Real War is Information War (Marshall McLuhan)

I take today’s McLuhan quote from a playful little book called the Medium is the Massage, written with Quentin Fiore and artistically rendered by Jerome Agel. I’ll use a brief paragraph, from page 100 of the book, to introduce the material which follows:

“The young today reject goals. They want roles—R-O-L-E-S. That is total involvement. They do not want fragmented, specialized goals or jobs.” (p.100)

Real War is Information War

Real, total war has become information war. It is being fought by subtle electric informational media—under cold conditions, and constantly. The cold war is the real war front—a surround—involving everybody—all the time—everywhere. Whenever hot wars are necessary these days, we conduct them in the backyards of the world with the old technologies. These wars are happenings, tragic games. It is no longer convenient, or suitable, to use the latest technologies for fighting our wars, because the latest technologies have rendered war meaningless. The hydrogen bomb is history’s exclamation point. It ends an age-long sentence of manifest violence.

p.138

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

By: Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore

Produced by: Jerome Agel

Gingko Press

Copyright 1967

Berkeley, CA

 

Ear World (Marshall McLuhan)

Our present day cellphone dominated world has created a Pavlovian environment where a series of sounds, burps, whirring, and chirps calls us back to the device. We want to know who or what wants to reach us. It may be foe, scammer, Big Tech calling us to a new announcement, anything to keep us firmly in their grip.

Marshall McLuhan predicted the movement from print media to electronic media meant a dramatic sensory shift. From the old visual world with its logical pacing we would move to the ear or audio world. A profound observation. Somehow the McLuhan’s sage warning has not been grasped in any meaningful way. He warned us with the utmost care on the change involved.

I take today’s McLuhan quote from a playful little book called the Medium is the Massage, written with Quentin Fiore and artistically rendered by Jerome Agel. I’ll use a brief paragraph from page 62. Of the book to introduce the material which follows:

“At the high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective.” (p.62)

Ear World

The ear favors no particular “point of view.” We are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless we around us. We say, “Music shall fill the air.” We never say, “Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.”

We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from “above,” from “below,” from in “front” of us, from our “right”, from our “left.” We can’t shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids. Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships.

p.111

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

By: Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore

Produced by: Jerome Agel

Gingko Press

Copyright 1967

Berkeley, CA

Political Democracy is Finished (Marshall McLuhan)

You’ll notice that political governance has become increasingly impossible. The destruction of representative democracy became evident every since Barack Obama came into office and Mitch McConnell stated his goal for the next four years was to keep Obama from getting re-elected. Sure enough Obama was reduced to trying to govern through presidential edict.

Donald Trump demonstrates little of no passion for governing through the usual methods, has almost no interest in working with Congress. We would like to think the elected representatives in the Senate and House will have more impact under future presidents.

Marshall McLuhan’s statement below—made in a Playboy interview from 1969—argues that the electronic environment, “the new tribal society,” brings an end to “political democracy as we know it.”

By the way, did you notice newsman Bob Schieffer’s book “Overload”? He discusses the overwhelming impact of the new media environment on our understanding of the daily news. Haven’t read the book. I wonder if the name McLuhan ever enters into the discussion. Bob, a little late to the party, but he did pick a good subject.

Political Democracy as we know it is finished

(Marshall McLuhan in 1969 Playboy interview)

Playboy: If personal freedom will still exist—although restriced by certain consensual taboos—in this new tribal world, what about the political system most closely associated with individual freedom: democracy. Will it, too, survive the transition to your global village?

McLuhan: No, it will not. The day of presidential democracy as we know it today is finished. Let me stress again that individual freedom will not be submerged in the new tribal society but it will certainly assume different and more complex dimensions. The ballot box, for example, is the product of literate Western culture—a hot box in a cool world—and thus obsolescent. The tribal will is consensually expressed through the simultaneous interplay of all members of a community that is deeply interrelated and involved, and thus would consider the casting of a “private” ballot in a shrouded polling booth, a ludicrous anachronism. The TV networks computers by “projecting” a victor in a Presidential race while the polls are still open, have already rendered the traditional electoral process obsolescent.

