Marshall McLuhan's media ecology theory posits that all technology functions as an extension of human capabilities (e.g., the wheel extends feet, writing extends memory, GPS extends navigation), but each extension atrophies corresponding natural abilities. The printing press established modern individualism and rationality, while the electric age is returning humanity to tribal sensory ratios—auditory dominance, participatory consciousness, and communal identity—explaining phenomena like declining attention spans, reduced critical thinking, and the rise of tribalistic online behavior.
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How Technology Is Making You Primitive
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>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> All right. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. This is Dr. David Patrick Harry with Church of the Eternal Logos.
And today, we're going to be talking about why technology is actually making you primitive.
It's kind of ironic, given the advancement of technology. You would think the idea is that we're sophisticated, civilized, modern people.
But the goal of today's stream is actually to introduce concepts, theories, but also an individual, which many people are not familiar with. Uh Marshall McLuhan, the great Canadian scholar of media. He developed the concept of the media ecology. Uh some people have highlighted that he's essentially the founder of the field of communications.
And he has some very interesting articles which or theories and ideas, concepts that we're going to be going through today.
We're going to be watching some of his old videos because this man, if you've never heard of him, was actually like a famous intellectual during the 1960s.
Like you could imagine turning on the television set, um and there'd be an interview with scholar Marshall McLuhan. And he was kind of presented as a totally incomprehensible individual. You can't understand what he's saying, he speaks over your head.
But we're going to break it down. You're going to be able to understand what Marshall McLuhan's main theories were, and why it's actually really advantageous for you to put it in your intellectual tool belt so that you can better analyze and see the impact that technology is having on you and I. Um and I brought this up during my speech in Montana. I mentioned Marshall McLuhan very briefly and his theories about hot and cool media, which we'll get into.
And arguing that every medium essentially shapes and creates the contours of human consciousness in every era. He's the first person to really look at history itself and read it from the perspective of what mediums what ways in which media is being and information is being transmitted in a particular civilization oral, manuscript, book writing, book printing.
We're going to be getting into that uh because all these fascinating insights that you would never think about actually come to the forefront when you read Marshall McLuhan.
Um I have a couple books.
Um I have a PDF version that we'll be looking at here regarding his famous phrase "The medium is the message."
Meaning again, it's not about whether on if you're watching television, whether you're watching a nature documentary, or you're watching a slasher film. It doesn't matter the content.
His argument is despite the content of any medium, radio, print culture, writing, um television, pictures, films, it doesn't matter the media or it doesn't matter the content of the medium, it's that the medium itself shapes your sensory ratios.
The actual senses in which you use to come to knowledge of the world. That's one of the most fascinating things. So, he argued that we're moving into what he called the global village. Now, I'll explain all this stuff later.
But, essentially that the sensory ratios through the evolution of media, and this is where he gets into the Gutenberg Galaxy. This book in particular out of all his books is really focusing on the trajectory of intellectual history, and it's fascinating stuff. And when you read him, it's almost psychedelic because it's not the typical linear scholastic way that you would under think you would understand someone to present an idea. And there's so much onus on the reader when you read his stuff because Marshall McLuhan was actually a professor of English who was a literary scholar. Now, mind you, his whole professional career ends up being a critique of print culture per se and the role of the book.
But, he has read everything. We're talking about philosophers. We're talking about, you know, fiction, whether it be from Shakespeare to Russian and French poetry, everything.
The guy has read everything and he just makes continually references when you read his stuff. So, it's it's a bit of a whirlwind when you read his stuff, but it's fascinating. I want to even read a little bit sections to you guys today just to get a a vibe for Marshall McLuhan. I mean, some of the stuff that he talks about, for example, just so you get a feel for it, is he he delineates between oral or tribal culture, uh literate culture, printed culture, and then the electric culture and now the digital age. So, he argues that tribal man, oral man, pre-literate man, basically, was dominated by his auditory senses.
He listened to the world in a way, but also he he looked at the world, which is very different from reading.
And he makes this point in this delineation that reading is not seeing.
And that when you for example, when you read his stuff, he was a traditional Roman Catholic Canadian scholar. And he kind of has a soft spot for the medieval era. Now, us Orthodox, the Byzantine Empire, this is all during the medieval period and he argues, at least makes reference, that he believed the medieval era in particular had an equilibrium between oral culture and literate culture. And that it was still driven because of the history of early Christianity, it was still driven by an oral culture.
But, once the Gutenberg printing press, you know, Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press comes out, it totally devastates the medieval worldview, which is a manuscript-oriented culture. When you read a manuscript, you actually look at a manuscript. You don't read it like you read a text, because it's handwritten, it's illuminated, has pictures and colors, and it's very individualistic. The hand of the maker is present in a manuscript. And when you once you get to the printing press and you get typesetting, that every E is the same E, every T is the same T.
He argues, and I think this is a profundity that most people never even discuss, is that it actually shaped the predispositions of modernity, meaning individual. We talked about what is modernity, individualism, rationalism, scientism, technological progress, and democracy.
Well, here's the thing that he argues, none of that stuff would have been possible as a paradigmatic shift without the printing press.
Because it's print culture.
He argues that it's linear focused, it's more logically oriented. Um and that print culture established the idea of the individual as a sort of printed letter present in the printing press, that the same thing can be used at infinitum, which sets the precedent for an idea of democracy. The individual, the public, right? That there's a mass group of things, and that printing culture and reading in specific >> [snorts] >> um begins to delineate and decipher things and group things into categories and separates, which is exactly what we're talking about with the idea of the the public. What Who's the public? You wouldn't hear this in a medieval society. You wouldn't even hear this in, you know, ancient Rome or something because there's so many different groups, so many different ethnic identities, different languages being spoken. There wasn't this general idea of an abstract public. This all comes as a consequence due to print culture. And so these there's these fascinating insights. For example, he argues that words construct conceptual walls. And that Western civilization, as he saw it at the end of the 20th century, was essentially the consequence of print culture, what we would consider modernity. But he would say before you get modernity, you get printing press.
And that the medium in which we engage in information actually changes our ratios, our sensory ratios of how we perceive reality.
And so in light of all that, he believed through the electronic sphere, the electronic world as he called it, there was an extension of the nervous system of man.
And so a basic tenant, you know, the medium is the message is a famous phrase that he coined. But another one is that all technology is an extension of man in some way.
For example, every technology extends a physical attribute or capability of man and then atrophies something else.
For example, the wheel is an extension of the human foot.
But once we create the wheel, people then no longer have to walk as much. So there's a loss or or less walking per se. You walk less. You ride in a car or a buggy or something like that. There's new ways of transportation.
Writing is an extension of human memory.
Remember the famous conversation that Plato recalled with Socrates as Socrates was against Plato writing, you know, all his philosophical works, his dialectical back and forths. Why? Cuz Socrates said it was going to atrophy your brain. You weren't going to be able to memorize all the all the traditions, all the stories, all the songs that these were embedded in the human memory and that people, and this is a fact, even with modern research. I'm going to show you some articles in today's stream, that people are literally losing their memory. And this is something that is happening to you and me and everyone right now. We're engaging in a digital black mirror.
And just by the engagement of these technologies and realizing that they are truly extensions of ourselves, we lose a piece of ourselves in it. And so he talked about how the entire electronic world is an extension of the human nervous system and that as we continue to move forward, he says this is a re really a reintegration of tribal man sensory ratios. The problem is he talked about how the medieval period, so medieval Christianity in particular, of which something he was very fond of, is this equilibrium between oral culture and literate culture. But this is pre-printing press. And he argued that it was a perfect equilibrium because it still validated participation. Well, ala Orthodox theology, Eastern Orthodoxy, one of the delineations between East and West is this emphasis on participation over and over again, right? That theosis is an ongoing participation with God through the uncreated energies in our own personal lives. And he even marks in this book, I have it highlighted, not that I'll read much to you guys cuz I know you guys get bored with that, but he even argues that literate versus oral culture was one of the delineations between Christendom East and West, arguing that literate culture was more dominant in the West and the Latin West than the more traditional oral culture of the East. And this was part of the underlying tensions between Rome and Constantinople, if you will.
So, he believed that it was a participatory medieval element, but tribal man, even before that, didn't have some of the conceptual categories that literate man. This is why I was in equilibrium. Well, he argued that the electric age that we're all in right now is actually shifting us back towards the sensory ratios of a tribal man. That's why his book's called the global village.
The global village, because what we're moving back towards is a is a total involvement with everyone, that the distances between places have dissolved.
And so, therefore, we engage in information acquisition like we're in a village filled with people that we actually know, which we don't.
Al la the obsession with Hollywood celebrities and gossip culture, or even infighting, even debate culture online, cuz he said tribal culture is going to involve more tribal delineations between groups. It's not going to be this multicultural utopia, but because of that, our dominant sensory ratio is going to go back towards the auditory. And that the reason why modern man would be auditorially dominated is because he presents and believes himself to be the center of the world, because when you have your auditory sense as your dominant sense, you're always at the center of your information acquisition.
Meaning the sound waves around you are always operating in a way in which you're the center. Very different from a visual culture where there's a separation between you and object. The subject and object distinction is very obvious in a visual dominated culture.
And so, he argued that the morality, which you can see with the scarification, tattooing, piercing, uh uh let's say you know, I like EDM music.
EDM music is a very shamanic, you know, shamanistic, uh tribal form of drumming that all this stuff would become more and more popular as we move further into the information age. Now, he didn't get to see the the internet age. Although, he predicted it. That's one of the interesting things about Marshall McLuhan is how much he actually predicted of the modern world, including smartphones. There's famous video from like the early 1960s in which he's talking about having a a phone in which you'll be able to request anything and it'll be brought to you, ala DoorDash, ala Amazon Prime, ala the world that we live in now.
But, this he also saw was going to be a world of more and more conflict because there is no example in human history in which groups come together, different ethnicities, languages, and religions, and somehow live in harmony, which is the sort of mythos of modernity regarding multiculturalism.
So, he he also highlighted that the difference between like a medieval seeing culture, one that looks, not reads, but looks at nature, um is a more heart-oriented culture.
Whereas, a culture that's based on reading is a more head-oriented culture, which is why it's more logical, why it actually loses more religious traditionalism, why it tends to be more secular, more system-oriented, more mechanical. All of these things are rooted in the ways in which we acquire information.
And so, he makes the interesting argument that without the printing press, Protestantism is not possible.
