In my early 20's, when I first read McLuhan over a decade ago, I felt like I was let in on a huge, huge secret. So many lightning bolts of insight. I was stunned every chapter. It's like the man had a crystal ball. I still can't believe that Media Ecology isn't a mainstream field of study. It feels like something is very wrong with our world, the way McLuhan, Ong, Postman, and others have been so neglected. Please, folks, go read Understanding Media.
Marshall McLuhan was a such a prophetic voice: If Jordon Peterson could be introduced to his Marshall McLuhan Essentials, many lights will go on in the Word of God.
I had the same experience in my twenties. I picked it up at a used bookstore and it was almost creepy how applicable most everything he said was. I was also shocked about how relatively unreferenced or unknown he was in my critical theories courses as, to me, at least, his work is so relevant to so many of those subjects
I find that not a lot of people know about him and usually dismiss my explanation of his theories as self-evident, but I also find it important to engage with them to keep awareness of the global village rather than being blindly within it
McLuhan is incredibly underrated. He truly had groundbreaking revelations and because he did it in a playful way, he doesn’t get the respect he deserves. And doing it the way he did, reflects the medium he was communicating through
it reflects the genre of the medium he was communicating through, be it that the medium he was communicating through was a lot less flexible than tv is today.
One of the definitions of great is a lone voice predicting the future. Why.. because prediction is such a difficult accomplishment. McLuhan certainly did that. He was championed by the likes of Terrence McKenna; also a visionary. I am pleased that his contribution is being rediscovered. Thank you.
Excellent work, Professor. From McLuhan I have learned: We must interrogate the media that occupy our lives (from Plato and the printed word to Google and the portable phone.)
@@ArawnOfAnnwnhe literally said people will become tribal, and that tribal people are violent... Nobody will be thinking individually but take other people's (tribe mates) as their own thought lol. I think that's absolutely negative...
@@aka74459 An instance of violance can be neutrally or nonpartially conveyed from a distance by the use of pencils, typewriters and computors. This detachment from events forms McLuhan's idea about the written language
@@aka74459 He also portended the swelling of narcissism, which of course would be part and parcel with the tribally violent mass-mind of the technological village. People are in constant need of validation and belonging in this metaverse because they give all of themselves to it without cultivating any interior identity
21:15 when he says privacy is the result of an architecture , I instantly think of "cars" and am reminded of micheal hankes first film , the seventh continent and all those phenomenal scenes when the family experiences the world in car ; sealed off from the world the are being washed in a carwash , they observe a car accident as if they are watching a movie... that's insane
McLuhan did predict the internet in his book The Global Village. Which is a bit concerning because Yuval Harari n his book Homo Deus said nobody predicted the internet in a small paragraph where he uses the phrase “ The Global Village”. A little bit suspicious for me coming from an apparent heightened intellect, who surely could not have missed McLuhans work.
@@archetypesmith9435We cannot underestimate the Hybris of elite-intellectuals. Look at the contemporary critics of McLuhan in the first clip of this video essay-the elite intellectuals are not only wrong very often, they quickly become obsolete, and even refuted within a few years (i.e. Fukuyama.)
This is so good. Thank you! I discovered Marshall's ideas through the work of Walter Ong and the book Amusing Ourselves to Death. I was trying to learn about the differences between orality and literacy and applying these concepts t to the world of music improvisation.
Marshall McLuhan's genius comes from his dedication and honesty. Another important book of his is "Gutemberg's Galaxy". There's also a very good lecture by Tom Wolfe about McLuhan here on RUclips. Wolfe was McLuhan's friend and makes interesting observations about the Canadian thinker.
I read McLuhan at the time, but at Oxford there was no place for his views. Nor for Barthes or Baudrillard! He is so right about the rear-view mirror! Today we can say "Suburbia , and rural America, lives in Yellowstone-land" for those who never saw Bonanza! Or JAG, or Blue Bloods! That comforting place where morality and justice prevail. McLuhan was the only one in the early 1960s talking like this, he saw the coming communications age and how it shapes 'tribes' of identity.
McLuhan has expressed that his primary influence was Lewis Mumford (whom was close to the era in which Spengler was writing.) I think the correlations, and/or overlap between early writers on technology (Spengler, Heidegger, Ellul, Mumford) are evident in that each thinker was aware of the amazing advances technology had created for humankind (not only in the 20th century), but they also made efforts to trace the genealogy of Technics, and highlight its destructive power.
The comparison really works for me. Like Zizek, he was sneered at for talking to popular audiences about things in the world. It's interesting how long it's been that this is the fastest way to get banned from anglophone philosophy departments.
