Posted on: 2023.08.01
This book talks about the effect of communication mediums on the content of the communication and how concepts that are difficult to express will be talked about less, and the easier concepts will be talked about more and considered more important. The danger here is that if more critical ideas (such as health, education, organization of society) aren’t easily able to talked about, then they won’t be.
Interesting thought to wonder that “how” I think / speak determines some nature of “what”.
To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that tech is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is stupid, plain and simple. p.157
Created Thursday 07 November 2019 (My responses to the words are prefixed by “MN:”, I’ve also added updated thoughts after this writing in 2019 prefixed by “Updated:”)
kids come to the conclusion that TV is almost exlusively interested in presenting show business and sensationalism and in making money. Amazing as it seems, they had never realized that before. p.xi
His Q’s can be asked about all tech and media. p.xv
Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. p.xix
In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. p.xx
“[this book] is an argument that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates that how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inexitably become the important conent of a culture…Our attention here is on how forms of public discourse regulate and even dictate what kind of content can issue from such forms.” p.6 ** (book’s main point)
[I like the example of how smoke signals can’t transmit ideas of political philosophy. In his words] “Its form excludes the content.” p.7
On TV, discourse is conducted largely through viz imagery, which is to say that tv gives us a conversation in images, not words. [MN: So a person’s image tells much more than it would on radio and is now a part of the conversation, regardless if it’s important or not.] p.7
…the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation. - Marshall McLuhan p.8 [Just like the Pickpocket book, listening to ppl’s lingo is so important.]
[The second commandment, no graven image,] is a strange thing to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. p.9
Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility. This is what McLuhan meant by “the medium is the message.” p.10
What is peculiar about such interpositions of medai is that their role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed. [MN; A blindness. You don’t see this happening.] A person who reads a book or who watches tv or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is orgranized and controlled by these events. p.11
In manufacturing a clock, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measureable sequences. p.11
The written word, is not merely an echo of a speaking voice. It is another kind of voice altogether, a conjurer’s trick of the first order. p.13
The introduction into a culture of a technique such as writing or a clock is not merely an extension of man’s power to bind time but a transformation of his way of thinking — and, of the content of his culture. That is what I mean to say by calling a medium a metaphor. We are told in school that a metaphor suggests what a thing is like by comparing it to something else. And by the power of its suggestion, it fixes a conception in our minds that we cannot imagine the one thing withour the other. p.13
Our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our Metaphors create the content of our culture. p.15
"I want to point out that definition’s of truth are derived, in some part, from the character of the media of communication through which info is conveyed. [MN: Basically this is saying “don’t believe everything you see on the internet” is a statement about a medium’s validity, and that cultures adhere to the fact that certain medias can change how true something seems.] [The media distorts what the message says.] ["This way of thinking (way=medium) lead some to come to this conclusion.] p.17
The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression….which is a way of saying that the “truth” is a kind of cultural prejudice. [MN; “truth is often seen, rarely heard”] p22
As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it. p.24
I believe the epistemology created by tv is not only inferior to a print-vased epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist. p.27
Whenever language is the principal medium of communication, an idea, fact, a claim is the inevitable result. The idea may be banal, the fact irrelevant, the claim false, but there is no escape from meaning when language is the instrument guiding one’s thought. [MN; This is so heavy to me] p.50
[language centered discourse] is serious because meaning demands to be understood. A written sentence calls upong its author to say something, upon its reader to know the import of what is said. The reader must come armed, in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one’s responses are isolated, one’s intellect thrown back on it’s own resources. p.50
Almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to on’s habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality. p.51
In a print culture, writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes when they don’t notice, or worse, don’t care. p.51
The history of newspaper advertising in America may be considered, all by itself, as a metaphor of the descent of the typographic mind. p.58
[MN; There’s a transformation in advertising that goes from rationality (“b/ dandruff is a result from dry skin, by rehydrating that skin….etc.) to psychology (”We notice that our readers respond with more sales when we…etc.") I don’t like this.] p.60
[thoughts from “Walden” on the electrical conversion of conversation] “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Tezas; but they have nothing important to communicate…We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but maybe the first news we get will that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” [MN; Tell em Ralph] p.65
Telegraphy gave legitimacy to the idea of context free info. It’s three pronged attack came in the form of irrelevence, impotence, and incoherence. p.65
It was not long until the fortunes of newspapers came to depend not on the quality or utility of the news they provided, but on how much, from what distances, and at what speed. p.67
How often does it occur that info provided you on morning radio or tv, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?…But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of info that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action…In both oral and typographic cultures, information derives its importance from the poss of action. p.68
The principal strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move info, not collect it, explain it or analyze it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography. [MN; One of my favorite things about China is the fact that it has such a long written history. If telegraphy is undoing, this hurts.] p.69
Civilized people everywhere consider the burning of a book a vile form of anti-intellectualism. But the telegraph demands that we burn its contents…Facts push ohter facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. p.70**
“Knowing” the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. p.70
The “graphic revolution” had imagery not just function as a supplement to language, but bid to replace it as our dominant means for construing, understanding, and testing reality. p.74 [MN; “do you get the picture?”]
