"War and Peace in the Global Village"Bullet point summary of a funky book by Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore and Jerome Agel, Bantam, 1968
Full of unusual photos, academic quotes and citations from James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake", this book challenges many of our assumptions about the media. It should be the follow up to a reading of "The Gutenberg Galaxy" (also by MM), which will be the subject of a coming presentation in our Sciences-Po advertising class.
Bear in mind that McLuhan's insights date back to the 1960s, when the media were less developed than today.
- He claims that JJ's book, "Finnegan's Wake" (FW) was really about the 'electric retribalization of the West', the meeting of East and West. Joyce discovered that 'all social changes are the effect of new technologies (self-amputations) on the order of our sensory lives.'
- Great changes have taken place since the industrial revolution - mechanisation, the press, highways, postal routes, steam, railways...
- 'We now live (note: in 1968) in an electric environment of information coded not just in visual but in other sensory modes'
- Highly educated people, i.e. phonetically literate, live in a 'rational' or 'pictorial' space. They are specialists.
- New environments 'inflict considerable pain on the perceiver.' Hieronymus Bosch depicted this 'pain' in his paintings in the post-Gutenberg 16th century
- 'Man-made environments are always unperceived by men during the period of their innovation' (note: we did not question our book culture before the computer). When that environment is superseded by the new one, then it becomes visible
- As the wheel is a technological extension of the foot, so electronics are an extension of our central nervous system
- Fashion : of great interest to many in the alphabetic West, it does not exist in the tribal or oral world
- Civilisation : 'Civilisation is entirely the product of phonetic literacy'
(Photo courtesy eqqman, www.flickr.com)
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