@@ArawnOfAnnwn To start, McCarthyism and its legacy, and the connection between the science wars and the analytic philosophy establishment. All of these sought to depoliticize philosophy in their own ways, which, of course, was a deeply political/ideological objective. If you want to think about something like gender, you could _maybe_ get to do it in a literature or gender studies department, and leave the real philosophy to people who understand it's about math and propositional logic and none of that annoying human stuff. Philosophy is and could only ever be a handmaiden of the sciences. That's a common refrain. In this, philosophy, you could at least argue, defanged itself. This isn't to say it's only happened in the English-speaking or analytic philosophy world (which I don't mean to call totally reactionary or stupid or anything), but that banning cultural involvement from philosophers (or demanding cultural cloistering) has been more of an explicit aim than an epiphenomenal result of post-WW2 anglophone philosophical culture. There's also been some opening up in the 21st century. There are many factors that could be argued to have had the same impact in continental Europe as well (I can't speak to much of the world beyond that), but I don't think that story has so much cancellation, culture war or (self-)censorship. Perhaps more overspecialization and dejection.
Hello Professor! Quick question: was the Georg in the very first and very last seconds of the video the real you? Before and after genuinely pretending to be a RUclips profile? Or did you just simulate authenticity? This is messing with my head.
Another fantastic video in this series. Really looking forward to you answer about the Spectacle. I would love to hear you perspective on profilicity strategies in the context of Richard Rorty's Ironism. He seems to be providing a strategy for humbly interacting with the profiles of others while contingently accepting your own when he describes the Ironist as: 1. She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; 2. She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; 3. Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Thanks again!
I went to design college in the 1990s and unfortunately in the theory classes they taught Postmodernism derived from French intellectuals which was very leftist and critical in nature. It was interesting but not very supportive of learning how to create commercially viable design the way it tried to 'Deconstruct' everything. I only discovered McLuhan after leaving college and loved the way he was fascinated by the relationship between technology and man. A much more inspiring approach. I have no idea why McLuhan was not taught more in the design education system.
2:40 that's one of my favorite Woody Allen, childhood memory, movie scenes but I had no idea who that was until today. Prof, your videos are so fun and understandable! Thank you!
Other than Byung-Chul Han and maybe Rene Girard I know of no other intellectual whose model of today fits so snugly with the actual experience of living atm as prof. Moeller's. Although a shame, it's perhaps inevitable that this kind of content is fairly niche and out of reach to the mainstream, but it could do much for people's sanity and sense making, much more than the self help industry that always oversells and underdelivers on it's promises. I hope these ideas and concepts somehow trickle down the cultural totem pole more abundantly (like a TV show or something), it would be a revelation.
McLuhan was scarily ahead of his time! I'd also say his approach to regard technology as primary, and regard humans and media as mutually shaping each other has its similarity with the early writings of Marx.
He used those terms in the sense of US English slang. Examples are necessary here. “Cold, cool, chill” suggests engagement, where McLuhan attributes the term “Hot” to media where you’re detached and merely observing. I wager your confusion might be that the opposite designations make more sense intuitively. Involved media should be “Hot” and detached as “Cold.” Yet modern communications reverse this. McLuhan was illustrating this then. Today, when my friends want to hang out they tell me they are “Chilling.” That is my cue to engage with them. Yet, when i state an observation conclusively, it is a “Hot Take.” I am not open to engagement other than debate. And even in debate, discussing different but conclusive points is a “Heated debate.” It’s as if the intuitions are reversed , with electronic communication somehow doing the inversion. I could go on as I am currently reading through his work, but hopefully this might have clarified things a bit.
i'm sure this is as good as this ruclips.net/video/9jWHiueK-Uk/видео.html bottom line on both, and i'm sure this fella is a pragmatic charismator, bottom line with mcluhan, STUDY THE EF-FECTS of the innovation, not necessarily, the innovation, the sub genius is better than the genius
Identity shaped by technology used - post-humanism. Identity contingent, not essential. Identity technologies People find comfort in old technologies while using new technologies perhaps but also find comfort in the old identity technologies Book inner world, 'authentic', individual. Now everyone connected, making a tribe, more about thinking about the group, shaping identitiy in communication loops. 1) no privacy (rear view image) 2) mutial surveillance, constant feeback
It is interesting to see that this video didn't get much attention compared to other videos of this channel. Most probably it is because this video is showing the real mirror to the spectators. Nobody likes their true face, so it seems!
Awesome summation (and a great channel over-all - thanks for doing this). Maybe covering "media archeology" thinkers like Friedrich Kittler would be interesting as a follow-up(?).
You're closing warning is opaque, to me at least. It reads more like a confession. You made this video to attract my attention and to promote this channel. If the platform you are using is designed to be addictive and to mine my data for profit, then you're advancing the addiction and the profit mining by producing the video. This seems to be a game of chicken. Do you stop producing, or do I stop watching? Or do we continue to respectively serve and take the poison with the medicine? Is this the vortex?
McLuhan wasn't an incoherent theorist as stated here, because he wasnt a theorist at all, and neither was he political he is way too perceptive to be indulging in ctafting concepts. He is a seer, who could inhabit the center of a paradox and probe in both directions. He is not telling us what to think about anything but is an example of really getting to know something.
Yes Derrida just pushes M.M. to the conclusion of no privacy no author no responsibility. At the end of "Signature Event Context" he claims he has eliminated J. L. Austin's immediacy in intention agent purpose in speech act for the mediated notion of writing. The speech is really in the same boat as writing of intentionless systems of language as written. This deconstruction of the speech writing distinction and privileging of speech as immediate owes a lot to Heidegger's "destruction", but then destroys its condition of possibility of presence and Dasein etc. Heidegger in his work on Technology and art. this guys account through is tendentious against tradition in his lecture. in analytical philosophy from Wittgenstein it is confusing how we learn first Lange with mum and dad in our home with how we learn a second one with a teacher in a class room. they want to make all the raising of children in a culture, into being like a university lecture on a culture. To sublate (hegel) the private domestic world into public schools. as if i was potty trained by listening to a lecture on the history of the toilet as part of a course on the history of parents and family and the domestic institution of the home/house/24 hour public day care authority. This is necessary for the project of globalisation. Human capital efficiency and planetary justice.
Thank you for all this contents, very precise and clear! Would you consider to make an episode about William Burroughs and Brion Gysin new media theories? I mean, the cut-ups theory and the Dreamachine (1959), and published books like "The Third Mind" (1977), "The Electronic Revolution" (1970), Gysin's "Permutation Poems" (1960) or the Nova Trilogy: "The Soft Machine (1961), "The Ticket That Exploded" (1962) and "Nova Express" (1964), that derived from the "The Word Hoard" manuscripts written by Burroughs between 1954 and 1958. I think it's necessary to cross their thought ideas and concepts, for instance with Baudrillard, McLuhan, Debord, Chomsky or Foucault.
guess i got caught in the "maelstrom" this time. So curious about that "punky" song at the end of your highly informative videos, anyone out there who can help me?
In relation to the global village / privacy... Yes, it's obvious that we are losing privacy. And I think it's good, as transparency forces our inner world to be aligned with our representation. That, of course, makes us profilic, as it's not quite possible to present ourselves authentically under such strong social pressure created by electronic media and especially the Internet. However, since the pandemic and significant increase of working from home and reduced traveling in general, it's now different in relation to privacy than it was before. While we are actively curating our public personas, we could be living very different lives privately. It was true even before as the Internet in the current, developed form (cf. "On the Internet nobody knows if you are a cat"), although it was much more about internet-specific culture before 2020, as most people used the Internet, not lived on the Internet. It's different nowadays. It is possible to have a private persona (or private personas), as well. Because, if we compare the pre-Internet way of socializing to the way of socializing nowadays, it's about going to a pub to socialize vs playing an internet game or commenting on a RUclips video to socialize. And that creates a physical barrier, which actually increases privacy. In other words, we are becoming more connected and losing our privacy, but just as long as it's about our social interactions. It's completely different in the personal sphere, even if it's about our own computer, even it's about using the internet, as marketing companies, like Google, care about us spending money (i.e. they care about our social functions), not about our private lives. And the increasing lack of necessity to interact with others at the same place and time enforces that trend. That dynamic is interesting, as I think that we already feel the consequences in the form of various irrational behavior during the past three years. From the public, social perspective, we've been forced even stronger to conform with the social norms, but our private space has become even more private. Consequently, there should be a bridge between increasingly dissonant relations between our private and social lives. That's not working well if a person is authentic and wants to keep their identity monolithic. Thus irrational behavior. But it's also interesting to explore how those trends are going to affect the future. Profilicity has been created in the pre-Internet era and limiting privacy, as the only practical way to socialize included our bodily presence at the places where people gather (we can now fulfill most of our social needs with Facebook, RUclips, dating apps etc.). It's different now. It's like the time when modernism was in its zenith during the first decades after WWII, exactly when McLuhan was in his own zenith. Something different appeared on the basis of the previous technological developments.
McLuhan to became a central focus to me sometime after graduated in English in 1964. He challenged me to rethink much of what I took for granted, much of my rear view mirror driven thought and behaviour. To look into what I was not aware of very differently from Jung and Freud’s approaches. I used his ideas in teaching media always suggesting that srudents notice form. So I would play them the Eagles line “It’s the same old murder movie, we just call it the news.” I also tried to share the idea of a media environment and how we tended to less direct experience and more mediated spaces created by others. Vortex of energy may have been visionary when McLuhan said it, but now it directly visible. For example, in public transit where we see almost everyone being sucked into the vortex of the phones they are each holding in their hands. I agree McLuhan is not a consistent theorist but rather, like Jung by the way, a thinker who constantly circumambulates his subject bringing up what comes immediately to him.
I think the better word compare to vortex is what the professor Molloer previously described: secondary order observation. the difference is that the observation is now not only being filtered by the 2nd observer, but also by the media, the editor of the media and also capitalist/profit oriented media owner.
"We shape our tools..." did pop up in an official McLuhan publication -- it was "The Medium is the Massage" audiobook, at the 6 : 30 mark. McLuhan himself, however did not say the line.
Carefree do you still over references for your video?? I always am hungry to read some of the shorter PDF's shown in the video--but I don't see them in the description!
