Centroids :
There is the book-reading culture and there is the non-book-reading
culture.
In the 70s and 80s the non-book people, essentially evangelists for
all things television, were insisting that, in McLuhan's phrase,
"book is dead" --a play on Nietzsche's "God is dead."
.
We are hearing this again, aren't we ? .
.
C. P. Snow, back in the late 1950s, said that there were two cultures,
that of the sciences and the humanities, and, in effect, never the
twain shall meet. There still is a division in culture along Snow's lines,
but it actually is tripartite, consisting of science, humanities but
including behavioral sciences, plus popular culture which is
often both anti-science and anti-humanities, in favor of
mass entertainment or, anyway, entertainment that
sometimes is pretty bad stuff objectively.
.
It now seems that we have a new "two cultures" paradigm to consider.
McLuhan was right ; C.P. Snow was right. But they are right in the sense
that Newton was right, and Darwin, in days before relativity physics
or before genetics. Newton is still right and so is Darwin, but only in
appropriate realms.
.
Does computer technology shape us ? The question is rhetorical.
But book culture also shapes us, at least it shapes people who
read books. And, despite some talk of gloom and doom about
publishing, the book trade is flourishing.
Here is a Wikipedia listing of book fairs around the world, a list that
is sketchy and incomplete :
A
* _Antwerp Book Fair_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antwerp_Book_Fair)
B
* _Belgrade Book Fair_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgrade_Book_Fair)
* _Bologna Children's Book Fair_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_Children's_Book_Fair)
* _Buenos Aires International Book Fair_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buenos_Aires_International_Book_Fair)
C
* _Cairo International Book Fair_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_International_Book_Fair)
* _Cape Town Book Fair_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_Book_Fair)
* _Comiket_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comiket)
E
* _Ekushey Book Fair_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekushey_Book_Fair)
G
* _Gothenburg Book Fair_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothenburg_Book_Fair)
* _Guadalajara International Book Fair_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalajara_International_Book_Fair)
* _Gute Bücher für Alle_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gute_Bücher_für_Alle)
H
* _Havana's International Book Fair_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana's_International_Book_Fair)
* _Hebrew Book Week_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_Book_Week)
* _Hong Kong Book Fair_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Book_Fair)
L
* _Lisbon Book Fair_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon_Book_Fair)
L cont.
* _London Book Fair_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Book_Fair)
* _Lviv Book Forum_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lviv_Book_Forum)
N
* _Niigata Comic Market_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niigata_Comic_Market)
P
* _Porto Alegre Book Fair_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porto_Alegre_Book_Fair)
T
* _Taipei International Book Exhibition_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taipei_International_Book_Exhibition)
* _Tehran International Book Fair_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehran_International_Book_Fair)
* _Turin International Book Fair_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turin_International_Book_Fair)
V
* _Vilnius Book Fair_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilnius_Book_Fair)
There are separate categories for nations that have multiple book fairs
known
to the compiler --who obviously missed out on fairs in France and
elsewhere.
G
*
► _Book fairs in Germany_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Book_fairs_in_Germany) (2 P)
I
*
► _Book fairs in India_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Book_fairs_in_India) (3 P)
P
*
► _Book fairs in Pakistan_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Book_fairs_in_Pakistan) (3 P)
T
*
► _Book fairs in Turkey_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Book_fairs_in_Turkey) (1 P)
U
*
► _Book fairs in the United Arab Emirates_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Book_fairs_in_the_United_Arab_Emirates)
.
These are the listings for the USA :
A
* _Alternative Press Expo_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_Press_Expo)
B
* _BookExpo America_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BookExpo_America)
* _Boston Book Festival_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Book_Festival)
L
* _Los Angeles Times Festival of Books_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Times_Festival_of_Books)
M
* _Miami Book Fair International_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Book_Fair_International)
N
* _National Book Festival_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Book_Festival)
This list is ridiculously incomplete. Texas, for instance, has a world
class fair, so does
Chicago, Alabama, and still other places. There may well be hundreds,
certainly there are
if you count local fairs that cater only to specialized readerships, viz,
poetry,
cowboy / western, and the like.
.
Then there is the success of Amazon and the rise of the antiquarian book
trade
into a more-or-less popular trade fair system ( maybe thanks in part to
Antiques Road Show ). Annual sales of new books ( all formats ) as
of 2011 came to a cool $ 27 billion. Sales of used books and overstocks
is unknown but obviously is also in multiples of billions.
.
