From: listserver@pX1.stfx.ca Date sent: Fri, 26 May 1995 12:39:13 -0300 Send reply to: listserver@pX1.stfx.ca To: walterl@vesta.chch.planet.co.nz Copies to: gsanders@juliet.stfx.ca Subject: SUBSCRIBE MCLUHAN-L WALTER LOGEMAN You have been added to list mcluhan-l@listproc.stfx.ca. The system has recorded your address as walterl@vesta.chch.planet.co.nz and in order for your messages to get posted, you will have to send them from this address. If a message is ever rejected, please contact the list's owner: gsanders@juliet.stfx.ca Your initial password is 801502746. Please change it as soon as you can by issuing the following request to listserver@listproc.stfx.ca: set MCLUHAN-L password 801502746 new-password This system may accept Internet TCP/IP connections for processing of live requests, and the password will be used to give you subscriber privileges. For more information, send a 'help live' request to listserver@listproc.stfx.ca. All requests should be addressed to listserver@listproc.stfx.ca. ************************************* McLuhan Listserver. The Herbert Marshall McLuhan Foundation has established this listserver to act as an extension of McLuhan' s ideas, probes and suggestions. The McLuhan Probes ( http://www.mcluhan.ca/mcluhan/ ) are a mosaic of his thoughts on a wide range of subjects which suggest topics for discussion and research. This listserver can become a lively and coherent forum for many of the problems and perceptions that McLuhan raised. Although unmoderated, it will not be unobserved. It is our hope that it will become a resource for understanding media and for constructive collaboration. McLuhan's prescient remarks on the effects of media and especially on the development of the electronic environment are overlooked at our peril. Although he is currently endorsed by Wired, Lewis Lapham of Harpers, and a variety of others, there is little serious consideration given to his thought by the vast majority of thinkers, professors, writers, pundits, politicians. This has led to the "Toffler Effect"--the unwarranted admiration of minor futurists. How can people as smart as Negroponte enthusiastically drive their chariots of wire into the future? Recently Stuart Brand remarked that "The difference between computers and LSD is that computers keep getting better and LSD never got better at all". McLuhan's explanations of the violence in our streets and in our homes, the fugacity of political personalities, the tribalization of and fragmentation of America, the erosion of our institutions, our schools, our churches, our traditions are ignored. He wrote and spoke cogently on how the new media revise our sensibilities and ideas and give rise to the distressing and dangerous events cited above. Members of the Listserver are urged to contribute ideas, cognate news items, relevant essays that complement McLuhan's perceptions, your own feelings about how McLuhan's thought can be re-integrated into the present and his explanatory insights inserted into today's social discourse. Questions and queries about McLuhan's thoughts are welcome. This is not meant to be a cult following, but a critical and exploratory conjunction of notions and counter-probes. It might seem paradoxical to utilize the Internet to study media effects just when its own addictive properties are showing up. But possibly we can redeem the growing digital rage by a reflective investigation of its effects on ourselves and others. The Foundation, which has the world-wide electronic rights to McLuhan's work, intends to begin the electronic publishing of his work in the next six months. Suggestions as to topics and methods for conducting this Internet research into media effects are welcome. (The listserver is provided by St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish N.S. Canada B2G-2W5. Problems may be addressed to Gsanders@stfx.ca ) ************************************************************************ To subscribe, send an email to: Listserver@listproc.stfx.ca with one line and no subject as follows: Subscribe McLuhan-L George Sanderson Replace my name with yours when you send it. The spaces are important, but the capitalization is not. To post a message for all subscribers to see, send an email to: McLuhan-L@listproc.stfx.ca with a descriptive subject, the body of your message, and a signature at the end which lets us know who you are. N.B. There is no need to change the code number as suggested by the Listserver. The McLuhan Probes available at the web-site in Adobe font are re-printed here in plain font so that those who lack the requisite hardware can have easy access to this growing sequence. ************************************* McLuhan Probes Volume 1 Number 1 text-only Electric information is a world environment that illuminates all senses, mental and physical. Electric circuitry is an extension of the nervous system. The book is an extension of the eye. The eyes are also extended by such forms as print and microscope or telescope. The ear is extended simultaneously with the voice by telephone and radio and TV and either familiar means of communication. All senses and body organs get their extension by man-made means. Clothing is an extension of the skin. The wheel, an extension of the foot. There is nothing inherently impossible in the computer, or that type of technology, extending consciousness itself--as a universal environment. In