So, most people, if you listen to some scholars, they'll say, "Oh, well, Protestantism because, you know, they believed in, you know, their independent reading of scripture and moving away from the Catholic Church that they catalyzed the printing press. McLuhan makes the opposite argument. He says without the printing press, which occurs roughly what, 40 to 50 years before the Protestant Reformation, that it's the printing press and the fact that books become the new mass commodity, right?
For the first time, books are produced, edited, manufactured, sold, and then people requested sequels. And that the book, by the end of the 15th century and moving into the 16th century, 1517 being the Protestant Reformation, the book, indicative of the print age, becomes the model in which every commodity is sold, which is the world we live in now with mass consumerism.
And that so that history, and this is one of the reasons why he believed Christianity was really the Christians were the only ones that could fully understand his theories because he argued it's really an unfolding of the word throughout history. That's what he thought he was witnessing or or recognizing through his theories is that um from the logos, from the second person, from Jesus Christ, speaking the world into existence, there has been a transformation of the word. And every time the word or information, and let's put word as a lower w. So, we're not talking about the logos, he does not change. Let's talk about the the diminutive form of the word in which that we participate in.
That is evolving throughout historical time and changing human consciousness and our species.
So, right now in 2026 in America, we have the lowest math scores.
We have This would This even surprised me. Remember I did a stream with FDA, what was it a few years ago on people who don't have internal monologues?
I found an article today in prep for today's stream that is arguing that almost 70% of Americans don't have internal monologues.
Now, this is according to some other study they cited in the in the article, but it claimed that only 30 to 50% of people have a continuous internal monologue in their head.
Shocking.
Shocking for me. I constantly have an internal monologue.
But we're seeing drop in IQ scores for the first time. We're seeing the iPad generation have no social skills whatsoever. We're seeing um literacy rates drop at precipitous levels generation after generation. And so in in in very interesting ways, the world in which Marshall McLuhan sort of forecast or prophesied, we are now living in.
And I would say we're not moving into some sweet spot of a medieval culture cuz one of the things he argued is that the television as a cool media, we'll get into hot cool media, as a cool media is more like a manuscript. You look at a television. You don't read a television.
You don't focus and and scan your eyes and guess the next word and put in logical sequence a series of thoughts and orders. You look at a television.
And just like you would look at a manuscript. And he thought this would sort of change our sensory ratios to bring us hopefully back to some equilibrium. However, what I would argue is that we're moving past the medieval and going totally archaic.
So with the postmodern turn, and that's what postmodernity is really reacting to in many ways is print culture. I mean, what what was the dominant hermeneutic of postmodernism is that there's no authority behind the text. There's no objective meaning in the text.
Uh that's really a response against what he considered print culture because in print culture where Protestantism emerges out of, you get personal interpretations, you get an objective text that is authoritative in itself. The literal meaning is the meaning.
Individualism, um, is forecasted by the typesetting of the printing press. Personal interpretation is elevated over church authority. There's a standardized set of Bibles now.
And that literacy becomes the way in which you commune and interact with the community because before in a in a medieval or pre-modern era, there's many people who are non-literate. They still participated in the community in a different way than which Protestantism demands a sort of literacy.
Right? You must be literate. You must read the Bible. It's a new formation of man which develops this idea of his private conscience.
And so authority totally shifts from the church to the individual in that printing era.
And maybe that's why Protestantism is actually falling apart right now because we are transitioning to essentially a primitive state. Man really is being reoriented towards a much more primitive and that's why we see the rise of Nordic and Germanic paganism, trad Catholicism, and also orthodoxy. I would say trad Catholicism and orthodoxy is an attempt to reach back for what McLuhan highlighted as the perfect equilibrium between oral, traditional, ritual, liturgical culture, symbolic culture, and literate, more philosophical, more logical, more even linearly, um, approached culture put together, brought together in manuscripts in the writings of of the medieval period, but the printing press totally destroys oral culture. That's his argument. Is that the beginning of the printing press is the end of oral culture.
And what we're moving back towards really is totally archaic, as I said, scarification, tattoos, piercings, polyamorous sexual orientations, relativistic morality.
I mean, people are getting into wild transgenderism.
This is not medieval. This is This is archaic. This is totally primitive. And I think if Marshall McLuhan lived long enough, he would see what has become of everything. And I think he would agree that this isn't about a returning to the medieval period. This is a return back to the archaic. And that even aligns with people like the archaic revival theory of Terence McKenna.
He argued that the religion of the future was a form of shamanism.
Now, I don't know if it's going to go that far, but we can certainly see the elements of that process taking place in a serious way.
So, we're going to be hitting on all this different stuff. You know, ideas, for example, um, you know, in in the modern era, the I the 18th and 17th century idea of the unconscious is no longer important because it's all about data storage. You see, if we take serious and that's going to be the big the big part of today's stream is I need you guys to step back, right?
When we listen to McLuhan and you listen to his theories, there must be a stepping away to see this way more abstractly. You got to use your right brain. You got to put patterns together, um, and and see it more holistically.
If technology is the extension of man and every technology we can point to something that man could do without it, but would have been bodily or more natural, if you will, that every technology then is exte- you know, the bifocals, glasses is extension of sight. The telescope is an extension of sight. The microscope is an extension of sight. You see every technology is an extension of human senses.
That if the electric age, as McLuhan argued, is the extension of the human the human nervous system, then data storage is the collective unconscious, and therefore there is nothing that is unconscious anymore. Freudian theories and all this stuff really doesn't matter because man's all that excess data is being stored and can be retrieved through a browser.
Um all technology, as I said, in some way or another, when we think about this, when we think about hot and cool media, a cool media, for example, is one that is high in participation, but low in definition.
You think, "What the hell am I talking about?" Okay, let's compare a radio versus a a telephone.
You think, "Okay, those sound like similar mediums." Telephone is a cool media.
It is high participation cuz you must participate with the other person on the line, right? You have to have a conversation with them. You have to guess and fill in the blanks. They say a word, you have to come to conclusion of what they mean.
It's not totally clear. It's a low resolution, high participation.
But something like the radio is high definition and what he called a hot media. A hot medium is one that fills fully with data one particular sense.
So radio is a hot medium because it fills the ear with with the maximum amount of data.
You must sit and concentrate and focus when dealing with a hot medium.
So a book, for example, is a hot medium because you must sit and focus. You must visually follow and go through that You can't just passively read a book.
I mean, you if you're good at reading, you can do it quickly and it takes less effort, but very different from sitting on the couch and watching a television show where you're receptive, but you're participating in it. And so, the again, all these digital electronic mediums he said is going to make people more involved with everyone's life.
Everyone needs to know where everybody else is.
And he makes this great point. I am going to read this. This is from the Gutenberg Galaxy. This is a great point he makes about what [clears throat] happens as um literate man engages with technological culture. He says, people of literacy and critical bias find the shrill vetements of So, he's talking about de Chardin and his um you know, sort of cosmic Christ, noosphere theory that technology is going to bring about a collective unconsciousness and stuff like this.
As disconcerting of his as his uncritical enthusiasm for the cosmic membrane that has snapped around the globe by the electric dilation of our various senses.
This externalization, talking about technology, especially electric digital technology, of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the noosphere or a technological brain of the world.
Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library, the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside of us, which is what I've talked about with the atrophication of our human abilities, as our senses have gone outside of us, Big Brother goes inside.
Now, he's writing this in the 1960s talking about how as we engage more with electronic technology, the idea of privacy, for example, he said is going to go away. There is no There's no longer going to be personal privacy because we've already given away privacy through the digital electronic technologies. And what we get in return in our most private intimate sphere is Big Brother.
He goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terror is exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and super imposed coexistence.
Kind of what we see right now. It is easy to perceive signs of such panic in Jacques Barzun who manifests himself as a fearless and ferocious Luddite in the house of the intellect. And it goes on and on talking about these interesting theories of how he sees historical developments occur all based on the medium. It's really fascinating.
We're going to get into all this stuff.
So, smash that like, guys.
Really appreciate you all being here.
Uh let me catch up with the chat real quick.
Victor Ziegler, major appreciation to you, my brother. You threw in $10 before the stream even started along with Blink 444. He says, "Let's get it raining pay piggies." Interesting topic. Well, thank you, Victor.
Um and how many of you guys have heard of Marshall McLuhan before? How many of you guys have even listened to Marshall McLuhan talk before?
It's It's really fascinating stuff. I'm curious in the chat how many of you guys were even familiar with his ideas.
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Um I know people have wanting Basil the Bulgar Slayer, all types of stuff. So, we'll see we'll see how things go.
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Um, all right.
I want to begin by giving you a little bit of a straight intro so you can hear Marshall McLuhan, you know, the you can hear it for yourself. Uh, let me see, where is that window?
Uh, here we go.
And so, we're not going to watch this whole documentary. This is a great great sort of film. I was thinking about even uploading it to the channel. I think it's uncopyrighted. So, this this movie {slash} documentary's from 1967.
1967.
And it's Marshall McLuhan, it's titled The Medium Is the Massage, which was actually a misprint of his book Medium Is the Message. They mistakenly put uh, an A instead of an E, and he kept it cuz he thought medium truly is massaging our sensory ratios, and it really is part of the mass age.
So, he actually did a whole play on it.
But, this is the documentary related to it. But, we're going to get into a bunch of stuff from McLuhan. So, this will just give you a sort of taste. Now, remember, at the time of McLuhan's life, he was a famous intellectual.
And if you watch some of the content, it really makes you think how dumbed down American culture is because they used to have incredible intellectuals on to like debate topics on public television. Now, you get, you know, Jersey Shore and Love Island or whatever people are watching nowadays. So, the quality of content, although he's focusing on, again, the medium, but the quality of content has definitely declined. There's so many Again, we'll watch some of these interviews today. Such higher tier than anything we see today, but this is just a little snippet from The Medium is the Massage documentary of Marshall McLuhan.
>> The family circle has widened, Mom and Dad.
The world pool of information constantly pouring in on your closely knit family is influencing them a lot more than you think.
The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once.
Ours is a brand new world of all-at-onceness.
Time, in a sense, has ceased, and space has vanished.
Like primitives, >> [music] >> we now live in a global village of our own making.
A simultaneous happening.
>> Global village is not created by the motor car or even by the airplane. It's created by instant electronic information movement.
The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose in everybody else's business.
The global village is a world in which you don't necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else's business.
And much involvement in everybody else's life. It's a sort of Ann Landers column written large. And it doesn't necessarily mean harmony, peace, and quiet, but it does mean huge involvement in everybody's everybody else's affairs. And so the global village is as big as the planet and as small as uh the village post office.
