2 years ago

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Speaker: Marshall McLuhan
Recording date: 1977
Location: John Hopkins University

The recording was made from a cassette original by Star Larvae (http://starlarvae.blogspot.nl)

More about 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. Now, however, we can experience Marshall McLuhan in the original. The Marshall McLuhan Speaks Special Collection is a historical archive that comprises video of three decades of McLuhan’s appearances on television: interviews, panels, debates and lectures. Taken together, the Marshall McLuhan Speaks Special Collection is a priceless archival resource for students, scholars and everyone interested in understanding the impact of new media in the 21st century.

Some quotations from the John Hopkins talk:
"One of the peculiar effects of the alphabet was to separate the visual faculty from the other senses. Such an effect never occurred in china or Arab world. Only the Phonetic alphabet has the power to divorce the visual faculty from the other senses. Visual space is continuous and connected homogenous and static. All other spaces created by the other senses of touch, acoustics, kinaesthetic – all these other senses are discontinuous, resonant and dynamic, they are not static”

“The alphabet in divorcing the heart (the right hemisphere of the brain) from the head (the left hemisphere of the brain” ......... (next video)

“The alphabet in divorcing the heart (the right hemisphereof the brain) from the head (the left hemisphere of the brain .. the quantifying visual detached observant function. The alphabet in doing that left the other side of the brain somewhat in abeyance. The Greeks developed an environment of services, roads, military. Alexander the Great would have been unthinkable without the alphabet and without the lineality that went with it. And the Romans took over there and developed an even more lineal and beurocratic hieratical structure. The Roman world created a world that pushed the right/left hemisphere into dominance. A dominance that remained throughout the middle ages, the renaissance and reaching peaks in the industrial assembly line and other structures of the kind.”

Discontinuity is acoustic . Continuity and connectiveness is visual and left hemisphere. Discontinuity which is electric – electric current do not flow in the way water does through a pipe or a wire. That is not the form in which they exist. The Telegraph was not long in existence when we had a revolution in physics:

- Max Planck – 1900. Matter as discontinues quanta of energy. Matter was not connected at all. There was resonating intervals in matter (planck’s quantum theory)

- Freud – discontinuity between the unconscious and the conscious

- Picasso – discontinuous spaces called Cubism

- Einstein later – relativity theory refers to the fact that you have to measure anything in the

world to the speed of light

“You can have 20/20 vision in each eye and still be profoundly dyslexic. Dyslexia is not something that takes place in the eyes – it takes place in the matter of conversions of the eye in front of the page. Dyslexia is a problem of conversion"

More information about Marshall McLuhan:
https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com
http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com
http://www.mcluhanonmaui.com
http://marshallmcluhan.com
http://www.fivebodied.com

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