Curated Quote: Marshall McLuhan

“Our Age of Anxiety is, in part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts”

-Marshall McLuhan [1911-1980 Canadian Philosopher]

Marshall McLuhan is the greatest philosopher and thinker about media in history. Whenever I want insight, perspective or simple wisdom about media, past, present and future I turn to McLuhan. Along with R. Buckminster Fuller and Alvin Toffler, McLuhan has been extremely influential in my life as a futurist.

To the degree that media affects consciousness, McLuhan is a deep thinker on consciousness and evolution. As he wrote in “The Gutenberg Galaxy” modern man learned and conveyed wisdom aurally through proverbs and listening. Then with the invention of the moveable-type press in the mid-fifteenth century, we learned visually through the printed word, individually. Next with the coming of radio and television, we moved to the image and the collective consciousness or identity. We took up residence in what McLuhan called “The Global Village”

His insight and brilliance is validated since his death by how spot-on his thinking was in the 21st-century Internet era. Back to the quote.

Whenever it was, most likely the 1960s and 70s, that McLuhan called the “Age of Anxiety”, the 2020s is most certainly a time for anxiety. As has been written frequently in this space, this decade is one where what was – the realities in which we all lived prior to 2020- seem to be fast receding, and yet the approaching new realities are not yet clear. This causes anxiety.

In a recent column, and in a book that I wrote, I set forth that this decade would be one of extreme cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance creates anxiety. Cognitive dissonance is the reaction to changing realities, as we migrate from the ones we thought were real to the new ones that aren’t yet fully understood.

[This is one of the reasons for creating this space about the future here at Evolutionshift, to help bring understanding about what will be and the dynamics that are causing the changes we all are experiencing].

We all live in a connected world. We have all experienced social media, streaming, texting, surfing, browsing, posting, and the consequences of these activities. Here is a quote from the book “Laws of Media” published posthumously by McLuhan’s son Eric from what his father had been working on when he had his stroke and later death:

In Laws of Media (1988), published posthumously by his son Eric, McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects. The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology (i.e., any medium) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously. McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing his laws as questions with which to consider any medium:

· What does the medium enhance?

· What does the medium make obsolete?

· What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?

· What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the "grammar and syntax" of the "language" of media. -Wikipedia

Read these four points and then reflect on social media, streaming and the Internet in general, as it has now become the backbone of all media. A big question is how these four are applied to AI.

Throughout the life of this newsletter, McLuhan will be cited often as he is the giant who stands above all others in the area of mass media insight. He perhaps was the greatest media ecologist who ever lived, as he invented the field. One of his most influential followers was the media ecologist Neil Postman

Postman spawned a new generation of McLuhanesque media ecologists, the foremost of whom is my good friend Jack Myers, who has now become a Substack writer with his The Media Ecologist.

Here is a list of McLuhan’s books. I warn you that he is a really dense writer with deep thought in every paragraph. The exception to this was his wonderful collaboration with designer Quentin Fiore “The Medium is the Massage” If you have never been seduced by his work, this book would be the easiest way to be exposed to his towering genius.

Here is just a small collection of McLuhan videos: