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 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
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.
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.)
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.
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
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 TH-cam. Wolfe was McLuhan's friend and makes interesting observations about the Canadian thinker.
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!
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 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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
@@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
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
"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.
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 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
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.
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(?).
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.
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!
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 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.
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 haven't engaged with McLuhan since high school, but I feel like his conception of privacy and the tribal vs individual are based either on some personal ignorance due to being a big intellectual, or some other nonsense. The clips may be dumbed down a bit since it was for TV, but it really gives the impression he doesn't understand books outside of limited use cases, not engaging with the fact that even during his time literacy to the quality of being able to consistently read books was hardly universal, nor was the ability to have a private office 1) primarily related to reading (I'd rather suggest it was related to wealth) or 2) universal Books also took some time to become so plentiful that reading a book wasn't the same as listening to a radio show was at the time - when books were more expensive to produce, most of those exhibiting the same trade and class role would engage with the same books and thus form his supposed tribal perspective. We see today that new media has also become plentiful and accessible to the point of replicating his claims about books.
A very difficult book, but David Webb on Aristotle and Heidegger on the accident and the error. My view from this is the "space of error" within a axioms or multi functional system is different to the space of error in a natural setting. they have different degrees of freedom, in fact a system or functionality series really has no error space at all, it just stops working. eg you can instantiate the same logic in many different mechanisms, but the errors are unique to each mechanism. and nothing like the kind of logical errors human make. Compare a gladiator in action to a series of decathlon contestant events. the old view of Aristotle as function as purpose and end (eg Sartre)i think is no longer believed by anybody. its the unity in action of the virtues all at once. see iterability in mathematics also.
@@harveyyoung3423 My latest thinking about the system and myself (or "we", all the people) in it, is that actually there is no need for seeking a way to function like an error, because the system will destroy itself. It is a characteristic of all systems
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.
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 TH-cam profile? Or did you just simulate authenticity? This is messing with my head.
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?
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 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.
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.)
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 TH-cam 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, TH-cam, 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.
Alright so I'm a movie buff and movies exploring social media I've found have been the most interesting to come out recently. I would recommend going to letterboxd and searching social media and watching the lists that pop up. Off the top of my head I recommend Like Me, Swarm, and The Hater. The unfortunate thing is that in the arts alot of people HATE social media, probably because the arts is a very individualistic field and social media is naturally collectivist, but a whole genre is slowly getting made. I also recommend Zola. It's not really focused on social media but it's based off of a series of tweets and is a great film.
@@gh0s1wav @gh0s1 I don't think social media is necessary for reflecting on profilicity. An I idea I have is King of Comedy by Scorsese is a good representation, as the main character just does his thing to reach publicity on what he wants to be viewed as successful in - to have more credibility in turn. I'm just sure there are better examples where the theme of profilicity is more central. On the other hand, I don't think art being very individualistic is particularly true. Thinking of folk art, where you can't trace the author of an idea, artifacts being works of individuals, but really representing a community's intellectual product. As a XXth century take, we can have these: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_art Möller did a video on Garau's immaterial sculptures, which are solely based on the participants' representation of the idea of the sculpture. I also wonder whether social media is really collectivist when it is about the gratification of the individual.
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!
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.
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.
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
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. 🖖
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.
@@johnmacrae2006 How come?
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.
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.)
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.
WOW. Here I thought NO ONE paid attention to McLuhan anymore. My opinion of you just went up many levels!
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.
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 TH-cam. Wolfe was McLuhan's friend and makes interesting observations about the Canadian thinker.
I would have continued to study philosophy in university if I had encountered a teacher like yourself.
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!
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 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.
“Staring at the world through my rear view.” - Tupac Shakur
Warning at the end is so spot on! Well spoken and timely presentation. Thanks for producing and sharing.
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.
Excellent presenttion! Very well thought out.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
Amazing Work, I would love to see and episode on Jacque Lacan!
...
(Or even Zizek!)
I love the hidden Marshall McLuhan joke in the Sopranos😅
so excited to see this, mcluhan doesnt get enough recognition
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
No matter how underrated he was he is indispensable in understanding media😅
This is great. I heard about McLuhan from Chris Cox, the chief product officer at Meta
The medium is the message. Marshall McLuhan 🎯
You are a wonderful explainer - and spannxxx!!!
What an interesting and intellectually arresting study you have explored here. Well Done!
You're a lifesaver, thanks a lot!
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
"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.
21:00 that is genius . Never thought of that . We even invented " privacy " daaaaaaaamn
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.⚡🔥💧⏳🛰🎶
I was enlightened by McLean in the 60s.
Today Digital is extension of our brain
"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
excellent series
Right on. Thanks for sharing.
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.
Ibsen points part of this in Enemy of the people... the leftovers of privacy.
let´s just appreciate that the opening credits for "Bonanza" was play in his totality
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(?).
so strange, I watched the Sopranos episode with the Marshall McLuhan joke exactly when this was uploaded...
как раз недавно хотел разобраться с идеей "medium is the message" и вот те нате!
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 😀
McLuhan is great- extensions and amputations - for instance -medieval reading was out loud and through stained glass - different experiences from us
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.
I NEED THAT TSHIRT
Well said. Thank you for this.
AY WHEN YOUR MERCH BE POPIN I NEED IT
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.
you look good
Great work as always :)
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!
Where can we buy the t-shirt?
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.
love these videos!
You have a branded T-shirt now.
Profilicity t-shirt NOICE
Was McLuhan influenced (or even aware of) Fritz Heider's Thing/Medium distinction?
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 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.
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.
Excellent video.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
great as always
I haven't engaged with McLuhan since high school, but I feel like his conception of privacy and the tribal vs individual are based either on some personal ignorance due to being a big intellectual, or some other nonsense. The clips may be dumbed down a bit since it was for TV, but it really gives the impression he doesn't understand books outside of limited use cases, not engaging with the fact that even during his time literacy to the quality of being able to consistently read books was hardly universal, nor was the ability to have a private office 1) primarily related to reading (I'd rather suggest it was related to wealth) or 2) universal
Books also took some time to become so plentiful that reading a book wasn't the same as listening to a radio show was at the time - when books were more expensive to produce, most of those exhibiting the same trade and class role would engage with the same books and thus form his supposed tribal perspective. We see today that new media has also become plentiful and accessible to the point of replicating his claims about books.
I'm trying to figure out how I can function as an error in the system.
404
A very difficult book, but David Webb on Aristotle and Heidegger on the accident and the error. My view from this is the "space of error" within a axioms or multi functional system is different to the space of error in a natural setting. they have different degrees of freedom, in fact a system or functionality series really has no error space at all, it just stops working. eg you can instantiate the same logic in many different mechanisms, but the errors are unique to each mechanism. and nothing like the kind of logical errors human make. Compare a gladiator in action to a series of decathlon contestant events. the old view of Aristotle as function as purpose and end (eg Sartre)i think is no longer believed by anybody. its the unity in action of the virtues all at once. see iterability in mathematics also.
@@harveyyoung3423 My latest thinking about the system and myself (or "we", all the people) in it, is that actually there is no need for seeking a way to function like an error, because the system will destroy itself. It is a characteristic of all systems
become a lurker... and bide your time... which will come. Wasn´t that what Poe´s maelstrom was all about?
Some commentators have said that Star Trek is a Western
The Frontier etc etc
Excellent
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.
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 TH-cam profile? Or did you just simulate authenticity? This is messing with my head.
Great video!
Shout out to the profilicity shirt for keeping it profilic
Ever seen Videodrome by cronenberg ? Or benny's video by hanke ?
@Carefree Wandering - Can you do something on your countryman, Friedrich 'Driving the Human out of Humanism' Kittler?
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?
th-cam.com/video/Koq-G8Ose4k/w-d-xo.html
Have you spoken to Bob Dobbs yet?
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!
this was a really good video thank you! marshall m is kind of annoying but kind of awesome.. do RAOUL VANAGEIM next ❤
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'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.)
11:27 "The Medium is the 'massage'..."
Is Prof. Moeller selling tees?
20:12 if only the web instituted that kind of feedback
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 TH-cam 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, TH-cam, 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.
This video was ☑shaping
This is an amazing series. Could you recommend any movies or literature that embraces profilicity and reflects on it - even if in an implicit way?
Alright so I'm a movie buff and movies exploring social media I've found have been the most interesting to come out recently. I would recommend going to letterboxd and searching social media and watching the lists that pop up. Off the top of my head I recommend Like Me, Swarm, and The Hater.
The unfortunate thing is that in the arts alot of people HATE social media, probably because the arts is a very individualistic field and social media is naturally collectivist, but a whole genre is slowly getting made. I also recommend Zola. It's not really focused on social media but it's based off of a series of tweets and is a great film.
@@gh0s1wav @gh0s1 I don't think social media is necessary for reflecting on profilicity. An I idea I have is King of Comedy by Scorsese is a good representation, as the main character just does his thing to reach publicity on what he wants to be viewed as successful in - to have more credibility in turn. I'm just sure there are better examples where the theme of profilicity is more central.
On the other hand, I don't think art being very individualistic is particularly true. Thinking of folk art, where you can't trace the author of an idea, artifacts being works of individuals, but really representing a community's intellectual product. As a XXth century take, we can have these: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_art Möller did a video on Garau's immaterial sculptures, which are solely based on the participants' representation of the idea of the sculpture. I also wonder whether social media is really collectivist when it is about the gratification of the individual.
Oshi no KO and Perfect Blue spring to mind
Do you mean “profilicity” or “polificity”?
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!
yes v good 👍
Impressive how he predicted this new tribalism 😮😮
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.
❤ Galaxy Brains
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.
Sloterdijk soon?
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
McLuhan is Zizek like Hendrix is Millie Cyrus
"A world of made is not a world of born."
He saw… He bloody oath Saw.
McLuhan had a better stylist.
Why did you twinkify McLuhan in the thumbnail?