Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square—we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 15 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment’s amenity room. If you’ve been around a few times, feel free to meet up at the front door of the apartment at 7:30 instead.
Description
This week we’re going to run an experimental session based on the writings of the ur-media ecologist and philosophical troll, Marshall McLuhan.
Unfortunately, the Wikipedia page for him and also his works are terrible and full of misconceptions, and also his original writing can be quite inaccessible for even a fairly intelligent lay-audience. This is a real shame, because his ideas are cool as hell.
I’ll begin with a short presentation at the beginning going over his main ideas (“the medium is the message”, hot vs cool media, visual and oral cultures, the global village, and probes) as I understand them.
Afterwards, we’ll crack open the book I own of his aphorisms, The Book of Probes. We’ll launch a random number generator, flip to the page the generator tells us to flip to, and discuss:
what he might have meant by the aphorism in question
how it might apply to our current digital culture
We will repeat this until we get bored.
Readings
Page 9 onwards of The Medium and McLuhan’s Message (Strate 2012). This is a really great breakdown of what McLuhan means when he says “the medium is the message/massage/mass age”, and not too long (12 pages).
McLuhan’s Probes
Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square—we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 15 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment’s amenity room. If you’ve been around a few times, feel free to meet up at the front door of the apartment at 7:30 instead.
Description
This week we’re going to run an experimental session based on the writings of the ur-media ecologist and philosophical troll, Marshall McLuhan.
Unfortunately, the Wikipedia page for him and also his works are terrible and full of misconceptions, and also his original writing can be quite inaccessible for even a fairly intelligent lay-audience. This is a real shame, because his ideas are cool as hell.
I’ll begin with a short presentation at the beginning going over his main ideas (“the medium is the message”, hot vs cool media, visual and oral cultures, the global village, and probes) as I understand them.
Afterwards, we’ll crack open the book I own of his aphorisms, The Book of Probes. We’ll launch a random number generator, flip to the page the generator tells us to flip to, and discuss:
what he might have meant by the aphorism in question
how it might apply to our current digital culture
We will repeat this until we get bored.
Readings
Page 9 onwards of The Medium and McLuhan’s Message (Strate 2012). This is a really great breakdown of what McLuhan means when he says “the medium is the message/massage/mass age”, and not too long (12 pages).
Supplemental
The Ballad of Marshall McLuhan (The Vestibules, 1994)
cute but actually fake news; McLuhan would never shoot someone for disagreeing with him, he’d go “you don’t like those ideas? I got others.”
McLuhan’s Wake (documentary, 90 minutes, 2002)
apparently very good but I haven’t watched it
Teaching McLuhan (David Bobbit, 2011)
a McLuhan scholar breaks down McLuhan’s key concepts for teachers struggling with them
America’s New Post-Literate Epistemology (Michael Cuenco, 2021)
Palladium mag piece
Example of the contemporary resurgence in interest in McLuhan
1969 Playboy Magazine Interview
good summary of his whole deal