Marshall McLuhan - Lecture at Colombia University (1978) [ENHANCED]

[@aaronartale]

The chalkboard sounds in the background like at 15:00 add a fascinating dimension to this talk

[@drewid3876]

I would love to hear him riff on the identity politics of today in relation to the technology we’ve adopted… kids no longer have a private identity so they’re grasping desperately at an “intersectional” performative/social identity.

[@rawkvox]

that is their private identity

[@jebidiahkorn]

@@rawkvox only the insane ones. the rest of them are cooler

[@antoniusdeweerd8506]

I think you have the issue grasped upside down… it is about getting recognition for the lived experience brought along by the way in which the social reacts to the personal… if you are gay or a person of color for instance, your lived experience will inevitably be shaped by the way the outside world reacts to it. And if due to one of the aspects of some of the immutable characteristics of what constitutes you as a person, you experience adversity, that comes to form a very important part of who you are… Do you really think that someone who has faced racism or homophobia for years and years, is acting performatively by making their lived reality part of how they define themselves? Im sorry for saying this, but you seem very opinionated, yet not very well informed. You speak about a social identity and personal one as if the two can be separated? But a private identity, just for yourself… that has no relationship with your social interactions, is impossible. You would have to invent a private language for that since even the words you would use to describe yourself get their meaning from their intersubjective context. And inventing a private language isn’t possible (see Wittgenstein for that). Also, the fact that somehow you have come to believe that identity was more private in the past is rather odd… Do you seriously think that in the past people’s identities were less determined by social factors ? That women being forced into motherhood and subjected to the will of the pater familias were having a personally determined way of self identification? Do you think that men were less performative in expressing their manhood, i.e. by being emotionally repressed and conceal their feelings from the outside world… That in small communities in which the church dominated social life, identifying as a Christian of that particular denomination was a choice that wasn’t socially determined ? So either you form part of the societal norm and suffer from the so called empathy gap, making you angry and insecure because people on the margins are demanding equal treatment… or you are just ignorant as a result of your cognitive capacities being rather limited… it can obviously also be a combination of both!

[@kathrynengel278]

45:25 tactile space, the resonant interval …touch screens

[@TBilliards]

1:01:40 Completely At Play

[@mescellaneous]

this video feels so dense, mcluhan is too smart for me

[@kakaok]

that's because he was also a poet, and you have to listen to him as you'd read poetry which nobody is used to

[@kakaok]

there gives much lectures by MM on youtube polluted by unknown noises, which make them unbereable, go for genuine ones

[@RaoulTaom]

Marshall McLuhan’s ideas are very much Hegelian !

[@kakaok]

in some extent, but not entirely, I'm convinced MM has Hegel in his one small finger

[@jebidiahkorn]

this is an acoustic dosage of an antipsychotic

[@vervegrande]

Unfortunately, this lecture by McCluhan is polluted with commercials! 👎🏽

[@lecturevids2404]

What do you mean? No it isn't.

[@vervegrande]

@@lecturevids2404 There is more commercials per minute on this video, like some other videos. It's unwatchable, too many interruptions for me.

[@GaryLawrenceMurphy]

That claim he makes about the origins of schizophrenia, is there a reference for that?

[@davidlee6720]

What would Marshall McLuhan make of Ai and Facebook meta where we never actually meet but only have digital reresentatives onscreen in the electronic matrix?

[@drewid3876]

He talks about “discarnate kids” in 1978 and of a disembodiment that goes back to the telephone. He made so many great predictions… or premonitions perhaps.

[@davidlee6720]

only just come across him but had heard his name mentioned a lot, he was astonishingly prescient. Am a bit nervous about how the world is going. Thanks.@@drewid3876

[@sofistdecaydead]

He would likely say it is a further extension of the tactile aspect of TV. He remarked that the TV viewer is involved with the show, with video games and livestreams now the person on the screen responds to you. The oriental inwardness he mentions is kicked into very high gear. Text messaging now is moving away from the prose found in print towards emojis and memes. Iconic images, or the figure and ground he mentions in other lectures. Yet another example of re-tribalization. In regards to not meeting, these things have enormous power to get others to meet. I have friends who found relationships via video chat, living thousands of miles apart. Even AI is there to handle the boring stuff like insurance claims. More opportunity to get wrapped up in yourself. I would say we have moved further (or should I say deeper?) in the path he suggested we are heading.

[@danielhopkins296]

Plato, like the Buddha, praised the ear organ over all others. I forget where Plato has Socrates say this but the Buddhist version is in the Surangama sutra

[@danielhopkins296]

So the Indians and Chinese didn't have any logic? Foh

[@robinohara226]

yeah total bs. he also believed Chinese to be a pictographic language which is really not the case. The characters have their origins in pictographic meaning, but in the 1000's of years since have become abstracted, phonological symbols

[@robinohara226]

i still love macluhan but everything he says needs to be taken with a grain of salt and through the lens of 1960's casual racism

[@mescellaneous]

@@robinohara226 there is something to that, he is referring to using the alphabet as the core basis of abstraction. there is no alphabet in chinese. this is directly related to computers too, which is this applied logic. how would a chinese assembly language come about? you can make abbreviations with english letters, acronyms. math is still taught with western symbols. dont be so reductive.. to add onto this, it is very much like how there are so many *programming* languages, but they are all turing complete. to say that one language shapes the thinking, just like how programming languages have different workflows and some prefer different ones to different tasks, is not to say anything about the users in a 'racist' way. all programming languages are turing complete, anyone can take the time to dig into the actual semantics of any language and understand it. but the syntax inevitably shapes the programs that are written and what the languages are used for. mcluhan is making that observation about languages with a phonetic alphabet.

[@kakaok]

@@robinohara226 get some classes