>> We now share too much about each other to be strangers to each other.
>> For example, in the age of the information explosion all the walls go out between age groups, ethnic groups between family groups, nation national groups, between economies. The walls all go out. People suddenly have to adjust themselves to this new proximity, this new interrelationship.
And uh merely to tell them that this has happened isn't very helpful for uh helpful. What they need to know is if it is happening, what does it mean to me? For example, in the matter of say automation jobs.
Uh information at electric speeds blows out all the uh partitions between jobs, involves people in firms in uh operations that uh are total and in inclusive so that big business has discovered that instead of a person occupying a little specialist slot into the business, he uh it's better to be work with small teams that can take overall cognizance and consideration of the whole operation of the firm.
And uh come up with all sorts of new solutions for it up uh for factors that affect the entire operation of the firm. Instead of just going ahead doing their little job uh in the old uh pattern.
Same way with private lives.
Uh what had formerly been private life tends to become more and more corporate.
>> Today, the information level of education in the classroom is far below the level of modern home environment of electronic information.
>> The reason that the 19th century child could take the curriculum and the uh school room of his time with some seriousness was that he knew there was a considerable relation between what was going on in the school room and what was going on outside. That is no longer true. We still go on 19th century style with classified subjects uh instruction by stenciling on brain pans and regurgitating in exam form. This is all 19th century factory system uh school work. But uh well the it's no longer supported by the outside environment.
The electronic environment makes an information level outside the school room that is far higher than the information level inside the school room. In the 19th century, the knowledge inside the school room was higher than the knowledge outside.
Today, it is reversed. And the child knows that in going to school, he is in a sense interrupting his education.
>> Education must >> Now, think about that. Is that not fascinating? And that's so true today.
He's highlighting that back in the 19th century, the 1800s, when a school child went to a classroom, there was more information and knowledge and education inside that classroom than the outside world. But now, that's not the case. And this is why I think universities and colleges are in a major major problematic spot moving forward because with the world of AI, I mean and if you just use AI as a uh you know, data acquisition tool and device, we're not saying that it the AI's actually educating you or whatever.
But I mean, homeschooling with digital technologies, why do you need to go to a classroom? And everybody knows that when you go to college, you know, you're basically trying to get a degree and the information that you learn in university, how applicable and useful that is to your career, highly dubious. They really don't mean anything other than prestige. They're a requirement for your resume. Right?
And that's the age that we live in now.
I mean, what is education, higher education, going to look like in 20 years, 10 years, 10 20 years?
The universities are going to be absolutely hurting because why would you spend $50,000 a year to go to some major university or institution when you know that even the information, because of the bureaucracy and the institutional structure, it's so slow-moving, it actually cannot provide you with the most adequate information for whatever the specialty that you want to learn.
And part of it is also the breakdown of print culture. One of the things that McLuhan talks about is that print culture created specialization.
So, when we think about the modern university and how you have a historian and a philosopher and basically all this break up into uh the different departments, and then you have gender studies departments and all this different stuff.
That specialization was part of print culture, but as print culture dies, which is what he's talking about, it's not that literacy ends, right? So, don't confuse literacy with print culture.
Print culture is manufactured printing press culture, books, standardized books.
That that specialization process is going to go away and that we're going to return back to really what the point of knowledge is, back to the times of Odysseus, back during the medieval period. It was it had to do with wits.
It had to do with wisdom. It had to do with your ability to solve problems was your example of knowledge. This is indicative in in um in Odysseus.
When you read that, he he was a witful character who who figured out how to get around the Cyclops and and navigate himself through the world. That is not, again, because print culture changed it or changed our culture and society, knowledge then is associated with someone who's credentialed and specializes in one particular field.
Therefore, from a more pre-modern perspective, that person, unless well-rounded in other ways, lacks wisdom. Lacks true knowledge. They're not a fully formed, well-rounded individual, which was the pre-modern goal for every man. The goal was not for you to just know of tons of information on, you know, uh microorganisms, or whatever it may be. It was to have a better understanding of everything, virtue, yeah, knowledge, whether be biological or mathematical, whatever is that you're into, but social relationships, being able to engage with people, being responsible to the community, or all that stuff is pre-modern and what he is arguing was lost through print culture and this radical individualism, but is going to return in tribal forms through the electronic age.
>> Shift from stenciled instruction to discovery, probing and exploration.
The young today want roles. They want total involvement now, rather than just fragmented, specialized jobs or goals.
How can our youth look forward to a specialized job when the computer world of automation may eliminate that job?
>> The reason that our educational system is in crisis is because we don't know how to stop this flow of data, this one-way flow of data onto the brain pans of the unfortunate, uh and helpless, uh students.
>> All media or technologies work us over completely.
They are so permeating throughout, and their personal, political, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched.
>> Any new medium changes the image we have of our own bodies.
For example, the motor car is a vast extension of our feet, and and uh it's uh it turns you into a paraplegic with uh in a powered armchairs at work. Uh but they change is completely the image we have of our bodies.
With television, the image we have of our bodies is profoundly altered by the fact that the image goes inside us, and this has had a profound effect on the motor car.
The safety car is partly the response uh that or the effect of television on the motor car.
Uh involvement in the motor car in a new way makes people feel that it's something they ought to be able to control, and in which the from which they might expect a certain degree of safety.
Uh this is very much a TV effect on motor car. It may destroy the motor car.
But the image we have of our own bodies is uh completely altered by any new medium. Color television is not the old black and white television with color added. It is a new medium. It completely alters the image we have of ourselves. Our body precepts, as the psychologists say.
Our body precept is something of which we are always unconscious.
Your body precept changes directly with any alteration in temperature, any alter- any any alteration in input through any of the senses affects your body image.
Of this you are completely unaware.
Only a psychiatrist can really uh make you aware of the image you have of your own body.
Only >> And we have so much to get into. I mean, one of the fascinating ones he talks about violence as a quest for identity.
We've talked about the meaning crisis.
We've talked about the suicide rates and all this stuff. Well, he predicted this.
He's literally talking about what was going to happen in the electronic digital age in 1977.
I have a video here where he predicts the internet in 1966.
And even help handheld devices in which you can order things and communicate and basically fulfill all your desires immediately. All uh the smartphone.
Um and this is a this is a really good interview. Maybe we can get into that later. But we got so much content of Marshall McLuhan to actually go over. So smash that like, guys.
Um it's going to be I'm telling you, put on your thinking caps. There's so much interesting insight that comes from McLuhan. Just tidbits that you wouldn't expect thinking about um media. Again, thinking about how the information acquisition throughout history has totally changed people moving forward.
And essentially, where we're going is back to primitive man. We're going back to a tribal state.
And we can see this with the collective identities. We can see this with the search for meaning. As people are trying to figure out what tribe do they belong in? And there's a frantic rush for it.
So, smash that like. We'll be right back to all that stuff. Before we do though, I need to give a special shout-out to what we're doing over in the Logos Academy.
Uh we're going to be covering the complete Book of Enoch. The complete Book of Enoch. I don't know if you guys have read that before, but the men over at the men's group, we're starting it June 30th. I'm going to put out an ad um on YouTube.
But we're reading the entire Book of the Book of Enoch, which is the Watchers, which is the Parables, which is the Kingdom of Heaven, the Book of Noah. And I'm missing. There's one more. But um if you guys are interested in the Nephilim, you're interested in some of these um non-canonical texts, uh the Orthodox Church has an int- interesting perspective on it. So, we're going to be diving through and reading all five books, the complete books of Enoch, together. So, if you guys are interested in joining that, uh use this link right here. We'd love to have you. Uh I'm going to be promoting uh our reading of the Book of Enoch for the next week and a half. Again, it starts June 30th, Tuesday, June 30th. Again, the men at the Logos Academy meet every single Tuesday. We just met last night, had a great group discussion.
So, if you're looking for a a community of men that are smart, intelligent, Orthodox, and take their lives seriously, whether it be fitness, education, family, career, we do all that stuff. So, check that out. Also, if anyone is interested in my book, since we're talking about technology, you know, the opening quote the opening quote of my book is actually Marshall McLuhan.
The opening quote of my book is this quote. See, Marshall McLuhan never gave his own opinion or his what he deemed the quality of the different mediums, but in a private letter after his death, written in 1969, or or let me say discovered after his death, written in 1969, discovered after his death, a private letter, we have a little key insight into his actual sentiments. And he says this about the electronic world that we're now living in.
Writing in 1969, "Electric information environments, being utterly ethereal, foster the illusion of a world as spiritual substance.
It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body of Christ, a blatant manifestation of the Antichrist. After all, the prince of this world is a very great electric engineer."
>> [clears throat] >> And so, we've talked about how the electric age is very much like an externalization of the news.
It's very much an externalization of well, our mental capacities. I mean, AI is an extension of cognition. Right?
I mean, just look Think of the hit Well, I'll I'll I'll come back to it. Anyways, if you are interested in my book and you'd like to get a signed copy, you can do so with this link right here. Be greatly appreciative. And if anybody has a topic they would like to sponsor, please sponsor a stream with this link right here.
Uh would greatly appreciate that.
Um and I can email you and then get a little bit more clarification on what it is that you would like to sponsor.
So, use that link right there. And if anybody wants to set up a one-on-one session, if you want to get into a private Zoom meeting and talk about whatever your heart desires, we can do so as well with this link right here. And don't forget if anybody's interested in peptides, I've been using BPC-157.
I'm thinking about actually adding a new peptide, but if you want the highest quality peptides, I'm not kidding.
They're a little expensive, but they're very high quality. Use promo code Codel at level up health. c o t e l. Promo code Codel. c o t e l. Incredibly high quality peptides if you're into peptides. Especially for you men, again, we're getting bombarded with you know, estrogen and endocrine disrupting chemicals. You You almost need to be on peptides just to try to get your body back right. And then of course, if you're looking for any Orthodox study Bibles, prayer ropes, incense lamps, whatever it may be, use promo code Codel. c o t e l over at orthodoxdepot.com and get yourself a discount as well. So, all right. I hope some of you guys join us on our reading through the Book of Enoch. But, let me finish again about how technologies are an extension of man and our our actual body in a multitude of ways. I already mentioned the wheel or the car or the plane as an extension of feet.
And so, in so doing, we actually walk less because we use our technologies or our mobile technologies for transportation.
