01-15-2015, 02:10 PM
I'm very interested in beingness, quality of communication, and viewing language as existing as something way beyond speech. I think we are to approach the way we communicate in a symbolic way, carrying the idea of language and communication into new realms. A book called The Gutenberg Galaxy gives credence to the idea that communication is way more than it appears. I haven't been able to read it yet, but it's by Marshall McLuhan, who got his ideas from a guy named Harold Innis. McLuhan was apparently considered one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, yet he fell completely off the map. His most popular book is Understanding Media: The Extensions of Men. McLuhan gave the idea for the phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out" to Leary. Anyway, Innis' theory was that when we look back in history, we can see how a movement from oral culture to a written culture literally changed how we experience reality and results in particular manifestations. McLuhan would say that our sense-ratio is altered, as we begin to make use of particular regions of the brain over the other.
The main focus of oral cultures is morality, and is interested in quality across time rather than a rigid definition of reality. By writing things down, this lead to a more and more refined, rigid, logical approach to reality. So the theory goes that only in a culture of the printing press, with its removable and interchangeable parts, could you get something such as an assembly line and an industrialized nation. Things like depth perception in Renaissance panting is the culmination of a linear approach.
I should mention that I don't like to label anything good or bad, so I simply see these observations as interesting. They're more like a work of art or something. McLuhan agrees to an extent.."The theme of this book is not that there is anything good or bad about print but that unconsciousness of the effect of any force is a disaster, especially a force we have made ourselves." And so, "Some may feel that life is too valuable and delightful a thing to be spent in such arbitrary and involuntary automatism." I disagree with that last observation in a way, since all is well.
We're undergoing a transition, which can be noted in postmodernism with the blurring of the lines in the paintings of impressionism, or the broken up narrative format by James Joyce in Ulysses. Fascinating stuff. Electronic media is seen to favor tribalism in the sense of creating community, and decentralization of power. McLuhan summed all this up in his phrase, "The medium is the message." So it is not the content of what is in the medium itself that is the subject, but how the medium itself affects reality is the message. How does our beingness, that is, the style with which we communicate to others, its quality, affect reality?
This seems to be the essence of our seeking.
The main focus of oral cultures is morality, and is interested in quality across time rather than a rigid definition of reality. By writing things down, this lead to a more and more refined, rigid, logical approach to reality. So the theory goes that only in a culture of the printing press, with its removable and interchangeable parts, could you get something such as an assembly line and an industrialized nation. Things like depth perception in Renaissance panting is the culmination of a linear approach.
I should mention that I don't like to label anything good or bad, so I simply see these observations as interesting. They're more like a work of art or something. McLuhan agrees to an extent.."The theme of this book is not that there is anything good or bad about print but that unconsciousness of the effect of any force is a disaster, especially a force we have made ourselves." And so, "Some may feel that life is too valuable and delightful a thing to be spent in such arbitrary and involuntary automatism." I disagree with that last observation in a way, since all is well.
We're undergoing a transition, which can be noted in postmodernism with the blurring of the lines in the paintings of impressionism, or the broken up narrative format by James Joyce in Ulysses. Fascinating stuff. Electronic media is seen to favor tribalism in the sense of creating community, and decentralization of power. McLuhan summed all this up in his phrase, "The medium is the message." So it is not the content of what is in the medium itself that is the subject, but how the medium itself affects reality is the message. How does our beingness, that is, the style with which we communicate to others, its quality, affect reality?
This seems to be the essence of our seeking.