Hi Hans-Georg, I noticed that you will be doing a video on Niklas Luhmann. Please could you talk about whether you think the code of romantic love that Luhmann described in his book "Love as Passion: the Codification of Intimacy" is still the same today, or has love changed again in the age of profilicity? Thanks.
So is Bonanza land like, They act like a cow boy, talk like a coy boy, they dress like a coy boy, and we identifying them as cow boys with authentic cow boy traits, with cow boy rules making it possible to interlock identity to the cow boy symbols , or am I being a stupid?
I'm very grateful for this series on media studies. I learned about all these thinkers years ago during my bachelor's degree, but I forgot some things and was probably too immature/lazy to really appreciate other aspects of their work. This really is a fantastic refresher as well as a trip down memory lane. And last but not least an inspiration to engage with the theories again in a new way. Thanks Prof. Moeller and everyone involved with producing these videos!
Language, meaning and self-narrative based on language and meaning is the most prolific and most influentual technology. Every other thing is only a plugin.
i think successor to this conclusion is beaudrillard but as thinking about american based style of media village mcluhan must be so much influencial yet baudrillard provides a bigger picture globally in my opinion.
Would you please do a video on Michael Parenti, and his analysis of media. Really wonderful figure (in my view) with a lot to contribute, but usually overlooked. Thanks!
1) The Medium is the Message 6:20 2) We Shape oure Tools and Thereafter They Shape Us 9:00 3) The Rear-view Mirror 11:11 4) The Global Village 17:00 5) The Voretex of Energie 23:02
Very interesting, thank you. Could anyone elaborate the distinction between materialism and technologism? This caught my attention, would the washing machine freeing up women and enabling them to move into the workforce and gaining more equal rights be a technologist or materialist interpretation?
These terms can be used in different ways. I used "materialist" here in a Marxist sense of identifying economic and sociopolitical structures constituting the "mode of production" as a sort of "root cause" for everything else. I used "technologist" in the sense of regarding technology as such a "root cause. Accordingly, your example would be "technologist" because a technological innovation (washing machines) is regarded as the cause of economic (women join the work force) and sociopolitical (woman gain more equal rights) change.
In my early 20's, when I first read McLuhan over a decade ago, I felt like I was let in on a huge, huge secret. So many lightning bolts of insight. I was stunned every chapter. It's like the man had a crystal ball. I still can't believe that Media Ecology isn't a mainstream field of study. It feels like something is very wrong with our world, the way McLuhan, Ong, Postman, and others have been so neglected. Please, folks, go read Understanding Media.
I will - thank you for the lead. 🖖
Marshall McLuhan was a such a prophetic voice: If Jordon Peterson could be introduced to his Marshall McLuhan Essentials, many lights will go on in the Word of God.
thanks for your recommendation!!
I had the same experience in my twenties. I picked it up at a used bookstore and it was almost creepy how applicable most everything he said was. I was also shocked about how relatively unreferenced or unknown he was in my critical theories courses as, to me, at least, his work is so relevant to so many of those subjects
@Jordan M “I still can’t believe that Media Ecology isn’t a mainstream field of study”.😂😂
Well buddy, there is a good reason that it isn’t.
"I think Marshall McLuhan's work will ultimately be forgotten," says completely forgotten academic.
Precisely why I watch. Seems we are incapable of remembering something without perverting it fiercely.
I had forgotten about him 😅
However he is worth remembering.
Marshall McWhat???
@@penelopegreeneoh man, we missed “Mcl-who-an”?
I find that not a lot of people know about him and usually dismiss my explanation of his theories as self-evident, but I also find it important to engage with them to keep awareness of the global village rather than being blindly within it
McLuhan is incredibly underrated. He truly had groundbreaking revelations and because he did it in a playful way, he doesn’t get the respect he deserves. And doing it the way he did, reflects the medium he was communicating through
it reflects the genre of the medium he was communicating through, be it that the medium he was communicating through was a lot less flexible than tv is today.
One of the definitions of great is a lone voice predicting the future. Why.. because prediction is such a difficult accomplishment. McLuhan certainly did that. He was championed by the likes of Terrence McKenna; also a visionary. I am pleased that his contribution is being rediscovered. Thank you.
I discovered McLuhan through listening to McKenna.
Excellent work, Professor.
From McLuhan I have learned: We must interrogate the media that occupy our lives (from Plato and the printed word to Google and the portable phone.)
I would have continued to study philosophy in university if I had encountered a teacher like yourself.
Everything he described has happened. We are living in this global tech nightmare, a collective hallucination and a crazy world.
He didn't describe it as a nightmare. He simply said it's happening, he didn't take a stance on whether it was good or bad.
@@ArawnOfAnnwn Our modern world has handicapped our humanity, it has eliminated the collective. There is nothing great about this.
@@ArawnOfAnnwnhe literally said people will become tribal, and that tribal people are violent... Nobody will be thinking individually but take other people's (tribe mates) as their own thought lol. I think that's absolutely negative...
