McLuhan: Understanding Media
Intensity or high definition engenders specialism and fragmentation in living as in entertainment, which explains why any intense experience must be “forgotten,” “censored,” and reduced to a very cool state before it can be “learned” or assimilated.
..Were we to accept fully and directly every shock to our various structures of awareness, we would soon be nervous wrecks, doing double-takes and pressing panic buttons every minute.
.. And as for the cool war and the hot bomb scare, the cultural strategy that is desperately needed is humor and play. It is play that cools off the hot situations of actual life by miming them. Competitive sports between Russia and the West will hardly serve that purpose of relaxation. Such sports are inflammatory, it is plain. And what we consider entertainment or fun in our media inevitably appears as violent political agitation to a cool culture.
Page 1
.. a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.
Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message.
.. Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns of information.
Page 3 .. The present chapter is concerned with showing that in any medium or structure there is what Kenneth Boulding calls a “break boundary at which the system suddenly changes into another or passes some point of no return in its dynamic processes.” Several such “break boundaries” will be discussed later, including the one from stasis to motion, and from the mechanical to the organic in the pictorial world
.. One of the most common causes of breaks in any system is the cross-fertilization with another system, such as happened to print with the steam press, or with radio and movies (that yielded the talkies).