In other words, millions of people read books. The thesis here is that
these people constitute a culture that is separate from the
non-book-reading
population and that this culture is content driven in ways that are
virtually inconceivable to people who are fixated on media as such,
whether TV or computers or anything else.
.
So, yes, McLuhan is right, but only within a domain.
.
.
Billy
.
.
.
_____________________________________________________
Why McLuhan's chilling vision still matters today
100 years after the birth of the media visionary, 'the medium is the
message' explains what Google and YouTube do to our souls
_Douglas Coupland_ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/douglas-coupland)
_The Guardian_ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian) , Wednesday 20 July
2011
Over the years I've been asking people in my life who are old enough to
remember which technological change felt more like a cathartic change to
society: TV in the 1950s or the internet since 2000. Up until about 2006,
everyone said TV. Since then – call me crazy, but I think it has to do with
Google – it's been the internet and all its spawn: YouTube, smartphones,
Facebook, apps … and everything else that jackhammers away at the time we once
reserved for books, newspapers, daydreaming and, ironically, TV.
It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily
routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media
technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California. We really ought to
give ourselves a collective pat on the back for doing as well as we have in a
universe of constant media change and mutation.
Back at the start of TV people were thinking that it would be an excellent
way to have puppet shows in the home. Other people got paranoid and their
brains flew directly to Orwell, under the misguided assumption that any
content on TV, being electronic, somehow bypassed the membrane of critical
thinking we employ when reading a book; seeing would instantly become
believing. Magazines would show cartoons of families watching TV with captions
along
the lines of: "The modern family: nobody communicating or interacting."
(These days one might see that same cartoon with a caption along the lines
of, "We miss the old days, when families did activities together, such as
watching TV.")
And this is when _Marshall McLuhan_ (http://marshallmcluhan.com/) entered
the collective imagination and became a huge media star. He did this
either as a guru or as a villain – as a harbinger of the flowering of culture,
or of its death. McLuhan was a fuddy-duddy fiftysomething English lit
professor from Toronto. Through an alchemical mix of his vast historical and
literary knowledge, his bombastic personality and a range of behaviors we might
now place on the very mild end of the autistic spectrum, McLuhan was able
to cut to the chase. He stated that the point of much of technology, TV, for
instance, wasn't the content of the shows you were watching on it. Rather,
what mattered was merely the fact that you were watching TV. The act of
analysing the content of TV – or of other mediums – is either sentimental or
it's beside the point.
Mediums change you by their very existence. They do this on fundamental
levels because they force you to favour certain parts of your brain over
others. To the person of 2011 this makes total sense. That hour you spent on
Facebook came at the expense of some other way of using your brain, most
likely TV viewing or book-reading, though as books and TV recede, ever more
web-mediated activities will replace each other to the point where we'll have
long forgotten what the pre-electronic mind was to begin with. And let's
face it, Google isn't making us stupider, it's simply making us realise that
omniscience is actually slightly boring.
To be fair, McLuhan was about more than "the medium is the message", but
that remains a fabulous reduction. McLuhan was an information canary, warning
us that there were new media coming down the line, and it was the effects
of these new media on the mind that he wondered about so extravagantly –
the message seemed to be very dark, indeed. Here's what he wrote in 1962, and
see if it doesn't give you a chill: "The next medium, whatever it is – it
may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its
content, not as its environment. A computer as a research and communication
instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation,
retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip it into a private
line
to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind."Brrrrr.
The medium is the message seems like a timeworn cliche, yet in recent years
it has flipped and become one of the most germane of statements. In his
poetic and elliptical ways, McLuhan foresaw a fluid melting world of texting,
email, YouTube, Google, smartphones and reality TV. Most of the content of
any of these media is pure crap. But what's spooking us all is the
inevitable message of these new media: what will be the psychic fallout of
these
technologies on our inner lives?
Time seems to be going much faster than it once did. We don't remember
numbers any more. Certain forms of storytelling aren't working for us as they
once did. And what's happening to democracy? As with TV in the 1950s, don't
be fooled by the content of texts or blogging or online shopping. Look at
what these media are doing to our souls. That's what McLuhan did.
.
.
.
_________________________________________
.
Marshall McLuhan's message was imbued with conservatism
Although an icon of the counterculture movement, the man who coined 'the
medium is the message' was no pill-popping hipster
_Lance Strate_ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/lance-strate)
_guardian.co.uk_ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/) , Tuesday 26 July 2011
_Marshall McLuhan_ (http://marshallmcluhan.com/) is remembered by many
for his rise to fame as the original "media guru", the subject of a multitude
of newspaper and magazine articles and broadcast interviews, not to
mention a cameo appearance in Woody Allen's finest film, _Annie Hall_
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075686/) .