@@aka74459 An instance of violance can be neutrally or nonpartially conveyed from a distance by the use of pencils, typewriters and computors. This detachment from events forms McLuhan's idea about the written language
@@aka74459 He also portended the swelling of narcissism, which of course would be part and parcel with the tribally violent mass-mind of the technological village. People are in constant need of validation and belonging in this metaverse because they give all of themselves to it without cultivating any interior identity
21:15 when he says privacy is the result of an architecture , I instantly think of "cars" and am reminded of micheal hankes first film , the seventh continent and all those phenomenal scenes when the family experiences the world in car ; sealed off from the world the are being washed in a carwash , they observe a car accident as if they are watching a movie... that's insane
Thanks for making that point about privacy. It is a shifting concept and can be based on technology and ownership.
you look good
“Staring at the world through my rear view.” - Tupac Shakur
I'd say he's a step beyond the Zizek. Didn't he basically predict the internet?
McLuhan did predict the internet in his book The Global Village. Which is a bit concerning because Yuval Harari n his book Homo Deus said nobody predicted the internet in a small paragraph where he uses the phrase “ The Global Village”.
A little bit suspicious for me coming from an apparent heightened intellect, who surely could not have missed McLuhans work.
@@archetypesmith9435We cannot underestimate the Hybris of elite-intellectuals. Look at the contemporary critics of McLuhan in the first clip of this video essay-the elite intellectuals are not only wrong very often, they quickly become obsolete, and even refuted within a few years (i.e. Fukuyama.)
This is so good. Thank you! I discovered Marshall's ideas through the work of Walter Ong and the book Amusing Ourselves to Death. I was trying to learn about the differences between orality and literacy and applying these concepts t to the world of music improvisation.
I love the hidden Marshall McLuhan joke in the Sopranos😅
Amazing Work, I would love to see and episode on Jacque Lacan!
...
(Or even Zizek!)
Lacan is tolerable but Zizek is trash. Dude should try Agamben if he wants to be cutting edge
Marshall McLuhan's genius comes from his dedication and honesty. Another important book of his is "Gutemberg's Galaxy". There's also a very good lecture by Tom Wolfe about McLuhan here on RUclips. Wolfe was McLuhan's friend and makes interesting observations about the Canadian thinker.
I read McLuhan at the time, but at Oxford there was no place for his views.
Nor for Barthes or Baudrillard! He is so right about the rear-view mirror!
Today we can say "Suburbia , and rural America, lives in Yellowstone-land"
for those who never saw Bonanza! Or JAG, or Blue Bloods!
That comforting place where morality and justice prevail.
McLuhan was the only one in the early 1960s talking like this, he saw the coming
communications age and how it shapes 'tribes' of identity.
Man and Technic re hash, I guess... Did he steel Spangler work?!
McLuhan has expressed that his primary influence was Lewis Mumford (whom was close to the era in which Spengler was writing.) I think the correlations, and/or overlap between early writers on technology (Spengler, Heidegger, Ellul, Mumford) are evident in that each thinker was aware of the amazing advances technology had created for humankind (not only in the 20th century), but they also made efforts to trace the genealogy of Technics, and highlight its destructive power.
The comparison really works for me. Like Zizek, he was sneered at for talking to popular audiences about things in the world. It's interesting how long it's been that this is the fastest way to get banned from anglophone philosophy departments.
Many philosophers would prefer not to end up like Socrates.
I've never made the comparison myself, but the more I think about it, the more I see the similarity. Like Zizek, McLuhan was very fond of jokes.
Why do you mention this as being a feature of particularly anglophone philosophy departments specifically?
@@ArawnOfAnnwn To start, McCarthyism and its legacy, and the connection between the science wars and the analytic philosophy establishment. All of these sought to depoliticize philosophy in their own ways, which, of course, was a deeply political/ideological objective. If you want to think about something like gender, you could _maybe_ get to do it in a literature or gender studies department, and leave the real philosophy to people who understand it's about math and propositional logic and none of that annoying human stuff. Philosophy is and could only ever be a handmaiden of the sciences. That's a common refrain. In this, philosophy, you could at least argue, defanged itself.
This isn't to say it's only happened in the English-speaking or analytic philosophy world (which I don't mean to call totally reactionary or stupid or anything), but that banning cultural involvement from philosophers (or demanding cultural cloistering) has been more of an explicit aim than an epiphenomenal result of post-WW2 anglophone philosophical culture. There's also been some opening up in the 21st century. There are many factors that could be argued to have had the same impact in continental Europe as well (I can't speak to much of the world beyond that), but I don't think that story has so much cancellation, culture war or (self-)censorship. Perhaps more overspecialization and dejection.
Hello Professor! Quick question: was the Georg in the very first and very last seconds of the video the real you? Before and after genuinely pretending to be a RUclips profile? Or did you just simulate authenticity? This is messing with my head.
Another fantastic video in this series. Really looking forward to you answer about the Spectacle. I would love to hear you perspective on profilicity strategies in the context of Richard Rorty's Ironism. He seems to be providing a strategy for humbly interacting with the profiles of others while contingently accepting your own when he describes the Ironist as:
1. She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered;
2. She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts;
3. Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.
Thanks again!