Moron Don and Bob Corker: why the name game works

Donald Trump has the schoolyard bully’s talent for ranking people out. “Ranking out” was the term we used for putting down other kids back in Queens in 1960. One rank out phrase I recall sounds picturesque by the standards of these days: I’ll rank you so low you’ll play handball against the curb.

Trump brought the art of ranking people out to the national political stage with—

·               Low Energy Jeb Bush

·               Little Marco

·               Lyin’ Ted

·               Crooked Hillary

·               Little Rocket Man

·               Liddle’ Bob Corker

But the name Moron Don finally sticks to Donald Trump And, funny thing, Rex Tillerson used the phrase behind closed doors. Tillerson never intended the insult to fall upon Don’s ears. And especially didn’t plan for the rank-out to go viral and be heard by the ears of the world.

The key to a really good insult is its accuracy—and Moron Don fits Donald Trump surprisingly well.

Moron:

1. A person having an I.Q. of 50-69 and judged incapable of developing beyond a mental age of 8-12.

2. Informal any stupid person or a person lacking in good judgment.

Why does moron work so well for Mr. Trump. Well, there’s something loose and freewheeling about a moron. Moron Don rolls along—put your hands in the air, like you just don’t care. Don doesn’t care but he is sensitive about native intelligence. Donald Trump may be the master of street smarts but he’s no Henry Kissinger when it comes to world history or in the arena of books smarts.

But Bob Corker, the senator from Tennessee, comes along just in time. Corker, like Superman, steps into the void and leaps tall building. Corker, a voice of reason and courage, hurtles into the ball of confusion with no fear of Trump the schoolyard bully. Maybe it’s all about the name—corker!

Corker:

1.   a person who thing or thing that corks.

2.   Slang someone of astonishing talent or excellent quality.

Let’s just hope that Bob Corker keeps corking along…

We Are All Actors (Marshall McLuhan)

Donald Trump, former host of a reality television show, became president and turned the nation and the world into a reality television show-- complete with cliff-hangers, constant conflict and a barrage of insults for friends and foe alike. Trump TV engages us all. Marshall McLuhan died in 1980 but anticipated correctly our present state of connectedness. His comments below, powerful and challenging, are tour de force McLuhan... every sentence contains a Master's thesis.

The End of the Work Ethic 

(an address by Marshall McLuhan to the Empire Club of Canada)

Living electronically, where the effects come before the causes, is a rather graphic and vivid way of explaining why distant goals and objectives are somewhat meaningless to “neuronic” man. Electronic man, that is, works is a world where electronic services are an expansion of an environmental form, of his own nervous system. To such a man is it meaningless to say that he should seek or pursue distant goals and objectives, since all the satisfactions and objectives are already present to him. This explains the mystery of why preliterate and acoustic peoples appear to us to be so deeply satisfied with such shallow resources and means of existence. Acoustic man, living in a simultaneous environment of electric information, is suddenly disillusioned by the ideal of moreness, whether it be more goods or more people or more security or more fame. Acoustic, or electronic man, understands instantly that the nature and limits of human satisfactions, forbid any increase of happiness through an increase of power or wealth. Acoustic man naturally “plays it by ear” and leaves harmoniously and musically and melodiously. Ecology is only another name for this acoustic simultaneity and sudden responsibility for creating ecological environments pressed very suddenly upon Western man on October 17^th, 1959. That was the day when Sputnik went into orbit, putting this planet inside a man-made environment for the first time. As soon as the planet went inside a man-made environment, the occupants of the planet began to hum and sing the ecological theme song without any further prompting.

When the planet was suddenly enveloped by a man-made artifact, “Nature” flipped into art form. The moment of Sputnik was the moment of creating Spaceship Earth and/or the global theatre. Shakespeare at the Globe had seen all the world as a stage, but with Sputnik, the world literally became a global theatre with no more audiences, only actors.

from Marshall McLuhan essays:

media research

technology, art, communication

—edited with commentary by Michel A. Moos

1980, 1997