Ryan:
I'm wondering if you can elaborate on something
here, as I find what you're saying to be important,
of course. in applying language, like McLuhan's
environment to technologies or media, how do you
disentangle our understanding of them from the
environment itself?
Carefully? Painfully? By somehow getting outside that environment . .
. ??
Or, as McLuhan said, I don't know who discovered water but it wasn't a
fish.
After spending his life working on this problem, McLuhan came to use the
FIGURE and GROUND relationships explored by Gestalt Psychology to discuss
this difficulty. In this approach, the ground-of-our-experience is
psychologically hidden (as a defense mechanism?) and tends to be exposed when
the
figures-that-attract-our-attention change but remains elusive even then.
For McLuhan, whose day-job was English professor, the dramatic changes in
20th century literature were a powerful touchstone for him to illustrate how
this works. In particular, James Joyce was a prime example of someone
trying to expose a changing ground (in his case, to an electric media
environment) that required his poetic gymnastics to become manifest.
I've been asking people I run into two questions for a few years now -- 1)
do you think that the Internet has already changed everything? and 2) what
the most important changes in your attitudes caused by the Internet?
The first is a *figure* question and 95%+ of those I ask say YES. Figures
are easy.
The second is a *ground* question and very few can say anything other than,
Now I have an iPhone, etc. -- which, of course, is a *figure* answer.
Ground is difficult.
In Gestalt terms (as used by McLuhan), what we think we understand is
typically figure, while the environment is ground and is rarely directly
apprehended.
Even though it is clear to most people that the figures of our daily lives
have changed, trying to understand *why* this has occurred (i.e. examining
the changing ground) is uncomfortable, if it's even tried at all.
My presumption is that McLuhan was pretty good at working on this because
he came from nowhere (e.g. Edmonton, Alberta) but still had a strong
sense of identity (i.e. he converted to Catholicism in his mid-20's).
It also helped that he was an historian of RENAISSANCES (plural) -- so he
wasn't limited by the need to force-fit everything into a single linear
narrative, which requires you to deal mostly with figures and ignore the
counter-trends that dominate actual history -- and that he had quite a lot of
support (until he didn't and it all fell apart).
Clearly our need for IDENTITY is at work here, driving us to express what
is easy for those around us to agree with -- which then tend to be
figures, even (or maybe especially) among those who consider themselves to be
radicals.
McLuhan managed to gather a group of people who *expected* him to say
things that were puzzling, so he seems to have gotten away without too much
psychic damage (although the fact that his brain exploded at one point
might indicate that the stress was a very real one.)
Mark Stahlman
Brooklyn NY
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