I'm been binging on Marshall McLuhan YouTubes, as all the knowledge graphs show he's going to continue popping up within the networks we care about. There's the University of Toronto connection for starters. We're already focusing on Coxeter and Hinton. Canadians play a big role in our story.
Going over the disembodied interviews, I see his avatar clarifying many matters. A primary driver in his case is irritation. He finds what the next or downline generations are doing, with the new media, is frequently jarring and unpleasant, and not just because "too loud" although that's certainly part of it. So in some interviews he explains why he maybe comes off as somewhat cranky.
Also, let's talk about his Global Village meme, not far at all from Spaceship Earth. He and Bucky were co-conspirators, that's already established. Wasn't McLuhan all pollyanna Small World After All, the way Bucky was, or was rumored to be? "Global Village" sounds so quaint, so pat, as if we're all supposed to get along with obnoxious neighbors. By what Show White magic?
On the contrary, explains McLuhan, a Global Village may be claustrophobic, like a Winesburg, Ohio which a read a long time ago. Tiny towns can get oppressive, as everybody knows everybody else's business. Secrets become hard to keep. Privacy is lacking. Gossip is rampant. That's a global village for you.
Reading McLuhan tends to revector (re-aim) what I consider to be the meaning of "tactile" in the sense of "visceral" in Synergetics, what Fuller hands over to "the Gibbisian" those vectorial degrees of freedom (visceral energy flows), those deltas around phase changes, around going between frozen, liquid, and gaseous states of being. One the other hand: "the Eulerian" which is the visio-conceptual.
McLuhan somewhat scrambles my senses such that TV becomes the aural-tribal-tactile side of the senses, the Gibbsian, whereas the reader of phonetic alphabets, with an imagination, is the visualizer, able to conjure mental imagery in a private theater driven by text. That imagery went to film, and then was taken in by all the channels and programming and network talk of the broadcast and cable stations, by way of radio in between.
McLuhan didn't live to see the internet take-off, but would have used that development to underline the same lesson: the next medium uses the previous as its raw material. Theater uses literature, which uses real life. Television uses the movies, which came from theater, and the internet uses television, as streams. The golden age of television is feeding into the power of point to point and a PWS that's fully personalizable. PWS = Personal Workspace in the GST namespace.
Television is "cool" but by that McLuhan didn't mean "non-hormonal". On the contrary, the 3rd parent reaches into our skulls and squeezes the endocrine system, gooses glands. The electronic media manage to scare up and harness veritable blobs of groupthink emotions. The "EST people" may have a better immune system (better antibodies) according the the Handbook.
