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
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