Marshall McLuhan born 100 years ago

Marshall McLuhan would have reached the age of 100 today, if he had lived this long...

The official MM website














You might enjoy this illustrated article that Bobby Campbell created for the Maybe Quarterly

Happy Birthday Bucky!

Bucky did sometimes imply that McLuhan had got quite a lot of his radical ideas from Fuller's own work...he doesn't seem to have born a grudge...

You Know Nothing Of My Work

Great to see a brief and highly readable account of Marshall McLuhan from Douglas Coupland.

Like many "guru-charlatans" McLoon remains ambiguous, almost paradoxical, often misquoted and misunderstood.

People either co-opt him to their cause, or decide he needs translating, or write endless, solemn analysis of what he 'meant'.

Many people may simply think his time has past - but Coupland indicates how his approach still has much to tell us. Others perhaps think he acted as a cheer-leader for the future, and new technology (far from it!) Yet he does appear to have predicted the future (the way we live now) quite accurately.


Still, the title of the book (referring to the great gag in Annie Hall) offers fair warning that I should explain my own take on his work with a fair amount of diffidence. Suffice to say, I considered him a provoker of thought, rather than a man with all the answers.

I often find it hard to agree with a Catholic, a man who hated hippies and acid, etc.

Unlike the evasive or smartass answers to the press (the style adopted by Dylan and then The Beatles), McLuhan bewildered people through his mask of the absent-minded professor, or his use of odd puns, his sudden lucid responses, his own weird perspectives. He remains highly amusing when running rings around people trying to 'understand' him - using the provocative trick of hinting that their own outmoded reality tunnels will prevent them from 'getting it'.

"You mean my whole fallacy is wrong."

One of the reasons I consider him a trickster guru.

"The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopaedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind." M.M. 1962

State of the computer art in 1962.

TTOTT in TWELVE (T n' T)

TTOTT in TWELVE (T n'T)

without pip center/ever changing cyclic world/Brunocentral
gods hero's and men/recycling through the ages/recorsi vico
eternal return/the gods Nietzsche left us here/beyond either or
oak branching forces/ideogramic method/Fenollosa trees
spatial symbolist/weasels fight in a chamber/before the war Yeats
Ezra made it new/cantos brewing history/juxtaposition
Joyce cracked the cypher/hologramic comedy/to make Einstein cry
word is not the thing/no such noun only see verbs/motion in the thingzskis
...went in for structure/geodesic dymaxy/futurz Fullerene
Boolean Logic/and electrical switches/bit twinned by Shannon
turn on tune in drop/Joyce in digital village/Ez save McLuhan
Orson at hawk's well/cinema collage life force/fake filter buster


--Steve fly agaric 23.

http://ettt.wikispaces.com/

1. 12 LINE TTOTT
2. 150 TTOTT NODES
3. BRUNO VICO RECORSI WHEELS 1
4. CYBERNETIC RAW SOURCE
5. EMAIL TO DR WILSON
6. ETTT SIX WEEK SEMINAR
7. ETTT SPACES
8. EVERYTHING IS UNDER REVISION
9. FENOLLOSA POUND IDEOGRAMIC METHOD 3
10. FINNDABAD
11. FUCKUP TTOTT
12. GENERAL EPIPHANY COLTRANE SYNCHRONICITY 2010
13. GLOBAL FEEDBACK
14. HERMETIC STRUCTURES OF THE CANTOS
15. home
16. IDEOGRAMMIC FULLERENE
17. ILLUMINATI THEORY OF HISTORY
18. INDEX
19. JOYCE SHANNON HOLO INFO PROSE 4
20. KORZYBSKI FULLER NEURO SYNERGY 5
21. MCLUHAN AND ONTOLOGY OF CYBERSPACE
22. NEW TTOTT MAPS
23. NIETZSCHE YEATS AGNOSTIC UNITY 2
24. POPE JOYCE O NOLAN AND CIRCE
25. PROPHETS CONTAIN A MAYBE
26. RAW AND TTOTT
27. RECORSI
28. SAUL PAUL SIRAG INTERVIEW
29. SHANNON WEINER SCHROEDINGER
30. STEVE FLY AGARIC 23
31. TEXTATION OF THE TRIBE
32. THE I IN THE TRIANGLE WEEKLY DOSE
33. THE TALE OF THE WIKILEAKS
34. THE TELEVISION OF THE TRIBE
35. THE TETRAD OF THE TRIBE
36. THE TIMESPACE OF THE TRIBE
37. THE TONGUES OF THE TRIBE
38. THE TRAIN OF THE TRIBE
39. THE TREE OF THE TRIBE LIFE
40. THE TRIAL OF THE TRIBE
41. THE TRIANGLES OF THE TRIBE
42. THE TUNES OF THE TRIBE
43. THE TURNTABLES OF THE TRIBE
44. TRIBETABLE TALE OF THE TRIBE
45. TTOTT DODECAGON
46. TTOTT DODECAHEDRON
47. TTOTT GROUPINGS
48. TTOTT ICOSAHEDRON
49. TWO TWENTY THREE TALES
50. VON NEUMANN BICYCLE RACE
51. WELLES MCLUHAN UNDERSTANDING FAKE MEDIA 6
52. WORLDPISS

Enjoy the Solstice!