Spotlight - Marshall McLuhan # 1

TrueLife

https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US

Transcript
Digital Feudalis Speaker 0 (0s): Yeah,

Speaker 1 (11s): Monday, Monday, Monday. It's just another manic Monday. I remember that song. So in my age HHA, I was like, I thought that was a Suzanne Vega. Remember that walk like in Egypt who was just another manic. Oh, that was out of the song they have. Hey, you guys do it today. You feel it. All right. I'm feeling pretty good myself. I'm hopeful that the rays of sunshine are basking you and they're golden glow providing you with a source of vitamin D and vital energy to kitchen up and moving on and put a smile on your face.

Hope we have a great weekend and I hope you're enjoying the TrueLife podcast. We just went through the works or some works of the master storyteller, Joseph Campbell, who taught us about myth. He taught us to look to the past so that we could see where our future lies. We are about to get into Mr. Marshall McLuhan spotlight on the loss of Marshall McLuhan.

My friend's, this is a great segue. We are going to go from the past, into the future. Hopefully we can apply what we have learned from mr. Joseph Campbell, to where we're going. I'm going to try and tie it together. What I think you will find what I hope you will see. What I am trying to convey is the circular pathway that we are taking. You see mr.

Marshall McLuhan things. And let me be clear. Mr. Marshall McLuhan was a philosopher in the late seventies, early eighties. He had some very fascinating ideas about where we are headed. According to Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. What we mean by that is the medium. Be it a TV, be a radio, be a print and books, linear print.

Platform's wherever it in, whatever medium you you use to digest you're information. Change is the way you think we process information from different senses and different parts of the brain. It's incredibly important to understand that mechanism of action, how it changes the way we think, how it opens up to us, a new field of vision, or it narrows our field of vision.

You may have seen my video on my YouTube channel called the penny test. For those of you that are unaware of the penny test, I will run you through it quickly. Imagine taking a penny and you set it on your table and then you stand up and you look down at that penny. You can see from looking directly above it, that it's circular. It has engravings on it. It has a little design, a precedent. It has some words written on it.

Some numbers written on it. You can also see that it has a bit of thickness to it. You can see the, the markings, the color, the texture. You can see all of these things when you stand up and look down at the penny from that point of view. However, if you slowly bend down, you bend your knees and then you, you bring your eyes to the level of the table.

And you look at that same Penney in the same position and your at eye level with a penny. What you will see as a straight line. It's a good experiment to try with your kid's. It's a good experiment to try for yourself. And what this experiment shows is that when we change our point of view, when we change how we are given the information, the very same object becomes almost uninterpretable.

It can lead to incredible abstract thoughts. When in fact the first view, it was a circle. We saw texture. We saw engravings, we saw all of the textual. We saw this size, the shape. However, when you get down at eye level and you really look at it, eye level, you will see a straight line. You will no longer see the penny as you know it, but you will see a straight line.

According to Marshall McLuhan. This is exactly what's happened to our society. When you look back at the Renaissance and he saw all these great sculptures, it was great. This incredible verse that was written, that made you feel that helped you to envision the peanut a picture in your mind, wi in the Western society, you are currently unable to recreate that because of inventions like the printing press, because we have decided to utilize linear print, linear print Leeds, to linear thinking.

He goes on to talk about hot and cold mediums. A hot medium is a medium in which the vision gets put in your head for you without any critical thinking. Think of YouTube, think of television, think of movies. You don't necessarily need to do any critical thinking. The idea has been put there for you. You do not need to think critically the motive, the idea, the lesson, it's there for you in a digestible format.

However, when you read a book, when you listen to the radio, now you have to come up with the mental picture yourself. You're not given the mental picture. It's not shot into your, into your ocular membranes and then implanted in your head. The problem with that type of media in the problem with the hot media is that it leads people into very narrow points of view.

And that's what you see today. You see these echo chambers on platforms. You see people not even thinking critically, but just giving a message. Whether it's a CNN message or a Fox news message, they are given their ideas. They are given their marching orders. Then they go out and execute them. Marshall McLuhan talks a lot about brain chemistry and the different centers of the brain and, and how we process all this information. Like to read you some quotes now, so you can get a better idea of what he was thinking.

One of the most notable quotes that Marshall McLuhan is famous for his making the claim that we will be headed into Digital, Feudalism think of where our government was and the founding fathers game, whether it was in the sixties, think of the progression of our government. Think of where we're at now, almost ungovernable to think about the riots on the streets, the different movements around the world, the way people are reacting, the different camps that the division.

Why is that? Is it possible that the medium we are currently using the social media platforms we're currently using are driving this new behavior? Marshall McLuhan believes human beings are the sex organs of robots. He believes that we are in a way devolving back into a sort of Feudalism, but let me read you some quotes. And then we're going to get into this topic of Digital Feudalism quote, societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media, by which men communicate than by the content of the communication ads are the cave art of the 20th century.

There are no passengers on a spaceship earth. We're all crew art and its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. The modern little red riding hood reared on singing commercials has no object as no objection, two being eaten by the way, the business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds, historians and archeologists will one day discover that the ad's of our time, our are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation of fluence creates poverty. The new electric independence recreates the world in the image of a global village. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

I think of art at its most significant as a Dew Dew line, a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what was beginning to happen. politics' will eventuall...