kuniform

i’m assembling some notes for a lecture, and i am reviewing some of Marshall McLuhan’s work in Understanding Media. The whole book is a masterpiece; these two I stumbled across in my version on pages 88-90 spoke to me on a Sunday morning:

If Western literate man undergoes much dissociation of inner sensibility from his use of the alphabet, he also wins his personal freedom to dissociate himself from clan and family.

quote 2 (the long one):

Perhaps there is no more suitable way of defining the character of the electric age than by first studying the rise of the idea of transportation as communication, and then the transition of the idea from transport to information by means of electricity. The word “metaphor” is from the Greek meta plus pherein, to carry across or transport. In this book we are concerned with all forms of transport of goods and information, both as metaphor and exchange. Each form of transport not only carries, but translates and transforms, the sender, the receiver, and the message.

That’s heavy lyrics for such a young man, as B.B. King says to Bono in Rattle’n’Hum. So, I sat here and typed this. You are sitting there reading it. Do you feel translated? Transformed? You have been made into a ghost, according to McLuhan. Hmm. time to go buy a printer.