I went to design college in the 1990s and unfortunately in the theory classes they taught Postmodernism derived from French intellectuals which was very leftist and critical in nature. It was interesting but not very supportive of learning how to create commercially viable design the way it tried to 'Deconstruct' everything.
I only discovered McLuhan after leaving college and loved the way he was fascinated by the relationship between technology and man. A much more inspiring approach.
I have no idea why McLuhan was not taught more in the design education system.
He embarrassed academics and some had an axe to grind against him.
2:40 that's one of my favorite Woody Allen, childhood memory, movie scenes but I had no idea who that was until today. Prof, your videos are so fun and understandable! Thank you!
so strange, I watched the Sopranos episode with the Marshall McLuhan joke exactly when this was uploaded...
اووفیییی
Don't see the need to compare the too. Sorry, I can't stand slavoj
Other than Byung-Chul Han and maybe Rene Girard I know of no other intellectual whose model of today fits so snugly with the actual experience of living atm as prof. Moeller's. Although a shame, it's perhaps inevitable that this kind of content is fairly niche and out of reach to the mainstream, but it could do much for people's sanity and sense making, much more than the self help industry that always oversells and underdelivers on it's promises. I hope these ideas and concepts somehow trickle down the cultural totem pole more abundantly (like a TV show or something), it would be a revelation.
Excellent presenttion! Very well thought out.
I just recently bought Understanding Media by McLuhan - timing of this vide couldn't have been better!
Have fun! One of the most interesting books I've ever read.
the medium is the massage
the middle is a caress
The Medium is the Massage.
The Medium is the Mass-Age.
The Medium is the Message.
The Medium is the Mess-Age.
Ibsen points part of this in Enemy of the people... the leftovers of privacy.
You have a branded T-shirt now.
Profilicity t-shirt NOICE
McLuhan was scarily ahead of his time! I'd also say his approach to regard technology as primary, and regard humans and media as mutually shaping each other has its similarity with the early writings of Marx.
Sometimes McLuhan would refer to media at "hot" media or "cold" media. I've never been able to understand this distinction and what he meant by it.
He used those terms in the sense of US English slang. Examples are necessary here. “Cold, cool, chill” suggests engagement, where McLuhan attributes the term “Hot” to media where you’re detached and merely observing.
I wager your confusion might be that the opposite designations make more sense intuitively. Involved media should be “Hot” and detached as “Cold.” Yet modern communications reverse this. McLuhan was illustrating this then. Today, when my friends want to hang out they tell me they are “Chilling.” That is my cue to engage with them. Yet, when i state an observation conclusively, it is a “Hot Take.” I am not open to engagement other than debate. And even in debate, discussing different but conclusive points is a “Heated debate.”
It’s as if the intuitions are reversed , with electronic communication somehow doing the inversion. I could go on as I am currently reading through his work, but hopefully this might have clarified things a bit.
i'm sure this is as good as this ruclips.net/video/9jWHiueK-Uk/видео.html bottom line on both, and i'm sure this fella is a pragmatic charismator, bottom line with mcluhan, STUDY THE EF-FECTS of the innovation, not necessarily, the innovation, the sub genius is better than the genius
Identity shaped by technology used - post-humanism. Identity contingent, not essential. Identity technologies
People find comfort in old technologies while using new technologies perhaps but also find comfort in the old identity technologies
Book inner world, 'authentic', individual. Now everyone connected, making a tribe, more about thinking about the group, shaping identitiy in communication loops. 1) no privacy (rear view image) 2) mutial surveillance, constant feeback
It is interesting to see that this video didn't get much attention compared to other videos of this channel. Most probably it is because this video is showing the real mirror to the spectators. Nobody likes their true face, so it seems!
Awesome summation (and a great channel over-all - thanks for doing this).
Maybe covering "media archeology" thinkers like Friedrich Kittler
would be interesting as a follow-up(?).
You're closing warning is opaque, to me at least. It reads more like a confession. You made this video to attract my attention and to promote this channel. If the platform you are using is designed to be addictive and to mine my data for profit, then you're advancing the addiction and the profit mining by producing the video. This seems to be a game of chicken. Do you stop producing, or do I stop watching? Or do we continue to respectively serve and take the poison with the medicine? Is this the vortex?
McLuhan wasn't an incoherent theorist as stated here, because he wasnt a theorist at all, and neither was he political he is way too perceptive to be indulging in ctafting concepts.
He is a seer, who could inhabit the center of a paradox and probe in both directions. He is not telling us what to think about anything but is an example of really getting to know something.
Bonanzaland ~ MAGAland. Rearview mirror with a distortion.
This is great. I heard about McLuhan from Chris Cox, the chief product officer at Meta
No matter how underrated he was he is indispensable in understanding media😅
M.M., from what I have read, seems to be repeating a lot of German insights for American audiences. Think Nietzsche, Heidegger, Spengler.