the name of "progress" our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old. Notice, the electric surround of information that has tended to make man a superman at the same time reduce him to a pretty pitiable nobody by merging him with everybody. Any child is superhuman today--on the telephone or on any electric medium. The traditional human dimension hardly exists anymore. Because he has been extended. He now accepts such universal extension as his "natural" environment. Nature has disappeared and a new man-made "nature" has taken its place. "Numbed to death by booze and tranquilizers" is an average strategy for "keeping in touch" with a runaway world. Life at these speed obliges everyone to discover a new career for himself every ten years, a new job and even a totally new personality. So the young become intolerant; they become aware, through the speed of information, of all the knowledge that only adults were privy to in the past. Transmitted at the speed of light, all event on this planet are simultaneous, in the electric environment of information, all events are simultaneous. There is not time or space separating events. The satellite means, among other things, the end of the news. It can zero in on any part of the globe at any time and give you direct participation in whatever you want to see going on. The satellite environment has completely altered the organs of human perception and revealed the universal pollution. The medium is the message. To say that any technology or extension of man creates a new environment is a much better way of saying the medium is the message. This environment is always "invisible" and it's content is always old technology. There is nothing inherently impossible in the computer, or that type of technology, extending consciousness itself--as a universal environment. ************************************* McLuhan Probes Volume 1 Number 2 text-only We begin to think of mankind as the individual and of the private person as a merely historical memory. Nothing can hide everything is X-rayed. The electric light is pure information. Everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years. Nature has disappeared and a new man-made "nature" has taken its place. It wasn't until we put the planet inside a man-made environment of new clothing that we realized what a mess we had made with the old technological clothing. The satellite means, among other things, the end of "news". It can zero in on any part of the globe at any given time and give you direct participation in whatever you want to see going on. Renaissance man came to North America with gunpowder and printing, and he determined to conquer, or transform, or subdue nature. And in our literature and poetry we show nature, consistently, as the enemy of man. It's in flight, it's broken, and we're using new technology to support the old nature. We're now propping up nature in North America and rebuilding the old environment as naturally as possible. Any minute, trite bit of news acquires infinite potential at the speed of electricity. Anything becomes momentous at electric speeds. Man is translated into information, or an image. When man lives in an electric environment, his nature is transformed and his private identity is merged with the corporate whole. He becomes Mass Man. Mass Man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity. We broke it, smashed it to pieces. Now we're trying to put it back together again. We conquered nature, and it is no longer just an enemy, but a problem. Earlier when man approached nature, they tended to come to terms with it, got friendly with it, and adopted a rather ecological relationship with nature. In North America, only, we conquered nature. We have no choice but to anticipate the pattern of change itself. ************************************* McLuhan Probes Volume 1 Number 3 text-only Titled The McLuhan Probes: Acoustic Space Auditory space has no point of favoured focus. It's a sphere without fixed boundaries, space containing the thing. It is not pictorial space, boxed in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment. It has no fixed boundaries; it is indifferent to background. The eye focuses, pinpoints, abstracts, locating each object in physical space; against a background; the ear, however, favours sound from any direction. We hear equally well from right or left, front or back, above or below. If we lie down, it makes no difference, whereas in visual space the entire spectacle is altered. We can shut out the visual field by simply closing our eyes, but we are always triggered to respond to sound. [What Silence is To Acoustic Space] [Darkness Is to Visual Space] There are only interfaces and metamorphoses. There are no connections in resonant {acoustic} space. Scientists are still embalmed in the old visual space that is uniform, continuous and connected. Visual [space] as elucidated by euclidian geometry, has the basic characters of lineality, homogeneity, and stasis. These characteristics are not found in any of the other senses. On the other hand, acoustic space has the basic character of a sphere whose focus or centre is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere Today the entire human community is being translated into "auditory space", or into that "field of simultaneous relations" by electric broadcasting. *************************************