The following is a list of partially-organized thoughts on The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, the 1967 book by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore.
- I have given The Medium Is the Massage the nickname of The Medium Manifesto because, like The Communist Manifesto, it makes only predictions, yet no prescriptions. It is definitely no more a hand-guide to dealing with new technology than The Communist Manifesto is Communism for Dummies. The reader is given a set of facts, observations or predictions, and he can only nod his head, given nothing to agree or disagree with. For instance, it suggests that "our 'Age of Anxiety' is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools--with yesterday's concepts." But what are today's tools and today's concepts?
Pages 8 & 9
- Alternating between text and images in the book itself serves multiple purposes, such as A: creating Ted Nelson's parallelism (as in his Xanadu GUI) in a physical form, B: providing relief from text to appeal to the visual mind and, C: in a way, both demonstrating and satirizing (making fun of) the twitchy, distracted, quickly bored readers about whom the authors make so many predictions.
No Page Number
- Because parents are no longer the main source of learning for children, it is time to expand responsibility to complex systems like the Internet and accept that it is made up of countless "experts." "All the world's a sage."
Page 14
- A new form of politics is emerging, as I see it. We vote now with our interaction with media and our participation with its spawn. We vote by clicking what we want to see, selecting our future.
Page 22
- Is rediscovering the concept of the vanishing point a form of new technology? Although I feel I understand the message of this section of the book, I don't follow the authors' metaphorical use of the Italian Renaissance.
Page 53
- Like Ted Nelson, the authors notice a preoccupation with how people want to perceive their space. I predict that this will be a common, recurring theme as I continue to study the written work of artists.
Page 57
- I agree that "electric circuitry" is helping to bring back our "primitive" senses, but I disagree that it is "recreating" anything. To me, new technology is new, and that is that.
Page 56
- The authors predict an electronic future void of private guilt. Is this possible? Perhaps privacy of all sorts is losing popularity, but no emotion can simply disappear with time, as I see it.
Page 61
- We finally live in a world of "simultaneous happening," one of no notable time or space. I think I like it.
Page 63
- Yes, "we have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment" (no matter if we understand the process), but I feel that, to say we are arranging it "as a work of art" is a big stretch. I doubt that many people think in that way (but the authors, of course).
Page 68
- The following statement pretty well characterizes the book so far. "Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass."
Page 68
- I like the imagery in the statement, "we march backwards into the future." Walking backward is a slow, steady, short-sighted way of moving forward. I think of instances such as a new Apple product being released. A lot of people will choose to stick to what they have, not trusting the new device, until the new device is familiar--old news. Then the mass finally warms up to it.
Page 75
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