Yes Derrida just pushes M.M. to the conclusion of no privacy no author no responsibility. At the end of "Signature Event Context" he claims he has eliminated J. L. Austin's immediacy in intention agent purpose in speech act for the mediated notion of writing. The speech is really in the same boat as writing of intentionless systems of language as written. This deconstruction of the speech writing distinction and privileging of speech as immediate owes a lot to Heidegger's "destruction", but then destroys its condition of possibility of presence and Dasein etc. Heidegger in his work on Technology and art. this guys account through is tendentious against tradition in his lecture. in analytical philosophy from Wittgenstein it is confusing how we learn first Lange with mum and dad in our home with how we learn a second one with a teacher in a class room. they want to make all the raising of children in a culture, into being like a university lecture on a culture. To sublate (hegel) the private domestic world into public schools. as if i was potty trained by listening to a lecture on the history of the toilet as part of a course on the history of parents and family and the domestic institution of the home/house/24 hour public day care authority. This is necessary for the project of globalisation. Human capital efficiency and planetary justice.
In the Gutenberg Galaxy there are brief mentions of Husserl and Heidegger.
Why did you twinkify McLuhan in the thumbnail?
Thank you for all this contents, very precise and clear! Would you consider to make an episode about William Burroughs and Brion Gysin new media theories? I mean, the cut-ups theory and the Dreamachine (1959), and published books like "The Third Mind" (1977), "The Electronic Revolution" (1970), Gysin's "Permutation Poems" (1960) or the Nova Trilogy: "The Soft Machine (1961), "The Ticket That Exploded" (1962) and "Nova Express" (1964), that derived from the "The Word Hoard" manuscripts written by Burroughs between 1954 and 1958. I think it's necessary to cross their thought ideas and concepts, for instance with Baudrillard, McLuhan, Debord, Chomsky or Foucault.
I 2nd this recomendation. Burroughs is an important voice/"component". Language as a virus/technology and its morphogenic abilities.⚡🔥💧⏳🛰🎶
McLuhan had a better stylist.
McLuhan is clear than Zizek. Zizek babbles!
21:00 that is genius . Never thought of that . We even invented " privacy " daaaaaaaamn
let´s just appreciate that the opening credits for "Bonanza" was play in his totality
Some commentators have said that Star Trek is a Western
The Frontier etc etc
You're a lifesaver, thanks a lot!
20:12 if only the web instituted that kind of feedback
AY WHEN YOUR MERCH BE POPIN I NEED IT
so excited to see this, mcluhan doesnt get enough recognition
Have you spoken to Bob Dobbs yet?
guess i got caught in the "maelstrom" this time. So curious about that "punky" song at the end of your highly informative videos, anyone out there who can help me?
ruclips.net/video/Koq-G8Ose4k/видео.html
Was McLuhan influenced (or even aware of) Fritz Heider's Thing/Medium distinction?
In relation to the global village / privacy...
Yes, it's obvious that we are losing privacy. And I think it's good, as transparency forces our inner world to be aligned with our representation. That, of course, makes us profilic, as it's not quite possible to present ourselves authentically under such strong social pressure created by electronic media and especially the Internet.
However, since the pandemic and significant increase of working from home and reduced traveling in general, it's now different in relation to privacy than it was before.
While we are actively curating our public personas, we could be living very different lives privately. It was true even before as the Internet in the current, developed form (cf. "On the Internet nobody knows if you are a cat"), although it was much more about internet-specific culture before 2020, as most people used the Internet, not lived on the Internet.
It's different nowadays. It is possible to have a private persona (or private personas), as well.
Because, if we compare the pre-Internet way of socializing to the way of socializing nowadays, it's about going to a pub to socialize vs playing an internet game or commenting on a RUclips video to socialize. And that creates a physical barrier, which actually increases privacy.
In other words, we are becoming more connected and losing our privacy, but just as long as it's about our social interactions. It's completely different in the personal sphere, even if it's about our own computer, even it's about using the internet, as marketing companies, like Google, care about us spending money (i.e. they care about our social functions), not about our private lives. And the increasing lack of necessity to interact with others at the same place and time enforces that trend.
That dynamic is interesting, as I think that we already feel the consequences in the form of various irrational behavior during the past three years. From the public, social perspective, we've been forced even stronger to conform with the social norms, but our private space has become even more private. Consequently, there should be a bridge between increasingly dissonant relations between our private and social lives. That's not working well if a person is authentic and wants to keep their identity monolithic. Thus irrational behavior.
But it's also interesting to explore how those trends are going to affect the future. Profilicity has been created in the pre-Internet era and limiting privacy, as the only practical way to socialize included our bodily presence at the places where people gather (we can now fulfill most of our social needs with Facebook, RUclips, dating apps etc.). It's different now.
It's like the time when modernism was in its zenith during the first decades after WWII, exactly when McLuhan was in his own zenith. Something different appeared on the basis of the previous technological developments.
Where can we buy the t-shirt?