Writing is an extension of memory. But, as Socrates told Plato, you're going to lose your memory. I have an article literally highlighting how people's memories are becoming more deficient.
Marshall McLuhan spoke about how the digital technology were going to limit people's memories and attention spans.
Talking about that in the 1960s.
Absolutely the case.
GPS GPS is an extension of our innate ability to navigate.
But, what we've seen through people becoming dependent on GPS, Google Maps, uh Apple Maps, whatever it may be, is they've lost their own spatial awareness.
I was talking with a a Gen Z guy cuz my wife made a comment about how I always know where north is. I'm I'm very good at memorizing like how many turns we made or what direction that we're typically oriented towards.
And we're talking with a younger Gen Z guy and he's like, "Yeah, I I'm totally dependent. I can't do that. I'm totally dependent on like my smartphone to tell me where I'm at. I just put in the the address and go." And it's like, "Okay, fair enough, but you've atrophied your innate ability to know where you are."
Right?
Um smartphones is an extension of our ability to communicate.
And what you can do is you can communicate uh at distances, mass distances. You can be {quote} present at places that you're actually not present at, right? So, you can go into the live chat. For example, look at us right now. I'm live streaming in Indiana. You guys are watching this somewhere around the world, mostly in the United States.
We are able to participate and communicate while being presently in different places. And so, smartphones as an extension of communication is actually the loss of our presence in the present moment.
Because, yes, you are in the present moment maybe watching this stream or something, but the people around you, the environment you're in. You see there's a there's a loss. So, the fact that you can be present anywhere in the world at any moment means that you've lost your presence in the present moment. AI as an extension of cognition, that's what it is. AI is the externalization of your cognition. And this is why we have so many studies highlighting that people's critical thinking skills are actually depreciating.
Because and there's a whole article I was reading. This was a study I believe out of Oxford or England. They were talking with younger people who use and interact with AI a lot, and they found that they communicate to people like they're talking to an AI because they actually communicate with the AI more than they communicate with people face-to-face.
That is totally McLuhan-esque.
We are being shaped by the technology.
We're actually becoming the technology.
And that's the thing. That's the thing to ponder as we watch all these clips and move through today.
If technology is an extension of man in every aspect, right? AI, smartphones, GPS, writing, the wheel, transportation, what happens to man when every of his attributes is externalized? What is the point of us?
And I'll let you ponder. There's no one answer to it, but it's it's reminiscent of the Matrix where we become biological batteries for the system.
Because what what is the point if your memory is outsourced through the data centers?
If your navigation is outsourced through GPS?
If your ability to critically think is outsourced through the AI?
If your communication is outsourced instead of face-to-face, it's through digital technology or your smartphone?
What ultimately is the purpose of man?
And you see, and this is why it's believed that in the next 10 years there's going to be as there's going to be as many robots on the planet as there are people.
How do we get here? Because the world that we're living in is ultimately dehumanizing.
And we're returning back to essentially a primitive state.
A primitive state in which many of our it's even worse than a primitive state, actually. Because even in the tribal, not the literate medieval era, but in the oral tribal era, pre-literate, they still had community. They still interacted face-to-face. They were still making babies. We don't even do that.
So, it's like we get the pre-literate sensory ratios of tribal man without any of the good stuff that tribal man had. We don't get the community, we don't get the rituals, we don't get the children. We don't even get the tribal identity.
And yet, you're essentially going to be a a person that has low attention span, you know, low critical thinking skills, can't do math, can't read books.
I mean, what's the point of you?
Just to consume, just so that the companies can make money off you, essentially. That's ultimately the plan.
Shout out to Kristen, slow board white board, been a cold crew member for 39 months. Right there with rough hands.
She says, "Putting in my vote for Emperor Basil II, the Bulgar Slayer. Let's go."
That's right, guys. We got to We got to reach some goals if you want to do some community-sponsored streams.
Blink 444 throws another 10. Thank you so much, brother. He says, "Even his discourse on these topics shows how stupid we are, Dal. People are just passions with no higher sense of self.
It's sad."
It's true. No, it's true. When we as we go through today's stream and we listen to And some of this stuff was public television.
That's the most shocking thing is that some of what we're going to see was literally shows on public television. So much more exciting.
Here's another thing to remember is there's really no scholar in the modern era. He's kind of been revived, I would say, in the last 15 years. I've even seen Paglia speak a lot about McLuhan.
But from his popularity, arguably one of the most famous academics in the 1960s, totally forgotten about.
I mean, most people have never even heard of him or read his books. And yet when he was alive, there was I I remember seeing a forward on his first major book was was on Understanding Media.
And um if I remember right, the the intro quote promoting the book said McLuhan, "The most important thinker since Newton, since Einstein, since uh someone else." It was but it was basically highlighting the major thinkers of our time. Uh really the modern era, Western civilization, whatever. But that's how famous this guy was.
And then he was totally forgotten after his death. Now, as I said, he's kind of been revived, but the insights are incredible.
Shout out to Jude, fellow friend, um throws in five. God bless you, brother.
Really appreciate it. He says, "Even at the lower level, public high school is allowing illiteracy and lack of accountability." Absolutely. Absolutely.
But I mean, high school we'll discuss it today. I mean, look at these articles I have.
The the the diminishing attention span, how technology is reshaping our minds.
So, this is before the kids even enter the classroom.
It's highlighting how all the, you know, our attention spans are absolutely dwindling. People cannot focus for extended period of time. They are addicted to the dopamine cycle, notification trap, infinite scroll constantly you know, the infinite scroll has been compared I saw one academic compare it to gambling addicts.
Because when they pull the jackpot, there's this anticipation to win. And that people who are addicted to scrolling have a similar psychological makeup that they're anticipating the next major dopamine hit. What am I going to find? What am I going to find?
And how it's shortening our attention span, smartphones, uh which has led into the rise of short-form content because people can't uh watch things for extended period of time. I mean, if [snorts] you want to get a viral short on YouTube, like if you go into like the how-tos, one of the major goals is to have some of the most interesting and exciting information right off the bat for the first 5 seconds. Because the majority of people determine whether they're going to watch it or not in 1 to 2 seconds while they're scrolling.
They can't even sit for a second and even figure out like what the point of something is. So, uh Uh, for example, if I want to present some type of idea, I need the most shocking part right at the beginning to like startle someone to stay there. But then if you go to explain, they're eventually going to swipe away cuz people can't sit and focus.
But the entire media sphere, social media, is literally focusing on propelling these activities, making sure that again you have like a goldfish memory.
And that you're constantly addicted to this dopamine cycle. So, if you guys, this is true for all of us.
That's what the whole point of today's stream is. It's not like technology's making you primitive and I'm not primitive. It's making all of us more primitive just by the mere engagement with it. That's what so shocking.
Um, so you know, ADHD is on the rise due to technolo- technological use. I mean, the the list goes on. It's ridiculous.
Here's one explaining that the steep drop in math scores. And again talking about how kids can't focus. They give up easily when they can't understand math. They don't have the critical thinking skills.
They can memorize a math equation, but when comes to utilizing principles, like they they can't apply it.
This is on the precipitous decline of IQ. IQ scores are falling and have been for decades, new study finds. You go down here, and where was it?
Anyways, the article highlights that historically generation after generation, noted a research in Norway, that IQ was increasing every 10 years, every decade it would jump a handful of IQ points.
This was study that began in like the 1960s in Norway, which led to the belief that every generation was going to get smarter and smarter. But what has actually become the case is for the last at least 20 years, which ala 2020, ala digital electronic environment that we live in, IQ scores are actually dropping.
The general G factor, which is what the you know, the book The Bell Curve is all about, the general G factor, the average IQ of people is actually declining in the information age, which McLuhan probably would suspect, but most people believed it was going to bring in some rational utopia.
You know, here's the fact that people have no internal monologue.
I don't even know what to make of this, but according to this article here, you can find that uh where do they say it?
Um here it is.
If you're wondering which experience is more common, having an internal monologue versus not having an internal mono, meaning do you do you have a voice that you think through ideas with, that criticizes yourself, that you hear speak in your head? That'd be an internal monologue.
Research shows that most people don't have an internal monologue.
Only 30 to 50% of people have internal monologues, which means up to 70% of people don't have a talkative brain.
What does that mean for our society?
I'm not saying you're you know, your brain needs to be chatting all the time, but that's a little concerning.
Which again makes you think about what what is the you know, 20% of the population are leaders, um 80% of the population are followers, and that's always been the case no matter what historical period.
It leads a little bit credence to that.
If if almost 70% of a population doesn't even have have internal monologue, what is going on?
That's crazy. I find that and maybe that's also developed partly through reading.
Because you know, there's a easy way to identify whether someone is a proficient reader or not.
Do you guys know what it is?
If two people let let I'm going to test you guys. If there's two people reading a a text or an article or something, they're sitting right next to each other.
What is a dead giveaway one of the per one of the persons is not a proficient reader? I'm curious.
What do you guys think? There it's a very obvious easy answer.
What do you guys think it is? What is the thing that identifies someone is not a proficient reader when reading?
Mouth in the words. Exactly. That's exactly it.
Christian, you you win today.
You win today's stream. That's exactly it. So, one of the ways and and McLuhan even spoke about this is a proficient reader, someone who's been trained and can read quickly and proficiently understand what they don't move their mouth cuz they develop the ability to hear the words inside their head.
Someone who is not a proficient reader, you know, really unproficient, they'd probably have to read it out loud, but even less proficient is you'll see them mouth in the words cuz they almost have to speak the words to know what they're saying.
So, that's a huge little clue there.
Um when you're when you know, when you're reading, do your lips move or are you able to actually hear the words in your head? It's a huge sign of whether you're a proficient reader or not.
So, you win, Christian.
Um and then next one, Emojis and hieroglyphics of the 21st century. So, the whole idea that we're becoming more primitive, which is what McLuhan is stating with his global village theory in the electronic environment, is it indicative of the fact that emojis have become a way in which a lot of people communicate with.
So, this article here, this is a uh uh University of California Long Beach blog article. So, this is academic article talks a little bit about the history of hieroglyphics, deciphering, and then emojis and hieroglyphic.
Talking about how um emojis, now this is an article that's almost promoting the idea that this is a cool cool new thing.
But, uh emojis are being used as a primary form of communication by a lot of people, which is indicative of returning back to essentially an Egyptian hieroglyphic form of language communication.
And so, very very interesting that um again, all this stuff correlates with McLuhan's ideas.