Because McLuhan was adopted first by the counterculture movement of the
1960s and, more recently, by web evangelists, people sometimes assume that the
man himself was some kind of pill-popping hipster. They couldn't be
further from the truth.
Far from sharing sympathy for countercultural forms of life, or the forms
of media they embraced, McLuhan made a point of withholding judgment,
refraining from moral evaluation of the processes he was describing and
explaining. If anything, it was the conservative side of McLuhan that
sometimes
shone through his stance as a scientific observer. He never condemned the
Vietnam war, suggesting instead that it was more of a media event than an
actual
happening. He discussed the possibility of using media as a form of
control, "using TV in South Africa … to cool down the tribal temperature
raised
by radio", with no acknowledgement of the Orwellian implications.
As a conservative Roman Catholic, he tended to downplay the significance of
the printing press in regard to the Protestant Reformation, a point
stressed by many other media scholars. But the fact that his insights could be
embraced by radicals and reactionaries alike is a testament to their
brilliance, and to his ability to transcend his own human frailties and
failings.
Even though he was later hailed as a prophet, McLuhan insisted that he was
only describing what was taking place in the present, while everyone else
was fixated on the past (looking "through the rear-view mirror," as he put
it). Looking at electricity, electric technology and electronic media such
as _Samuel Morse's telegraph_
(http://inventors.about.com/od/tstartinventions/a/telegraph.htm) and
_Guglielmo Marconi's wireless_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo_Marconi) , he was able to understand
television in ways
that no one else had, and to glimpse the seeds of new media environments to
come. It was because he understood the present, not the future, that his
insights remain as valid today as half a century ago.
McLuhan's approach is particularly well suited to helping us to understand
new technologies as they are being introduced into a culture. His early
rise to prominence was mainly due to his ability to explain the novel medium
of television and the dramatic social upheavals that it generated. At a time
when baby boomers were establishing a new, "cool" youth culture that ran
counter to the "hot" outlook of their parents, McLuhan had an explanation.
The "cool" cultural style was a product of the television medium, whose
low-resolution image required more cognitive processing than the
high-definition experience we might get from radio and the motion picture, and
that
processing, or participation, had a tendency to suck the audience member in,
creating a great sense of involvement in the message. "Hot media", by
contrast, require less cognitive effort, freeing audiences to act. This
understanding led McLuhan to claim that Hitler could not have been successful
in a
televisual media environment.
Moreover, television, in exposing viewers to the world with unprecedented
immediacy and intimacy, was creating what he called a "global village", an
entirely new form of tribalism that did away with private identity,
individualism and the nation state – all products of print culture. The
televisual
window on the world was giving rise to a transparent society where we all
find ourselves too close for comfort, with deep potential for aggression and
violence (including, for example, terrorism).
McLuhan's famous aphorism, "the medium is the message", goes to the very
heart of his way of understanding media, packing together a dozen or more
different meanings. First and foremost, it is a wake-up call. McLuhan asks us
to pay attention to the medium, rather than being distracted by the
content. The content is not without its import, but it pales in comparison to
the
impact of the medium itself.
Instead of focusing solely on the content of television programming, for
example, concerning ourselves with the depiction of violence, he argued that
we needed to examine how the very presence of television as a medium was
changing us, changing our very mode of thought from one that was
characteristically linear and sequential (one thing at a time), to one that
involved
pattern recognition.
Is all this really that far out? The bottom line is that the medium is the
message because the medium has a great influence on what is communicated,
on how it is used. How we go about doing a task has much to do with the way
that task turns out. It is simple, commonsense stuff. We say "ask a silly
question, get a silly answer" because the questions we ask determine the
kinds of answers we obtain.
Supposedly more "conservative" thinkers have argued along similar lines.
_Henry David Thoreau_ (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thoreau/) observed
that "we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us"; Mark Twain quipped
that "when you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail",
and Winston Churchill maintained that "we shape our buildings, and
thereafter they shape us". To this last, McLuhan's colleague, _John Culkin_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Culkin) , generalised that "we shape our
tools, and thereafter they shape us", by way of explaining McLuhan's
perspective.
The medium is the message also means that the medium is the environment.
Our media are extensions of ourselves, they go between ourselves and our
environment, and whatever goes between us and our environment becomes our new
environment. In this way, every new medium is a new environment, and affects
us much as the natural environment shapes us. That is why, to understand
our media environments, we need McLuhan's media ecology.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
