In Search of Kingdom Living

Continuing my love affair with all things McLuhan.

I first came across this book at chapters. It’s a fairly quick read and it introduces McLuhan’s ideas through a combination of prose and images. The following are a few examples:

(all pics taken from markbattypublisher.com)

Also, the following are the ten ideas from McLuhan’s Understanding Media (these points don’t do McLuhan any justice, as he would invite you to fully participate in discussing them and deriving your own conclusions – that aside, here they are):

1. A medium or a technology can be any extension of the human being.
2. Media operates in pairs, one effectively ‘containing’ another (ie. the telegraph contains the printed word, which contains writing which contains speech).
3. There are exceptions to media working in pairs (ie. speech which contains thought, and that’s where the chain of media ends because thought is a nonverbal and pure process).
4. Media are powerful agents of change in how we experience the world, how we interact with each other, how we use our physical senses – the same senses that media extend.
5. New media do not so much replace each other as complicate each other (ie. tech of mankind in age of acoustic space is tech from writing, print, and telegraph later developed – was speech).
6. Classification of media hinges on contrast between well-defined, sharp, solid, detailed forms of sensory input and those that require the senses to fill in _____ (what is missing) – ie. hot media is radio, print, photograph vs cool media as telephone, speech, cartoon.
7. technologies create new environments, the new environments create pain, and the body’s nervous system shuts down to block the pain.
8. The expansionist pattern associated with older technology now conflicts wth the contracting energies of the new one (ie. moving from mechanical tech to electronic tech).
9. The starting point of all media is always the individual, since media are defined as technological extensions of the body.
10. Western culture, with its phonetic literacy, when transplanted to oral, noliterate cultures, fragments their tribal organization and produces the prime example of media hybridization and its potent transforming effects. At the same time, electricity has transformed Western culture, dislocating its visual, specialist, fragmented orientation in favor of oral and tribal patterns.