Harvard, um what's driving decline in US literacy rates? Well, again, they talk about all the different types of things. Uh technology's mentioned briefly, but it's not considered one of the main purposes.
It's, you know, economic status and access, which isn't the case. It's not the case. I mean, imagine this, America was more literate in the early 20th century than it is now.
It's one of the fascinating things about American history is that in the early 20th century, the majority of people were literate.
The vast majority of people were literate. And they could actually read and understand something.
There were now having to Jude's point, people graduating from high school they don't even have basic math skills.
I mean, I remember what this was a long a stream long time ago, but we covered LeBron James' school in Akron, Ohio, you know.
And it's for essentially inner-city black kids.
And I forget how many years of operation been like five or seven years and they didn't have a single kid graduate at a proficient math level or reading level.
Which again, I don't know how literate LeBron James is. Remember when he was reading Malcolm X and he was on the same page for like multiple months whenever he was seen in the locker room. He was holding Malcolm X like he's you know, a black patriot. Anyways, I I I digress, but um literacy rates, people cannot read. And then of course, we have the iPad generation.
And so this article talks about all these teachers dealing with iPad kids and how they can't develop basic skills of patience, containing themselves long enough to manage something difficult or frustrating.
Um if a device is put in front of a child the minute they start to fret or find things difficult, then that's the only way they learn to cope with difficult things. And there was a viral I played this uh a while ago. There was a viral video of this chick who was a substitute >> promise >> who was a teacher >> promise >> um talking about her experience with iPad generation kids.
I don't know if you guys saw this, but check it out.
>> that we are not going to raise iPad children. Please.
>> As a Gen Z who majored in education for one semester and worked in child care for about eight or nine years and who has many younger relatives, I think I speak for many of us when I say that Gen Alpha or the iPad kid generation is so far an absolute terrifying nightmare to deal with. And I want to talk about this today. And I know people say this about every young generation, it's kind of like a rite of passage for aging, but it is an epidemic to the point where teachers who have taught their entire lives are just up and quitting their jobs now because they can't handle these kids anymore. And yes, of course there are other issues like benefits and pay, but the main reason when pulled for most teachers is the children's behavior of recent years. Main issues we're finding with Gen Alpha, which to be clear was born between 2010 and 2025, and most of their parents are either millennials or Gen Xers, is that they're having extreme social issues and they have like little to no mannerisms. The iPad kids are out of control. I'm not lying when I tell you as someone who used to nanny for a lot of families, I have some crazy stories, but the families that were the easiest to manage were the families that extremely controlled screen time for their kids. I think a big issue is that these kids are using screens at a rate we've never historically seen before and these parents are replacing like parenting and babysitters with iPads.
Like even Z didn't have this level [clears throat] of access to the internet quite. We all know that all this screen time is bad for everyone in society, but we're directly seeing that in things like this generation as a whole is having reduced attention span and concentration. So that might be why like ADHD diagnosis seem to be going up and up. They spend less time socializing in person and this one I've the most with the kids in my life is less development of creativity and imagination. Kids I've watched over the years have no interest in coloring and building and they just want to sit on their iPads and watch Netflix and play The worst families I've ever had to nanny for were the families that allowed their kid like unregulated access to their iPads and whatnot because they just wanted to be on those 24/7 and it was a nightmare. These kids didn't want to go and play outside.
>> Okay, so you get the idea. I can't listen to her voice much more, but you get the idea. It's it's a dire situation. The children are actually absolutely being um well evolving into a sort of a new creature.
I mean, what humans in history were had lacked basic basic social skills, lacked basic basic attention spans, and basically got upset and had a little hissy fit if anything didn't go according to plan or if any little frustration occurred.
The These are not people that build society. These are not people that deal with, you know, serious problems. So, um now we're going to move We're going to get into a bunch of McLuhan stuff now.
And this is him talking about how the electronic age is an age in which people are trying to find their identity.
And that it's actually an age of a lot of violence, especially among different groups. So, check this out.
>> In the early '50s, you predicted that the world is becoming a global village.
We're going back into the bicameral mind, which is tribal, collective, without any individual consciousness.
But it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this this this tribal world is not friendly.
Oh, no. Tribal people are One of their main kinds of sport is a sort of butchering each other. It's you know, it's a It's a full-time sport in tribal societies.
But I had some ideas. We got global and tribal >> I love that.
>> [gasps] >> He >> [laughter] >> No, it's actually a full-time sport.
They butcher each other.
>> We you know, we were going to become The closer we get together, the more you like each other.
>> Yeah.
>> There's no evidence of that in any situation that we we've ever heard of.
But when people get close together, they get more and more savagely impatient with each other.
>> Well, why is that? Because of the nature of man or >> No, his tolerance is tested in that in those narrow circumstances very much.
Village people aren't that much in love with each other.
And the global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
>> Do you see any pattern of this in for example the desires of Quebec to separate?
>> I I should think that they are feeling very abrasive about the English community and about the the way they felt the the American South felt about the Yankee North 100 years ago.
>> And is this distancing is this going to be a pattern right around the world?
>> Apparently separatisms are very frequent all over the globe at the present time.
Every country in the world is loaded with regionalistic nationalistic little groups.
>> But in Quebec for example latest define it as the the quest for identity.
>> As all forms of violence are a quest for identity. When you live out on the frontier you have no identity. You're a nobody.
Therefore you get very tough.
You have to prove that you are somebody.
And so you become a very violent.
And so identity has always accompanied by violence.
This seems paradoxical to you?
That >> And it also makes sense in regard to the online debate sphere, right? The online debate sphere is a form of rhetorical violence without physical violence.
And it makes sense why it's becoming so popular right now is because it's a way for people to establish their identities, whether it be political orientations, all the theological debates.
It's a way for people to delineate their tribe from another tribe through rhetorical violence in one way or another or logical violence through their arguments and the execution.
>> So ordinary ordinary people find the need for violence as they lose their identities.
So it's only the threat to people's identity that makes them a violent.
Terrorists, hijackers, these are people minus identity.
They are determined to make it somehow to get coverage, to get noticed.
>> And all this is somehow an effect of the electronic age?
>> Oh, no. But people in in in all times have been this way. But in our time, when things happen very quickly, there's very little time to adjust to new situations at the speed of light.
There's very little time to get accustomed to anything.
One of the big uh violent make violence makers of the of our of our century has been radio.
Uh Hitler was entirely a radio man and a tribal man.
>> And what does television do then to that tribal man?
>> Well, I don't think Hitler would have lasted long on TV. Like Senator Joe McCarthy, he would have looked foolish.
He was uh a very hot character and uh like Nixon made Nixon made a very bad image on television. He was far too hot a character.
Much better on radio or on uh on on the movies, not bad on the movies, which will take quite hot characters.
But Nixon >> And I'm going to introduce this hot-cold delineation here after this video. But what he's talking about is the medium.
Remember, cool media is high in participation but low resolution, low definition. So if you're a hot character, meaning what what in regards to the Nixon example, his point is that Nixon comes across too serious, too stern, too authoritative for the television medium.
And that the television medium is a much more relaxed medium. So if you are that type of hot character person, what medium you would use would be a book, a radio, hot mediums in which you can have high-definition resolution on this particular content, whatever it may be.
So that's what he's talking about is between the a hot individual utilizing a cool medium is not effective. So, using the example of Hitler, his speeches were so intense that if you watched it on television, him flailing his arms around, maybe he would look foolish.
People would make fun of him. But if you're only hearing his speech, one, it's a hot medium, so it's full data sensorium for the ear.
And you have to sit and focus and concentrate. And when you hear it, you know, a hot person coming through a hot medium is way more effective.
>> So, what happens on TV?
The the the the investigations now of the the CIA and the FBI and even our own, God forbid, our CMP. Is this has this anything to do with the electronic age?
>> Well, yes, because it we now have the means to keep everybody under surveillance.
And then no matter what part of the world they're in, we can put uh them under surveillance.
It has become one of the main occupations of mankind, just watching other people and keeping a record of their goings-on.
>> And invading privacy.
>> Invading privacy, in fact, just ignoring it. It's It's uh everybody has become porous.
They They got They got the light the light in the in the message to go right through us. As By the way, at this moment, >> Right.
>> uh we >> When he's talking about porous, he's talking about in the electric age, your privacy, your interior self is externalized, which we're doing through social media, you know, all the apps and the communication devices we use. And he says, "What fills that void is Big Brother. It's It's the propaganda. It's the mass media network. This is what Then we have an internal fight within ourselves to prevent, essentially, the collective front of the zeitgeist of the world becoming our own."
>> We are on the air and we on the air we do not have any physical body.
When you're on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don't have a physical body. You're just an image on on air.
When you don't have a physical body, you're a disincarnate being.
You have a very different relation to the world around you.
And this, I think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age.
It has deprived people really of their private identity.
>> So, that's what this is doing to me?
>> Yes.
Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light.
It's called being mass man.
By the way, one of the big marks of the loss of identity is nostalgia.
And so, revivals on all hands in every in every phase of life today.
Revivals of clothing, of dances, of music, of shows, of everything. We live by the revival.
It tells us who we are or were.
>> Do you feel that the fact that you and I are have enjoyed the rewards of literacy, that we are more protected against television than the job?
>> Yes, I think you get a certain immunity.
Just as you get a certain immunity from booze by literacy. The The man The literate man can carry his liquor. The tribal man cannot.
That's why in the Muslim world or in the in the native world, you cannot booze is impossible. It's the demon rum.
However, literacy also though makes us very accessible to ideas and propaganda.
The literate man is the natural sucker for propaganda.
You cannot propagandize a native.
You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.
Therefore, propaganda is our Achilles' heel. It's our weak point.
We will buy anything if it's got a good hard sell tied to it.
>> What now, briefly, is this thing called media ecology?
>> It means arranging various media to help each other so they won't cancel each other out.
To buttress one medium with another. The You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television.
>> Mhm.
>> But television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages.
And so, uh you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others.
And therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one canceling the other out.
>> seconds, I've got one question for you.
How much television do you watch?
>> Whenever I get a chance.
>> [laughter] >> Not too often.
>> So, we're going to explain a little bit of his ideas and get back. We have so many videos, but you see how interesting it is. Just like him talking about alcohol, how it affects literate man versus tribal man very differently. And including propaganda. If you can't read, you know, printed propaganda doesn't isn't as effective. Now, in a tribal sensory ratio, hearing the propaganda, being forced by the collective expectations, is going to demand that that person acquiesce. And they're more likely to. So, in the sense of communal forcement, the literate man, who is the man of individualism, is more likely to say no to it. Which is an interesting thing. I I'm curious how many literate, non-literate people, or their levels of literacy, got the COVID jab.
