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1991
"There is absolutely no evidence that the nervous system is capable of 'amputating' any of its parts or functions.. [Nevertheless, McLuhan] was absolutely correct in insisting on the primary role of sensory functions as the cornerstone of any understanding how individuals apprehend and interact with their environment and his insights of [ sic ] how the advent of print. and the electronic media. have altered and accelerated changes in the energy mosaic the world presents to our senses is still unequalled in its scope and incisiveness." (96, 105)
"[Philip] Marchand's book [ Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger ] makes us realize McLuhan's affinities with another transitional figure, another cranky genius, Leo Tolstoy. Both believed in the importance of religion but quarreled with clergymen; both believed in the importance of family but quarreled with their children. Both took an intense interest in social change, if only because they found it so disturbing. Both liked to pontificate and attracted disciples; neither was capable of engaging in the give-and-take of true dialogue. Finally, McLuhan had some of Tolstoy's tragic quality in that this man who loved words so much could communicate only orally, and thus to a small audience. As Marchand puts it, 'Unlike writers who put the best part of themselves in their books, McLuhan could never quite convey in print his own vitality and the free play of his mind' (p. 275). This tragic quality comes through in Marchand's moving account of McLuhan's last year, after a stoke in September 1979 left him unable to speak: 'So began McLuhan's stay in an unearthly purgatory, in which he understood everything but could say nothing. For a man who lived to talk, it was the ultimate torment' (p. 271). No one has more fairly assessed the lasting meaning of McLuhan's legacy than Marchand: '.McLuhan's ability to stimulate, in the phrase of Matthew Arnold, "a stream of fresh and free though upon our stock notions and habits."'" (1142)
"Lefebvre. requests that some attention be paid to McLuhan even if he was 'un peu charlatanesque.'" (84)
"As a sweeping survey of Western thought, the book [From Milton to McLuhan: The Ideas behind American Journalism] inevitably invites criticism of the author's choice of key figures: Why a chapter on McLuhan and only fleeting references to Meiklejoh, Marcuse, and Mill? But this is a minor point. Ultimately, the book's value has less to do with teaching the ideas of any particular thinker than with charting the broad contours of the intellectual tradition and provoking curiosity for further study. The author is certainly successful on these counts." (217)
"McLuhan, in The Medium is the Massage , reminds us that 'Homer's Iliad was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece,' and that 'these Bardic songs were rhythmically organized with great formal mastery into metrical patterns which insured that everyone was psychologically attuned to memorization and easy recall.' McLuhan also reminds us of the communal basis of this highly patterned poetry: 'What the Greeks meant by "poetry" was radically different from what we mean by poetry. Their "poetic" expression was a product of a collective psyche and mind. The mimetic form, a technique that exploited rhythm, meter, and music, achieved the desired psychological response in the listener. Listeners could memorize with greater ease what was sung than what was said.' "These preliterate people, like all such people, lived in what McLuhan calls 'acoustic space,' which he describes as 'boundless, directionless, horizonless.' McLuhan argues that in such preliterate societies the ear dominates, and that only with the invention of a phonetic alphabet--with the subsequent need to string its sonic bits together into logical sequences - do the eye and visual space begin to dominate our perception and thought.'" (?)
"McLuhan presented his message in a medium that was 'pomo' before its time. . Another candidate for the 'Godfather of Cyberpunk." (18-19)
"Ong and McLuhan have argued that television and radio introduce 'secondary orality,' a recursion to non-print forms of language and an 'audile space' of cognition ( Orality and Literacy 135; Laws of Media 57). By analogy, hypertext and hypermedia seem likely to instigate a secondary literacy -'secondary' in that this approach to reading and writing includes a self-consciousness about the technological mediation of those acts, a sensitivity to the way texts-below-the-text constitute another order behind the visible. This secondary literacy involves both rhetoric and technics: to read at the hypotextual level is to confront (paragnostically) the design of the system; to write at this level is to reprogram, revising the work of the first maker. Thus this secondary literacy opens for its readers a 'cyberspace' in the truest sense of the word, meaning a place of command and control where the written word has the power to remake appearances. This space has always been accessible to the programming elite, to system operators like Clifford Stoll and shady operators like his hacker adversary. But Nelson's 2020 Vision puts a Silverstand in every commercial strip right next to McDonald's and Videoland. If Xanadu succeeds in re-awakening primary literacy as a mass phenomenon, there is reason to believe that it will inculcate secondary literacy as well." ( http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v001/1.3moulthrop.html )
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