I mean to suggest that a more significant legacy of the telegraph and the photograph may be the pseudo-context. A pseudo-context is a structure invented to give gramented and irrelevant info a seeming use. p.76
Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put…A technology is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates. p.84**
What I am claiming is that TV has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. p.87
And we must not judge too harshly those who have framed [news as entertainment]. They are not assembling the news to be read, or broadcasting it to be heard. they are televising the news to be seen. They must follow where their medium leads. There is no conspiracy here, no lack of intelligence, only a straightforward recognition that “good tv” has little to do with what is “good” about exposition or other forms of verbal communication but everyhting to do with what the pictorial images look like. p.88
[MN; p.89 has a great example of why TV is unable to host a serious exposition on a topic even when it tries to. Referencing how the discussion’s answers had to fit into 2 1/2 minutes due to television programming, or how no one could talk on the other’s points, etc. This program couldn’t foster the environment for a discussion. It didn’t fit into the program.]
TV is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore how TV stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the TV screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor precails. As typography once dictated the style of conducting politics, religion, biz, education, law and other imprtant social matters, tv now takes command. p.92***
There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, “Now…this”. p.99
TV provides a new definition of truth; The credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition. “Credibility” here does not refer to the past record of the teller for making statements that have survived the rigors of reality-testing. It refers only to the impression of sincerity authenticity, vulnerability or attractiveness conveyed by the actor/reporter. p.102
If on tv, credibility replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their performances consistently generate a sense of verisimilitude. p.102
But as long as the music is there as a frame for the program, the viewer is comforted to believe that there is nothing to be greatly alarmed about; that the events that are reported have as much relation to reality as do scenes in a play. p.103
What is happeneing here might properly be called disinformation. It means misleading info — misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial unfo — info that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact ledsa one away from knowing. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is inevitable result. p.105
“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies” -Walter Lippmann p.108
Contradiction requires that statements and events be perceived as interrelated aspects of a continuous and coherent context [MN; context, which disappears with the telegraph]. p.109
All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference. p.110-1
If the delivery is not the same, then the message is quite likely not the same either. p. 118
The spectacle we find in true religion has as its purpose enchantment, not enertainment. p. 122
If politics is like show biz, then the idea is not to persue excellence, clarity, or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another mattter entirely. What’s that other matter? Advertising. p.126
The distance between rationality and advertising now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them…A McDonalds commercial is not a series of testable logically ordered assertions. It is a drama. p.128
What the adveriser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research. p.128
The point is that tv does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, tv makes it impossible the determination of who is better than whom. p.133
TV gives image a bad name. For on the tv the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience. p.134
Men always make gods in their image. p.135
What I am saying is that juust as the TV commerical empties itself of authentic product info so that it can do its psychological work, image politics empties itself of authentic political substance for the same reason. p.136
It follows from this that history can play no significant role in image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions. p.136
The modern mind has grown indifferent to history because history has become useless to it. It is not obstinacy or ignorance but a sense of irrelevance that leads to the diminution of history. p137
With media whose structure is biased toward furnishing images and fragments, we are depriced of access to an historical perspective. In the absense of continuity and context he says, “bits of info cannot be intergreated into an intellignet and consistent whole.” -Terence Moran p.137
But the Founding Fathers did not forsee that tyranny by government might be superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely the corporate state, which though TV now controls the flow of public discourse in America. p.139
But what we watch is a medium which presents info in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, info packaged as entertainment…Tyrants have always known the value of providing the masses with amusements as a means of pacifying discontent. p.141
We may take as our guide here John Dewey saying that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallicies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes…may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson lesson in geography or history…For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. “We learn what we do” -John Dewey p.144
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility. p.155-6
To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that tech is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is stupid, plain and simple. p.157
Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light tramission of images and you make a cultural revolution, without a vote. p.157
Only though a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of info, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over TV or the computer, or any other medium. p.161 **
H.G. Wells believed that we are in a race between education and disaster and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking. p.163
Look up: - Lewis Mumford (looked into how diff technology shape our thoughts, could be interesting), <— Technics and Civilization, - Jonathan Edwards (Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton, and A Treatise Concerning Religous Affections*), [a bunch of preachers, which is kinda interesting to me;] - Georger Whitefield and Charles Finney, - “The Last Hurrah” by Edwin O’Conner, - “The Selling of the President” by Joe McGinnis, - “Experience and Education” by John Dewey,