It's an interesting question because the literate man's going to have more of a critical thinking skill.
I don't know. Interesting stuff.
So, let let's I just want to introduce these ideas. We're going to get right back to McLuhan. I'm not going to read all this stuff to you. If you want access to these study guides, they're all available over at the Logos Academy.
I've already introduced Marshall McLuhan.
Um lived from 1911 to 1980. Founder of media ecology, which he just talked about, looking at how the different medias work with each other and harmonize.
Major ideas are already said, technologies are extensions of man. And just what I laid out at the beginning here, wheel, foot, writing, memory, GPS, navigation, spatial awareness, um smartphone communication, AI cognition. Every time we create a new technology, a new medium of information, we externalize a piece of ourselves in it.
And in in turn, we weaken and atrophy natural abilities within ourselves.
So, he was adamant that technology is never neutral.
Every gain has a hidden cost. We adapt ourselves to the inventions, and eventually technology becomes invisible.
So, he argued that print culture, the effects of print culture, now speaking of the effects of television culture, is so difficult for us to see because we are fish swimming in the water. That when the new media arises, like AI right now, it's shocking. People decide, do I want to use it? Do I want not want to use it? He says, once it's normalized, people no longer can see the effects of it. They can't even see their full participation with it.
So, he talks about how every technology affects the human sensorium, your sensory ratios, as he calls. So, oral culture, hearing dominant, strong memory, great memories, oral culture people, ritual oriented, community oriented, and active participation in the community and reality. Reality is a mystery. Print culture. So, when we say print culture, we're speaking after the Gutenberg printing press, late 1400s.
Vision dominates, logic dominates, analysis, individualism, and linear thinking.
Now, once we get into the electronic age, everything is simultaneous awareness.
It's the global village. All activity, we participate. He talks about how in the future we would we would watch global spectacles together ala Ukraine Russia war ala the Iran war ala Israel's genocide in Gaza.
We the world now watches a sort of global culture through the electronic age. So all events are happening simultaneous doesn't matter if it's in Beijing or Rio de Janeiro or LA, it's all happening at the same time through these.
So he highlights um it's network oriented and he says it becomes network oriented as opposed to hierarchical. So he highlighted that both oral and print culture before the electronic culture was hierarchical.
Now pre-modern you could say patriarchal. So he says in the new electronic age it's network oriented. It's about a network a flattening of hierarchy and the network orientation. It is highly participation ala the post-modern turn, emotional immediacy, it's emotive, it's feminine, gynocentric world and constant stimulation of the body, constant stimulation of the individual.
And so we've already kind of highlighted the evolution of media tribal man, literate man and he's he highlights literate man as the ultimate balance.
This is the medieval period. This is the Byzantine, this is you know, the Catholic medieval ages. He says the medieval Christian era was ultimately the best equilibrium because it was founded in an oral culture before the Bible was you know, fully put together through the councils.
But because it was a literate people, they were able to get the benefits of literate culture. For example, and I'll show you here in just a few speaking specifically about Christianity.
Um once we get the Gutenberg printing press, it produces rationality, individualism, science, nationalism, specialization, ala many of the features of modernity.
So, he says the printing press created the modern Western mind. Now, the electric age, he argues, goes from telegraph, telephone, radio, television, internet to AI. Now, I'm I'm adding the internet and the AI. He He didn't live for that.
But, it's networks over hierarchies, patterns over sequence. We're We're literate man saw a sequential understanding of events, participation over observation. He argues that print man, as opposed to oral man, um was more of an observer than a participant, ala Protestantism. Cuz he as I laid out in the opening, he believes that Protestantism cannot exist without the printing press.
Not that the printing press allowed Protestantism to spread, the printing press and the idea of the book actually gave the mental contours to allow Protestantism to seem true.
Um and this all leads to his argument about the global village. Electronic communication transforms the entire planet into a single communicative environment. McLuhan did not believe this would produce peace, rather he believed it would create the emotional dynamics of tribal villages on a global scale, which is exactly what we see online with our siloing of communities, the constant conflict, how the algorithm incentivizes conflict, drama, negativity.
So, he said the the characteristics of the global village, before he fully, you know, believed it was in in full force, was instant communication, shared experiences, emotional contagion, mass formation psychosis, COVID, you know, Dr. um um Robert Malone. Tribalism, loss of privacy. This was the interesting thing is that in the global village, you will have no privacy, which it sounds like something the WEF would tell us.
Constant participation.
Now, in regards to hot and cool media, cuz he's going to be mentioning this in the videos that we watch moving forward.
Hot media, as I said, is high definition, low individual participation, but high definition, meaning it takes attention, and it fills one of your senses. So, a book fills your visual sense.
Uh radio fills your auditory sense.
Film, photography. He You know, he talked about how photographs are high resolution, that you can take one photograph and sit there and stare at it for minutes and find new things, new features.
So, a hot media produces focus, concentration, and linear reasoning.
Cool media are low definition, that there's a lot that you have to fill in while you observe it, but it's high participation because you have to fill in. So, if you're in a conversation with someone, you're watching the way their face moves, their hand moves, their emotional output, it's more than just the single words coming through. So, you have to then participate. You have to fill in the blank. So, we do that with conversation, telephone, early television, discussion. He said these are low definition, high participation, cool medias.
And they produce in participation, interaction, pattern recognition, and collaboration.
And he said this is the return of the tribal consciousness.
So, we've already kind of laid that out.
The great irony is that most technologically advanced civilization increasingly thinks the oldest civilizati- thinks like the oldest civilizations, but through electronic networks rather than face-to-face communities.
Now, in regards to medieval Christianity, he argues that it it it's an acoustic civilization. Very interesting stuff. One of McLuhan's recurring observation that medieval Christianity remained deeply shaped by oral culture despite possessing writing.
This is why he talks about it having a perfect equilibrium.
Yet average Christian experience, they had liturgy, chanting, preaching, iconography, stained glass, architecture, ritual, sacred calendars, pilgrimage, communal worship. Religion was fundamentally participatory ala pre-modern.
Right? This is the pre-modern understanding of religion. It's mystical, it's participatory, rather than informational, which Protestantism is. People did not primarily study religion. They inhabited it. It had a sacred sacramental world. So, I highlighted that although McLuhan seldom used Eastern Orthodox language or spoke specifically about Byzantium, there's a few references I found.
His understanding of medieval consciousness closely resembles what Orthodox theologians describe as a sacramental vision of reality.
And therefore, um he highlights oral religion. Religion is primarily experience. Truth is lives in ritual.
It's memory. It's liturgy. It's story.
It's participation. Knowledge is embodied. Authority is communal. Faith is lived rather than analyzed. They don't They don't second-guess and study everything about their faith. Literate religion, which is what he believed medieval Christianity is, this perfect equilibrium.
Writing preserves the revelation.
Doctrine becomes increasingly systematic. Scripture becomes fixed.
Theological reflection expands. Creeds become possible. History becomes preserved uh uh uh uh perceived and preserved. They're able to actually see history in a new way because they can write about it. And the church develops increasingly sophisticated intellectual traditions.
Print religion, Protestantism, dramatically changes the pre-modern world. Everything is changed with the the printing press. And this is why Protestantism exists. That's why Protestantism as a religion is so anomalous. Print dramatically changes religion. Faith becomes increasingly textual. Private reading expands.
Individual interpretation expands.
Doctrinal precision increases.
Confessional divisions multiply.
Religion becomes increasingly intellectualized.
Personal belief gradually eclipses communal participation.
And then you get into the uh electric religion. Digital religion is kind of where we're at where although McLuhan died before the internet, his framework extends naturally into the digital age.
Religion increasingly becomes algorithmic algorithmic, fragmented, personalized, continuous, performative, and networked.
So, uh that was just a little bit of I wanted to lay those ideas out as we now go back and watch more interviews of McLuhan so you have a basic understanding of what it is he's talking about in some of these interviews. Now, this is a great interview from uh 1977. This is on Australian Broadcasting channel or ABC in Australia.
There's a great uh CBC videos of McLuhan cuz he was Canadian, but I cannot play any of the CBC videos because they will copyright strike your stream. So, another boo Canada. But this is a great little interview. It's a three-parter.
So, we'll we'll walk through it.
>> When future historians look back on the 20th century, it's almost certain that one of the statements um from this era which they will treasure for posterity is the medium is the message.
Like most of Marshall McLuhan's statements, it's pithy, apparently simple, and provocative to the point of being outrageous.
Another of his propositions is that some media are cool and some are hot.
Marshall McLuhan studies the media as a way of understanding what it is that makes us live in the way we do.
As a way of understanding society itself.
He's concerned with all media, but he's best known for his work on the electronic media, particularly radio and television.
He sees them as the extension of our central nervous system.
And argues that they're leading to an electrical re-tribalization of the West.
If there is a Mr. Electric of the 20th century, it's Marshall McLuhan.
More formally, he's professor of English in the University of Toronto, Canada.
And director of the Center for Culture and Technology there.
Among Professor McLuhan's books are The Mechanical Bride, War and Peace in the Global Village, and of course, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
Marshall McLuhan has been brought to Australia by the Sydney radio station 2SM to address a seminar on the commercial broadcasting and music industries.
Earlier tonight, Professor McLuhan gave a speech >> I think it promotes illiteracy. And do you think that's a bad thing?
>> Uh I don't think it promotes illiteracy. I think it creates another form of awareness.
Uh literacy had a very strange antecedents, very strange effects on people.
And uh we're only beginning to notice what those effects were now that it tends to be pushed aside.
Uh the uh Literacy uh as a form of awareness is uh a highly specialist and objective sort of thing. You can stand back and the literate man can stand back objectively and look at situations. The TV person has no objectivity at all.
>> But but does television say promote illiteracy or doesn't it?
>> It tends to uh create uh totally different kind of awareness, which is rather that of involvement. Literacy is objective.
Uh is subjective, totally involving. In fact, the people who watch a lot of television or listen to a lot of radio say, do do do they read more or read less or or do >> I think radio people are far more literate than TV people.
But um read No, I I >> And this is so interesting cuz when we're talking about the boomers and the boomer generation, remember that they're the first generation to grow up with television.
