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