The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan. Core thesis: the way we use our senses to perceive the world also shapes the way we interpret our perceptions. Print media isolates the visual sense from the auditory/tactile, engendering a schizophrenic mental paradigm

McLuhan provides a definition of hypnosis as: "one sense at a time.” Print is a uniform and repeatable commodity that creates a hypnotic superstition of the book as independent of and uncontaminated by human agency https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1051974581441839105

Literacy deprives language of its multi-dimensional resonance; every word is a poetic world unto itself, a 'momentary deity' or revelation. Literacy: visual conformity frees the individual for inner deviation. oral society: inner verbalization = effective social action

Most of the book is about analyzing and describing the differences between a visual "print" culture" and an immanent "oral culture". The different modalities of these two types of society have implications for religion, politics, art, and sociality

GG tells a story: print-as-commodity turned us from sensually balanced beings whose inner lives were in parity with our social behaviors into rigid repressed mechanical beings, & the “simultaneity” of electronic broadcast media will return us to pre-literate soul harmony

This now seems naive but one can forgive McLuhan his excesses because his erudition is dizzying and his analysis of the phenomenological changes wrought by the industrialization of media is penetrating

There was a sense in the 60s that art, psychology, psychedelics, & politics were converging into some new culmination of spiritually enlightened Man, and McLuhan’s contribution was to imagine that the “oral” culture of electronic media would revive in us the nobility the savage

The concept of the global village is not only about the speed of communication across the globe, but about the ways that television and radio create "tribal" culture vs. the way print creates "sophisticated" “linear” literate culture

Understand that, at the time, the word “tribal” did not have the connotation of “tribalism” that we have today. Quite the opposite, and despite his protestations, McLuhan enumerates at great lengths the shortcomings of “print culture,” all of which he identifies correctly

"Sophistication", in this sense, is a bit of a slur. He means a very particular thing; "Sensuality" is defined as the isolation of the senses, and "Sentimentality" is defined as the isolation of the emotions. Sophistication is a sentimentality that anesthetizes certain emotions

You can see his angle in the following passage, as if some great opening of society is just around the culture, as if we are discovering a more “enlightened” way. Life comes at you fast.

“the prevailing philosophy of human nature since the Renaissance has been based on the conception of each individual as a “deviant case” whose existence consists very largely in his efforts to assert his personality against the restrictive and levelling claims of society”

The concept of individualism, of active aggressive private initiative and self-expression, can only make sensbe in the context of homogeneous citizens. This “scabrous paradox” has haunted literate men in every age.

McLuhan’s biggest shortcoming is that he misattributes the effects of the industrialization of media to the specific sensory vehicles of that media.

He’s right that listening gives you one mind and reading gives you two, but he’s wrong that sensual balance is freeing and sensual isolation is tyrannizing. It is true that illiterate people do not feel the torturous interior tensions that literate people do.

However! In the era of industrial media it is only the highly literate who are free to think as they please. McLuhan as a member of this group overlooks the totalizing and lobotomizing effects of living in an oral culture that is CENTRALLY CONTROLLED

The tensions that obtain in the mind of literate man are the essential quality of humanity that separates us from the beasts. This perhaps makes us unhappy. Quelle dommage! https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1037330250961575936

There is nothing subliminal in non-literate cultures. Their senses are in a different balance from ours. Because of this, we find old myths difficult to grasp: they do not exclude any facet of experience as in a literate culture. All the levels of meaning are simultaneous

Phonetic literacy removes societies from the world of “sacred” cosmic space into the detribalized “profane” space of civilized, pragmatic man. The homogeneity of print creates a subliminal faith in the validity of the Bible as bypassing the Church's traditional oral authority

The separation of science from faith, ethics, and art is the condition of industrialized man. We can only find truth in that which is measurable; religion, moral philosophy, and art are now matters of private opinion instead of public knowledge

As people become more literate, they become more deatched from the world in which they live. But at the same time, the possession of printed words makes the delineations between groups of people far more visible.

Typography has the effect of "outering" private inner experience. Print enabled men to see their vernaculars for the first time, and to visualize national unity and power in terms of vernacular bounds: "We must be free or die who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake."

Hence, even as religion atrophied, nationalism was its replacement. Aside: has the establishment of English as the global language of commerce and culture destroyed the ability of English speakers to perceive or desire our national borders?

McLuhan takes the structuralist stance that "it is extremely evident that man is language". Many of the problems he attributes to print culture appear to have deepened, rather than dissipating, in the age of electronic media.

"As typography filled the world, the human voice closed down; People began to read silently and passively as consumers."
"readers are as vain as authors, they crave their own conglomerate visage and demand the dullest wits to exert themselves in ever greater degree"

What I notice is that the simultaneous, oral, electronic culture that has become pervasive in the world of smart phones/the internet has not supplanted print culture; rather it lives along side it, funneling every different medium from the past through a single torrential portal

I have argued that the fragmentation of memetic space is highly overstated, but in writing this thread I have considered that the fragmentation of phenomenological space is highly underexplored. Knowing how to read is not the same as being literate.

Two people might use their phones in very different ways: a man could live in a virtual print culture made of twitter/ebooks, or a virtual oral culture of youtube and podcasts. It is hard to escape the perception that I am surrounded by the latter sort. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1055227790100856832

It's no coincidence that dissidents spend so much team rooting around in old books. The ideas therein are transformative, but if we believe McLuhan, the mere act of reading is equally important. The faith of a theologian is quite different to that of a mere parishioner

Bonus, McLuhan does a pretty good @kantbot20k impression:

We have seen how the alphabet involved the Greeks in a fictional "Euclidean Space." The effect of the phonetic alphabet in translating the audile-tactile world into a visual world, was both in physics and in literature to create the fallacy of "content."