And so when he's talking about the differences between the objectivity of literate man versus television man, we have to realize that that's part of the cultural problem, right? That everybody is living in this sort of subjectivist world and this relativistic morality. Well, the boomers in a way were already conditioned through the medium, through the medium of television to be so subjectivist oriented. It makes sense why the counterculture and America turned out the way they did. It had to do with the medium in which they were acquiring information.
>> I I just uh This is uh complementarity of the media. But the um I don't I personally have avoided making value judgments because I've long ago discovered that value judgments are so personal that it confuses people enormously.
>> Yes, but that's that is a kind of value judgment in itself, isn't it?
>> Uh not of a medium, but of people.
And uh people are very diversified.
It's long It's been known for a long time that uh a reader For example, the word read to read means to guess.
Look it up in the big dictionary.
The word read then means to guess, and reading is actually an activity of rapid guessing.
Because any word any word it so many meanings, including the word reading, many many meanings, that to select one in a context of other words requires very rapid guessing.
That's why a good reader tends to be a very quick decision-maker.
And a a good reader, a highly literate person, tends to be a good executive.
Because he has to make decisions very fast while reading.
Uh and so the the very nature of reading uh calls for quick decisions and guessing.
And the um the what's what the word means, to guess.
Write down.
>> One last point for me. You said that advertising is the folk art of the 20th century. In what sense is it an an art?
>> I I think it is a a very great art form.
It's not a private art form, it's corporate.
Um but it is uh the concern of the um advertiser is to make an effect.
The any painter, uh any any artist, any musician, sets out to create an effect.
He sets a trap to catch somebody's attention.
>> Now, pay attention here. He's talking about advertisement as an art, not because he thinks advertisement is a great thing and he loves watching commercials. He's saying, again, that's why he's making this emphasis about the effect, is that every art, whether it be poetry, a song, a painting, a dance, is supposed to impact the the person perceiving it with some type of an emotional effect.
And he's saying that's exactly what advertisement does, and therefore it's in the same category as art, and is indicative of the consumeristic tendencies of modernity. Because we then place some of the uh our most useful resources for the production of advertisement, which shows you that we consider this to be the highest art in our very strange modern world.
>> Any painter, any poet, any musician sets a trap for your attention. That is the nature of art.
>> Do you think there are any masterpieces of advertising or radio or television in the sense that they are real no better >> No better No better in what, 50 years?
Um >> What's your guess?
>> Now, I Well, I know that there are. On the other hand, the ones we we might select now as the great ads of the year would probably not get the same vote 50 years from now. But, the Remember now, Mr. Shakespeare wrote plays that were considered very vulgar and popular entertainment in his own day.
And And uh nobody had any criteria for measuring his greatness at that time.
He was a popular artist.
And TV is a popular folk art.
And we have no criteria for measuring it.
The measurements that we do use are just the results, bottom line. How many sales resulted from this particular ad?
But, that's box office.
>> Thank you. Now, someone from the audience, please.
>> Yes.
>> I have a question for you.
If If the medium is the message, and it doesn't matter what we say on TV, why are we all here tonight?
And why am I asking this question?
>> [laughter] >> I didn't [clears throat] I didn't say it didn't matter what you asked on TV. I said that the effect of TV, the message of TV is quite independent of the program.
That is, there's a huge technology involved in TV, which surrounds you physically.
And the effect of that huge service environment on you personally is vast.
The effect of the program is incidental.
Please, would you share your undoubted enthusiasm by having your hands up? It really does make it much easier if I can see them. Sorry to be Yes.
>> Uh Mr. McLuhan, those of us who are McLuhan students know how clearly you define a problem for us. We also know that very often you point to an answer, too.
Earlier in your talk this evening, you spoke about the search for identity through violence. I think we'd all agree now if if we ever could afford violence, we can as weaponry becomes more efficient, we can no longer corporately, your word, afford violence. So, what do you suggest as alternatives that we offer instead of the search for identity through violence?
>> Dialogue.
The alternative to violence is dialogue, which is a kind of encounter interface with others, people, and situations. Um but yes, we we live in a world in which we have so much power.
Uh in the old days, you could fire a pull a trigger on a revolver and hurt people, but [clears throat] today, when you trigger these vast media that we use, you are manipulating entire populations.
And the kinds of violence that we can now exert collectively are such as to require the situation to cool the right down cool cool cool.
And I we have, you know, by means of the overkill, we have created a kind of universal peace in the world.
The The means of destruction are so vast it at our command that we it war becomes unthinkable.
So, in the same way, people be are cooled off by media and by situations which require dialogue rather than just self-expression. Violence is a kind of self-expression.
And so that um the uh quest for identity Uh the uh person who is struggling who am I.
Uh by all sorts of maladjustments, all sorts of quarrels, all sorts of encounters.
Uh such a person is a social nuisance, of course.
But uh quest the quest for identity goes along with this bumping into other people in order to get find out who who am I, how much power can I exert, how much identity do can I discover that I possess by simply banging into other people. And uh so that's what I had in mind when I said that the quest for identity is always a violent quest.
It's a series of adventures and encounters that create all sorts of disturbance.
>> And the same could be true with guarding the identity of nation-states.
I mean, nations, you know, what's the difference between Japan and China?
Well, those identities were established, of course, culture, language, history, but it's always been a violent confrontation. And you can find that true with your European identities, African identities. So his point, even though she was making a more specific example and he's making a more abstract, general response that all identity in some way has formed the contours due to violent encounters.
>> I suppose I don't think you have to go very far in literature for examples of it, I suppose.
Don Quixote.
Uh is a a great popular hero and Flash Gordon.
And uh Superman.
But we're now beginning to get a I'm thinking now of this new show, the Star War that is the new Hollywood thing that is based on Flash Gordon comics.
Um the Bionic Man, Bionic Woman. These are vicarious forms of violence in which young people are trying to discover who am I?
I once asked to my granddaughter uh one of our granddaughters who was then six, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And she said instantly, "Bionic Woman."
Um this is a kind of violence that permits uh one to discover who you are.
Um I was using violence in a rather large sense of simply encounter, abrasive encounters.
>> Yes.
In terms of the uh figure-ground thesis that you put forward in City as Classroom, Professor, in what way would the message uh that you've given us tonight be different if this meeting, instead of being here in the Sydney Hilton Hotel, were, say, in the center of the Sydney Cricket Ground?
>> Well, cricket is a very organized form of violence.
I I would insist on studying the game of cricket as a manifestation of the controlled forms of violence in the community.
Um baseball or football, any kind of sport is a dramatization of the typical and accepted forms of violence in the business community.
And so you can learn an enormous amount about the business community by studying the rules and procedures in cricket or baseball or golf, as far as that goes.
The These are all these games are huge uh ways of discovering dramatizing what the society you are in is all about.
By the way, without an audience, uh these games would have no meaning at all.
They have to be played in front of a public in order to acquire their meaning.
A baseball game without an audience would be a rehearsal only, a practice.
The game requires a public, and the public has to resemble a whole cross-section of the community.
I'm very interested in games as dramatizings of violent behavior under control.
>> Just one quick thing you know so much about cricket. The problem is where to put the commercials apparently when you broadcast cricket. There's nowhere to put them.
Does this mean the game has >> Okay, so they're getting ready to get There's two more parts to this, but I want to talk a little bit about uh television. So, this is in chapter 31 of Understanding Media.
It's And I'm just going to read this first paragraph. He says, "Perhaps the most familiar and pathetic effect of the TV image is the posture of children in the early grades. Since TV, children, regardless of eye condition, average about 6 and 1/2 inches from the printed page, meaning they're they're too close to the book.
Our children are striving to carry over to the printed page the all-involving sensory mandate of the TV image. With perfect psychomimetic skill, they carry out the commands of the TV image. They pore, they probe, they slow down, and involve themselves in depth. This is what they had learned to do in the cool iconography of the comic book medium.
So, he highlights that comics, television, both cool mediums, low definition, right? A comic by definition is low low definition, but high participation. and that children are taking the the sensory ratio and then looking at a text and like really analyze instead of being able to read the text.
TV carried the process much further.
Suddenly, they are transferred to the hot print medium with its uniform patterns and fast linear movement.
Pointlessly, they strive to read print in depth. They bring to print all their senses and print rejects them. Print asked for the isolated and stripped-down visual faculty, not for the unified sensorium of a cool media.
So, from there, I want to go to him talking about television as an extending the tactile and then we'll get back to uh the second part of that interview.
>> Like there's no sequence. Everything happens the same instant.
That's acoustic. And uh everything happens at once. There's no continuity.
There's no connection. There's no there's no follow-through. It's just all now. And that by the way is the way any sport is, eh? Sports tend to be like that.
And in terms of the new lingo of the hemispheres, it's all right hemisphere.
Games are all right hemisphere.
And because they involve the whole man and they are all participatory.
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>> And they're all uncertain. They're not uh there's no continuity. There's just all uh uh surprise, unexpectedness.
And total involvement. Is that okay, do you think? The hemisphere thing?
>> Yeah, but I mean the whole thing. No surprise, all spontaneity, no connection, just all at one time. Is that okay for people?
>> Well, okay meaning is it good for people? Yes.
We live in a world where everything is supposed to be one thing at a time, lineal, connected, logical, and goal-oriented. So, obviously, for that left hemisphere world, this new right hemisphere dominance is bad.
We're now living in a world which pushes the right hemisphere way up because it's an all-at-once world. The right hemisphere is an all-at-once, simultaneous world.
So, the right hemisphere >> Guys, help me reach the super chat goal.
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>> Right hemisphere by pushing up into dominance is making the old left hemisphere world, which is our educational establishment, our political establishment, make it look very foolish.
What do you think is the most effective >> Uh uh >> I want I want to use the word effective, but that's not the right word. But, I'm talking about television here. Uh what has the greatest impact on audience?
From Is it TV program?
>> I- I- I- I- Is television best when it covers an event like a space shot or the Olympics or a baseball game? Is it best when it tries to entertain with with movies at night or when it tries to inform with news programs that have filmed things that have already happened?
>> The advantage of coverage of sports events is they are ritualistic.
The group gathered there is participating in a ritual.
Now, the the Olympics were even more a group ritual than the ordinary competitive event in a ball game.
>> Oh.
>> I was And I was thinking about the World Cup that's going on right now when he was mentioning this.
>> or a single ball game, a single event because they had a a corporate meaning.
It was not just a local. It was a a sort of a worldwide meaning.
And this is itself a ritualistic participation in a large process.
Television in fosters and favors a world of corporate participation in ritualistic programming.
It's uh it's not really uh that's what I mean when I say it's a it's a cool medium, it's not a hot medium.
