: Baudrillard argued the Gulf War was not really a war, but rather an atrocity which masqueraded as a war. Using overwhelming airpower, the American military for the most part did not directly engage in combat with the Iraqi army, and suffered few casualties. Almost nothing was made known about Iraqi deaths. Thus, the fighting "did not really take place" from the point of view of the West. Moreover, all that spectators got to know about the war was in the form of propaganda imagery. The closely watched media presentations made it impossible to distinguish between the experience of what truly happened in the conflict, and its stylized, selective misrepresentation through simulacra. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Place https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Pl... Baudrillard's concept of "simulacrum" is connected, and perhaps more interesting, even if attempting to apply it to the world results in weird claims like this one about the Gulf war.

johnchristopher 5y ago

You should give Wittgenstein a try :).