Forum Post: Marshall McLuhan: Occupy needs to become Hot Media, high-definition, but handle with care. . .
Posted 12 years ago on Nov. 27, 2011, 7 a.m. EST by CrossingtheDivided
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from Santa Ysabel, CA
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"An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him."
"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is."
"In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses."
-Reading of "Man and Media"'s end and "The Descent into the Maelström" :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTSD6Tz5D8I
"Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort."
"Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam."
"Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity."
"Affluence creates poverty."
"Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones?
On the 'Global Village' of now:
"There's an earthquake and no matter where we live, we all get the message. And today's teenager, the future villager, who feels especially at home with our new gadgets —— will bring our tribe even closer together."
"Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition."
"In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood."
"Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: 'When dialogue begins, propaganda ends.' His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology, but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom."
"I don't explain—I explore."
Alright, three or four more. . .
"Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols. . . ."
"Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society. . . . . . .Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy."
"The modern little red riding hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objections to being eaten by the wolf."
"As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes... ...Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen."