"Freedom is a road seldom travelled by the multitudes." The Anarchives Volume 2 Issue 6 The Anarchives Published By The Anarchives The Anarchy Organization The Anarchives tao@lglobal.com Send your e-mail address to get on the list Spread The Word Pass This On... --/\-- Raping The Media Messenger / / \ \ McLuhan is Transformed ---|--/----\--|--- By the Information Age \/ \/ /\______/\ by Jesse Hirsh jesse@lglobal.com Today, Saturday July 22 The Globe And Mail, Canada's elite newspaper published an article on the front page of the arts section on Marshall McLuhan. The title of the article by Robert Everett-Green was called "Resurrecting the media messiah", but in actuallity what is described in the article is the raping of a media mind. McLuhan was not a messiah, he hasn't saved anyone from anything. Rather he enlightens us all with some of the secrets of language and the way in which in we communicate. As with countless other ideas in our society, McLuhan's are being raped; transformed to meet popular conceptions of an emerging electronic envrionment. As McLuhan is brought from the grave he is laid out over his tombstone and fucked up the ass with a big corporate penis. Digital technology not only enables this to happen, but transposes a smile upon the dead man's face. Let's take a journey thourgh part of this article and see if we can discern exactly how this violation is being carried out. McLuhan in the subhead is described as: "not just as a footnote or thesis subject, but as an icon of our times." As an icon the figure of McLuhan is robbed of all substance and meaining. The image of the guy becomes a figure of consumption, and dissolves into the barren nothingness of our consuming culture. He is an icon to sell CD-Roms and corporate technological development. "Opinion is divided as to what he might have thought about the new gadgets, but there's no doubt he would have savoured his present role as the prophet who turned out to be right." McLuhan feared the changes he prophesized, so much so that he always retained his devout faith, even as he preached aspects of the secularization of our society, or even further the emergence of new gods. McLuhan was motivated by the horror he foresaw our society heading towards. He tried to explain this horror in the hopes that knowledge and awareness of these changes may affect their outcomes. "The question today, even among his admirers, is whether there is any further point in reading him." Exactly, why read him when he can be packaged for easy consumption. Why try to understand what he was saying when you pay someone else to do it for you. Let the real message fade into the oblivion of the individual mindset, and allow the collective corporate mindset dictate the real meaning of McLuhan. "'Nobody reads McLuhan, because he was right,' says Kevin Kelly , executive editor of Wired. 'He was right in that we're not a book culture any more. If you're getting your information about McLuhan from books, you're not getting it.'" This might explain why that rag Wired is 85% adds. They have nothing to say outside of selling image. They sell the medium of technology without having to justify the message that medium brings. As the book is defeated and turfed out of our corporate culture, so goes with it the ability for individual thought, and critical independent analysis. "it makes sense that he should have tried to wake the sleepers though a medium that was literally obsolescent (books) but that at least did not undermine his message." McLuhan did not spend his time trying to communicate through the medium of books or the printed word, but rather his focus was on the medium of language. Language in many forms, in many mediums; that was where McLuhan did his jig of media prophesy. He was an English Prof, not a book publisher. "That's part of the reason postmoderns, like the staff at Wired, dig McLuhan but don't want to read him, at least not in book-length form." This is an example of the lack of substance, or dillution of the message in the medium. With television people are exposed to a fraction of the real picture, and then collectively, with the rest of the electronically drugged out masses assume that they know the whole story. The post-modern-dummies at Wired get a bit of McLuhan with their morning coffee and think that they all embody McLuhan. Meanwhile his dead body is brought to the exec-editors office for a little alt.binaries.up.his.white.ass. "'Reading McLuhan continously is not a good idea,' says Derrick DeKerckhove, director of the McLuhan Program for Culture and Communications at the University of Toronto. 'It's better to jump in, take a peek, and then go somewhere with it.'" I'm sorry to see Derrick (derrick@epas.utoronto.ca) mentioned in this plunder of McLuhan, I've wanted to think that maybe he is not in league with the corporate rapists, but like any mortal he too seems to bend in the face of global power. At his book release party Derrick talked about the book and the act of reading in the context of clarification and comprehension in the speeded-up electronic age. I was joyed to see a guru of the electronic age promote the act of reading. But maybe now he too is being raped, while still alive, to be quoted out of context, supporting the McLuhan soundbite, and the McLuhan corporate run-away train. "So maybe we don't need to read McLuhan cover to cover, but only in probe-length bits, while savouring the stinging effects of these viruses of the mind. Perhaps McLuhan has joined the small elite of pivotal thinkers whose lessons have entered general consciousness. It seems a part of common sense to ask what impact any new technology is going to have on the cultural environment. The internet had scarcely hit the headlines before people began debating the effect this new medium might have on the culture at large. To that extent the sleepers are at least half awake, and McLuhan's work was not in vain." People are not contemplating what the message of these new media are. It is fashionable to assume that it will affect us, even dramatically, but very few are actually stopping to think how it is actually changing us. And furthermore even fewer are examining what McLuhan is saying about all of this shit. On the picture of the article there was a statement to the effect of "propaganda ends where dialogue begins". This was trying to imply that when the current broadcasting model of communications subsides to the multi-way format of electonic communications, propaganda also subsides. What a crock of shit. Propaganda will exist as long as power exists. Today's Globe And Mail was an example of power and an example of propaganda. The entire section was a tirade against writing, reading, and the methods of communication that encourage critical independent thougt. I was able to write this critique today because I have read McLuhan, sat down and spent prolonged hours reading what the guy had to say. I also sat down and read the article in the globe. I'm sure the large majority of Globe readers read the head line, sub-head, looked at the picture, figured they knew the story anyway and went on to read more of the bullshit. Exploitation and domination run our civilization. I and I are being drowned in a substance-less sea of information. Those brave enough to try and figure out what the fuck is going on end up becoming isolated because their ideas no longer fit within the artificial consciousness of corporate tv culutre. Those who do not consent willingly get raped anyway. What the fuck are you supposed to do? TAO keeps burnin'