Marshall McLuhan 1966 Full lecture from Gutenberg to Batman
Вставка
- Опубліковано 19 жов 2024
- Title: From Gutenberg to Batman
Location: Annenberg School of Communication
Date: 28 April 1966
Description:
A lecture given by Marshall McLuhan at Annenberg School of Communications, Philadelphia, in April of 1966. Symbol manipulation, the world of the happening, training of human perception and the potency of pop art. A tape that doesn't seem to have any beginning, middle or end.Opening remarks by Dr George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School. Then, Professor of Communications Robert Lewis Shayon introduces the other participants:
William Jovanovich, president of Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc;
Dr Dell Hymes, anthropologist;
William Dozier, creator/producer of the TV series, "Batman";
Professor Marshall McLuhan, Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto
Starting at just over 13 minutes Marshall McLuhan speaks.
At about 46 minutes the other participants comment upon McLuhan's lecture and take questions from the audience.
Topics or themes discussed:
the audience is about to become workforce
ads become more important than the products
Truman Capote or the reader was the murderer in "IN COLD BLOOD"
the computer DID NOT obsolesce the "job"
TV becomes an art form under satellite conditions
Jacques Ellul's definition of "propaganda" ("propaganda ends when dialogue begins")
"Egyptian" art (totalism) retrieved
Art as "the blood bank of great moments of living in the past" is obsolete, Art has to be a "probe" (helps "to SEE") and a "means of perception and discovery" now
specialist form of study vs. total-field study
DR. ZHIVAGO, and more on BATMAN's costume as like an iconic cartoon
More about Marshall McLuhan:
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was the first major communications theorist of how the new media have the power to transform human nature. No matter how powerful or persuasive the message, he said, it’s the media that have changed our patterns of thought and behaviour. Now, in a world dominated by the Internet and social media, McLuhan’s revolutionary ideas are as hotly debated as they were in the 1960s, when he became an academic star known worldwide for his catchy slogans “the medium is the message,” “the global village,” and “hot and cool media.” Today, McLuhan is back in the spotlight again, this time as the first seer of cyberspace.For decades scholars and students have read Marshall McLuhan’s landmark books Understanding Media and the Gutenberg Galaxy, recognizing him as the foremost theorist of how the new media have affected human behaviour.
Important links:
mcluhangalaxy....
www.marshallmcl...
www.mcluhanonma...
Skip to 13:41 for McLuhan Speech
13 minutes of old guard windbagging before the vanguard speaks.
The audience is about to become the workforce. Called influencers 50 years before they showed up.
The musical equivalent of Marshall McLuhan is the Minutemen. Every song is a quick burst of genius that blows your mind with originality.
13:13 mm takes the stage
13:40
So we just gunna ignore the fact he predicted memes
Orwell's definition of Newspeak covers it pretty well too
15:28
"The Artist is always at least 50 years ahead of the engineer or scientist">~McLuhan
As an artist, I can testify to the tension between myself and those who are not artists throughout my entire life. In fact it would seem that the larger society in fact seems to view the Artist as a heretic and sinner...at best a dunce.
\\][//
Willy Whitten I think that's because artists themselves have become degraded and not as important as they once were.
Also a fool, false prophet and scapegoat. No wonder they always find it hard to make money
@@genechorneyi'm an artist, but you're spot on. And this kiddo in the first coment, it's obvious he's subscribing to a statement of McLuhan without having the context and riding in the coat tails of McLuhan s brilliance and foresight ability he attained by sheer inteligence, hard work, research and a deeper observation of human behaviour. Only him can claim something as encouraging for artists as he did, without sounding vain, ignorant, and superficial. Unlike many meat riders of artists, deluded and self centeredbppl, devoid of an actual insight and message born out off their own work, wich makes them loudmouthed and self serving. The artists world is a make believe, all pretend, and a devious one, from the industry to the public and artists too. Few, sane ppl, are safe from these gimmicky voices. It's easy to glorify arts while undermining many type of workers from other fields, just because someone as lucid and intelligent as McLuhan regards them as ahead of their time, but context is crucial, since he aint including lets say Elvis, the rolling stones, the beatles, Dostoievski, Nietzsche, some sculptors or even van Gogh or Goya. Philosophy and counter culture are as full of shit as many poets and musicians. So, eventhough i admire ppl with talent, and love music with My whole life, i'm not falling for cheap glorifications of those who disregard the context and the very ppl they're sorrounded by, wich can't be understood without a deep first hand experience. Period.