McLuhan to became a central focus to me sometime after graduated in English in 1964. He challenged me to rethink much of what I took for granted, much of my rear view mirror driven thought and behaviour. To look into what I was not aware of very differently from Jung and Freud’s approaches. I used his ideas in teaching media always suggesting that srudents notice form. So I would play them the Eagles line “It’s the same old murder movie, we just call it the news.” I also tried to share the idea of a media environment and how we tended to less direct experience and more mediated spaces created by others. Vortex of energy may have been visionary when McLuhan said it, but now it directly visible. For example, in public transit where we see almost everyone being sucked into the vortex of the phones they are each holding in their hands. I agree McLuhan is not a consistent theorist but rather, like Jung by the way, a thinker who constantly circumambulates his subject bringing up what comes immediately to him.
I think the better word compare to vortex is what the professor Molloer previously described: secondary order observation.
the difference is that the observation is now not only being filtered by the 2nd observer, but also by the media, the editor of the media and also capitalist/profit oriented media owner.
"We shape our tools..." did pop up in an official McLuhan publication -- it was "The Medium is the Massage" audiobook, at the 6 : 30 mark. McLuhan himself, however did not say the line.
Is Prof. Moeller selling tees?
@Carefree Wandering - Can you do something on your countryman, Friedrich 'Driving the Human out of Humanism' Kittler?
Carefree do you still over references for your video?? I always am hungry to read some of the shorter PDF's shown in the video--but I don't see them in the description!
He saw… He bloody oath Saw.
Hi Hans-Georg, I noticed that you will be doing a video on Niklas Luhmann. Please could you talk about whether you think the code of romantic love that Luhmann described in his book "Love as Passion: the Codification of Intimacy" is still the same today, or has love changed again in the age of profilicity? Thanks.
I NEED THAT TSHIRT
damn
So is Bonanza land like, They act like a cow boy, talk like a coy boy, they dress like a coy boy, and we identifying them as cow boys with authentic cow boy traits, with cow boy rules making it possible to interlock identity to the cow boy symbols , or am I being a stupid?
I'm very grateful for this series on media studies. I learned about all these thinkers years ago during my bachelor's degree, but I forgot some things and was probably too immature/lazy to really appreciate other aspects of their work. This really is a fantastic refresher as well as a trip down memory lane. And last but not least an inspiration to engage with the theories again in a new way. Thanks Prof. Moeller and everyone involved with producing these videos!
This video was ☑shaping
Language, meaning and self-narrative based on language and meaning is the most prolific and most influentual technology. Every other thing is only a plugin.
this was a really good video thank you! marshall m is kind of annoying but kind of awesome.. do RAOUL VANAGEIM next ❤
i think successor to this conclusion is beaudrillard but as thinking about american based style of media village mcluhan must be so much influencial yet baudrillard provides a bigger picture globally in my opinion.
What an interesting and intellectually arresting study you have explored here. Well Done!
McLuhan is great- extensions and amputations - for instance -medieval reading was out loud and through stained glass - different experiences from us
Would you please do a video on Michael Parenti, and his analysis of media. Really wonderful figure (in my view) with a lot to contribute, but usually overlooked. Thanks!
I was enlightened by McLean in the 60s.
Today Digital is extension of our brain
What is surprising about the rear-view mirror it's the fact that we can even be looking at something that we have never experienced.
Warning at the end is so spot on! Well spoken and timely presentation. Thanks for producing and sharing.
He ever, not tribal? Maybe at some point it’s just more obvious than at other points?
Impressive how he predicted this new tribalism 😮😮
Ever seen Videodrome by cronenberg ? Or benny's video by hanke ?
Meme philosophy
1) The Medium is the Message 6:20
2) We Shape oure Tools and Thereafter They Shape Us 9:00
3) The Rear-view Mirror 11:11
4) The Global Village 17:00
5) The Voretex of Energie 23:02
Dear Hans-George Thank you for this video. Its really great and beautiful made!!! Hope to se you soon again at CBS
Hi Niels, thanks for your comment--just saw it. Hope to be back at CBS one day 😀
Do you mean “profilicity” or “polificity”?
You are a wonderful explainer - and spannxxx!!!
yes v good 👍
как раз недавно хотел разобраться с идеей "medium is the message" и вот те нате!
The medium is the message. Marshall McLuhan 🎯
"A world of made is not a world of born."
Very interesting, thank you.
Could anyone elaborate the distinction between materialism and technologism? This caught my attention, would the washing machine freeing up women and enabling them to move into the workforce and gaining more equal rights be a technologist or materialist interpretation?
These terms can be used in different ways. I used "materialist" here in a Marxist sense of identifying economic and sociopolitical structures constituting the "mode of production" as a sort of "root cause" for everything else. I used "technologist" in the sense of regarding technology as such a "root cause. Accordingly, your example would be "technologist" because a technological innovation (washing machines) is regarded as the cause of economic (women join the work force) and sociopolitical (woman gain more equal rights) change.
11:27 "The Medium is the 'massage'..."
Shout out to the profilicity shirt for keeping it profilic
Excellent video.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
2024
Right on. Thanks for sharing.
At the risk of derailing a trunk: WHO TF ever found Woody Allen to be funny?
I do
You lost me at the mention of Slavoj Žižek. McLuhan is a vastly superior intellect… the comparison is ludicrous.