Weird book, picked up at a discount at a shop that was closing down. Although I’ve heard of McLuhan, it’s really only as a cameo in Annie Hall and for the phrase ‘the medium is the message’, which I heard a lot at one time (not so much anymore) and which I felt I understood on an intuitive level without ever really interrogating what it means.

Anything with interesting layouts and weird typography is going to get my attention and after a few months on the shelf, I read it during a couple of hours downtime.

My brain tends to hear Charlie Brown’s teacher when text gets too academic (bwah-bwah-mwah-bwah), but I’ve picked out a few bits that I found interesting. I will say, though, that as I was going back to scan a couple of spreads, bits started leaping out at me. It might have spared itself from the charity shop, at least for a while.

Anyway, some stuff:

Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. […] Anti- environments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly.

Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass.

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The "expert" is the man who stays put.

I also liked this, quoted:

“The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and note remember of themselves…. You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.” – Socrates, “Phaedrus”

and:

The Balinese say: “We have no art. We do everything as well as we can.”

Buy ‘The Medium is the Massage’ by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore from bookshop.org