21:37
49:48
46:41
18:12
Can anyone please explain , in layman's terms , what McLuhan's means when he uses the expression , that , media changes a person's sensory ratio ? And what can one do about it short of not exposing oneself to any media .
The media we consume alter the way in which we perceive the world.
My take on it is this: Pre-literate people experience themselves and the world around them. By becoming literate, we create an interior space that is detached from the world and now we observe the world. Our sensory ratios change based on what we are interested in and what is being done to us. The detached western world is willing to destroy the environment because it is there for the taking. Illiterate people experience the environment as alive and vital. This is just one example. And I could be wrong!
I can help, but I'll have to define some things.
Media refers to a means of communication, whether it be gestures, or speech, or hieroglyphics, or handwriting, or print, or radio, or television, or telephone, or internet. Media is that through which communication takes place. The singular form of the word media is medium, and the sense of the word is familiar if you think of a "spiritual medium", which is someone through which the dead supposedly communicate, right?
What McLuhan's work is about is how media evolves through history as a technological process. With each technological development in the means of communication, things change dramatically for the people living within that "media environment", so to speak.
So, within a tribal, or a primitive, or a pre-literate, or non-civilized group of people (think indigenous people living in the jungle, or pre-historic man 40,000 years ago) they have only gestures, and speech. As such, their "sensory ratios" are skewed heavily towards the acoustic. That is to say, they do a lot of speaking, and listening, and they don't do any writing, or reading, or texting, or Twitter at all.
As I'm sure you can imagine, people who have only speaking and listening, and who are consequently very acoustic, are quite unlike people who are living in a hieroglyphic environment, or a handwriting environment, or a print environment, or a radio environment, or a television environment, etc, etc. With each subsequent evolution in the technological means through which communication occurs, i.e. "media", the person within that environment is dramatically changed. "All media works us over completely," McLuhan once said.
So this is basically what he means by sense ratios being skewed as a consequence of living within a given media environment. One big example he's always giving in the Gutenberg Galaxy is that for the longest time reading a book was always done aloud, and not silently, because people were very much in the mode of speaking and listening, and print media, which is highly visual, was fairly new. So, it took a long time for the ratios of people's senses to switch away from the acoustic, and towards the visual, and this is because of the development of print media, i.e. the printing press.
According to his theory, this increased visual stress brought about by the advent of print media was what led to the discovery of the laws of perspective, which feature heavily in renaissance art. Before then art was depicted on two-dimensional planes, and not with the illusion of depth from one singular perspective.
It's a strange idea, and it's not even necessarily scientifically true, but you will notice, maybe for the first time, that when you read this you can "hear" it even though you're seeing it with your eyes. Well, back before art and writing ever came about, people were VERY different, and they could not "hear" with their eyes at all. At some point, our "sense ratios" shifted and brought about the changes you see before you now.
As for your second question, good luck. You can't escape from the environment within which the evolution media is taking place. That environment has expanded to encompass the entire world, and it's evolving at an ever greater pace, and with each subsequent change in the means through which we communicate, we're remade over and over. "Humans make tools, and then the tools remake people to use them."
Good luck! Read McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy for more info.
In McLuhan's wording from 'Counterblast' (1969)...
"One medium of expression modifies another, as one language is changed by contact with another."
"Each of our senses is daily modified by the experience of the other senses."
"Each medium gives explicitness and stress to one sense over another. Noise weakens touch and taste; sight diminishes the range of the audible, and of taste and smell."
There is a video somewhere on the tube of McLuhan suggesting (regarding your secondary question) a balancing of media, a sort of rationing...
John Hennry
We shape the tools and then they shape us. Every new medium changes the environment and people themselves.
Starts here 13:36
30:22 for Canadian comedy
More general on comedy @ 28:49
NARDWAR a fan??
The International Internet
Subliminal massage.
Matrix
Dehumanization
16:44
27:54