A hot medium can can like a newspaper can cover single events very high intensity.
Uh TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a a rhythm, and a pattern.
And that's why a lot of advertising on TV you see is too hot, too special, too fragmentary.
Doesn't have that ritualistic flow.
But the uh this this the advertisers are aware of this and they're doing a lot to correct that.
But I think that was the the great secret of a thing like the Olympics.
People had the feeling of participating as a group in a great meaningful ritual.
And it didn't much matter who won.
That wasn't the point.
But I think TV tends to foster that type of pattern in events.
>> And so think about the boomers, as we said, the first generation with television, that they have been conditioned that they participate in the global community through these ritualistic programs through the television, which has altered the sense of self in their connectivity to the world.
>> And what you might say it's tends to foster patterns rather than events.
I was here during the tornado or the or the uh hurricane hurricane. And I was amazed at the excitement that that in everybody, expectancy.
And it was covered so thoroughly that it dissipated the storm itself.
The coverage actually got rid of the storm. I think that is one of the functions of news, to blow up a storm so big that it you can dissipate it by coverage.
It's a way of getting rid of the pressure by coverage.
That you can actually dissipate a situation by giving it a maximal coverage.
>> Yeah, that's a great point Scotty is that UFC White House bread and circus ritualistic event. Absolutely. It and you felt if you watch that you're participating in some type of homage to the White House, to the presidency, to America, Freedom 250. It was very ritualistic. Absolutely.
>> So it's very disappointing in from one angle, but it's survival from another.
Now, don't you get into the warning people?
>> Um that's done by rumors.
Not by coverage.
Hints, suggestions.
Uh but the big coverage merely enables people to get together and enjoy the sort of a a group emotion.
It's like uh being at a ballgame.
A big group emotion.
But uh I do think that there that that that taught me that one of the mysteries of coverage is that it's a way of releasing tension and pressure.
>> What would happen if you could shut off television for 30 days in the entire United States of America?
>> Uh it would be a a kind of uh hangover effect. Uh because it's very addictive medium. And do you you take it away and people develop all the uh symptoms of a hangover.
Uh very uncomfortable. It was tried.
Remember the uh the uh a few years ago there two or three years ago they actually paid people not to watch TV for a few months.
>> recall that, but I'm sure it was.
>> Germany. It was in Germany. It was in the in the great in the UK.
And they discovered they had all the withdrawal symptoms of drug addicts.
And uh very uncomfortable. Uh all the all the trauma of of withdrawal of withdrawal symptoms.
The TV is a very very involving medium.
And it is a form of inner trip.
And so, people do miss it.
>> The thought just occurred to me that possibly if you turned off television, there would be a lot of people who >> So, anyways, very interesting that they found that the addictive relationship to television is very similar to alcohol.
Uh, I thought that was fascinating. So, we're going to cut back. We heard him talk specifically about television, how it's a ritualistically cool medium that uh involves a sort of corporate participation. That's why it's so effective. And that when when people are taken from it, they literally have withdrawal symptoms like they do with alcohol.
So, we're going to go back to the 1977 uh Q&A that he's having in Australia.
>> Quite some time ago ago, you said that life was very much like uh driving a car, but only being able to look into the rear vision mirror.
After you've gone, who's going to drive the bus?
>> I made a strange discovery about the rearview mirror, having accused uh a lot of people of living in the rearview mirror.
And having meant by that that they were out of date.
That they were 19th century minds.
I then took another look into the rearview mirror.
On my own. I was not criticized. I did this on my own.
And [snorts] I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that when you look in the rearview mirror, you do not see what has gone past.
You see what is coming.
And the rearview mirror is the foreseeable future.
It is not the past at all.
The title, the phrase rearview mirror, appears to distort the situation.
Most people think of it instinctively from the sound of the phrase it must be the past.
Then in terms of media, of course, the thing that is occupying the foreground in terms of the rearview mirror is nostalgia.
Nostalgia is the name of the game in every in every part of our world today, including the program Roots.
But nostalgia is not it well, it's a kind of rearview mirror if you like, but it's also the shape of things to come.
Uh when people have been stripped off their private identities, they develop huge nostalgia.
And nostalgia for the jeans and and Levi's of the young today are nostalgia for granddad's overalls.
His work clothes now become the latest costume.
>> And you you see this even with hipsters wearing Carhartt and like, you know, blue-collar work attire.
It is a sort of nostal- it's a re-attaining of identity through a nostalgia of the past. It's very American, especially when you know, right now with the political situation.
We talk about the demographics. We sort of look back in nostalgia like in nostalgic terms of the 1950s, the Leave It to Beaver era, if you will.
So I found that fascinating that the the rearview mirror is nostalgia, which is indicative of the future trajectory of people in the electric age.
So even the nostalgia when we're talking about the scarification, the tattooing, the piercing, the polyamorous, it's sort of a even a nostalgia for the archaic era.
>> Um but this is a a rather mysterious thing.
It The costumes worn by the young, the festival costumes, are really very old hat.
And nostalgic.
And uh someone called it uh uh international motley.
That uh the costumes worn by the young today are kind of international motley or clown costume.
And uh paradoxically, the clown is a person with a grievance.
His role in medieval society was to be the voice of grievance.
The clown's job was to tell the emperor or tell the the royalty exactly what was wrong with the society.
He often lost his head in the process.
But the the clown, the international motley of our time, the clown is trying to tell us his grievance.
The beards and the hairdos and the costumes of the young are a manifestation of grievance.
And anger.
You've heard about the streakers?
A kind of manifestation of anger about the lack of jobs and goals in our world.
In America, we call them passing fannies, but >> [laughter] >> I understand it has a different meaning here.
>> It's more restricted. Yes. Yes.
Um Professor, I'm asking this question um which I think is very relevant for people today who are looking for an identity, who are searching for a kind of responsible attitude towards the media.
Since in the 20th century, we're so conditioned, uh hemmed in by the media, um should we be teaching our children uh what value judgments they should really make concerning different programs they should watch on TV or different programs they should listen on the radio as part of their development of achieving adult maturity.
>> Answer is yes. Um but the one of the peculiarities of electric speed is that it pushes all the unconscious factors up into consciousness.
This began with Freud and Einstein back in 1900. But the hidden aspects of the media are the things that should be taught because they have an irresistible force when invisible.
When these factors remain ignored and invisible, uh they have an absolute power over the user.
So, yes, the sooner that the population, or the young or old, can be taught the effects of these forms, the sooner we can have some sort of reasonable ecology among the media themselves.
What is desperately needed is a kind of understanding of the media which will permit us to program the whole environment so that the say literate values would not be wiped out by new media.
If you understand the nature of these forms, you can neutralize some of their adverse effects and foster some of their beneficent effects.
This we have never reached uh never reached this level of awareness.
>> We can never reach that uh level of awareness.
>> I have been working for that for a long time. The You may be surprised to hear that the Finnegans Wake of Mr. James Joyce is one of the top guides to the effects of media.
The work is entirely devoted to that theme.
>> So, if you guys have ever read Finnegans Wake, you know, James Joyce, Irish author, notoriously difficult text to understand, but it is a incredible incredible book if you figure out what is actually going on. And he actually has a section in the Gutenberg Galaxy that is quoting talking about how Finnegans Wake is actually articulating the entire history of media itself. It's in a chapter um let's see.
Uh I don't know. I Maybe I didn't save it.
But um it's it's a very very fascinating he's cuz it's talking about beginning with uh scribing in the dirt. It It If you read Finnegans Wake, it's like built in this Irish vernacular that you almost need someone who's performative to read it to you because it is very much a performative work. But Marshall McLuhan, I think he even has a skeleton key to the book which tells you what everything means.
Incredible incredible piece of art. I highly recommend getting a skeleton key of Finnegans Wake and then walking through Finnegans Wake. If you just grab Finnegans Wake, you try to read it, you're not going to understand a damn thing that it's saying.
But if you get a skeleton key, it makes tons of sense. And it he literally does in the first section of it lay out the entire history of communication. And this is before McLuhan made any of these theories.
>> And the the thunders in Finnegans Wake are statements of the effects of particular media. The last thunder in Finnegans Wake on page 424 is television.
And with all its effects, social consequences carefully dramatized. Finnegans Wake is a drama. It's a play.
And the actors in the play are the media themselves.
And very few very few Joyceans know this.
In the fourth row, yes.
>> Professor McLuhan, up till now, while television may have dominated our minds and our lives, the actual box in the corner hasn't dominated our living room.
But, large screen television sets are being developed, screens say the size of a living room wall. What effect do you think that will have? Will we tolerate giants watching us?
>> It's a I think very important uh thing to keep in mind, very important question.
I um am not personally, I haven't seen those big big screens.
They tend to have them out on the playgrounds or the play fields in in America. They tend to have these great big screens for the game itself, so that you can watch the game on television while the game is in process.
Um this um is a a kind of situation that we I think it invites an enormous awareness of actual process.
Uh to um participate in the kind of replay of the thing while it is still ongoing.
Uh participation [snorts] in replay is a form of pattern recognition that the is new in the media and has I'd say rather large consequences.
Mostly cognitive.
Mostly consequences that will affect our nature of our cognition and awareness.
And I would think entirely only in the direction of extreme self-awareness.
Um I have I once asked a famous quarterback in American football on television, once asked him what the effect of the instant replay had been on the game of football.
And he said, "We have now to play the game in such a way that the audience can watch the actual process that we're performing.
They're not any longer interested just in the effect of the play. They want to see the nature of the play.
So, they've had to open up the play on the field to enable the audience to participate more fully in the process of football play.
It's a unexpected effect. I think it was a being effect that would extend also to our educational world, to the classroom.
That the future of education requires that we pay much attention to the media we're employing as forms of study.
Not necessarily, you know, not necessarily the hardware of merely the hardware skill in the use of cameras and of microphones, but awareness of the nature of the operation.
>> When you said that For example, there is research done recently regarding schools that provide iPads or electronic devices for students versus some of these private schools that there is no electronics allowed during the school day.
Everything's written, everything's note taking, and they use physical books. And they found that the critical reasoning skills, attention spans, and comprehension of the students that did not use any digital technologies was higher than those that used iPads or computers or whatever type of digital medium that they wanted to educate the students through. So, very interesting finding that relates to what he's saying in 1977.
>> But the television uses the eyes and ears. What do you mean by that?
>> It is a phrase of Tony Schwartz in a a very interesting book called The Responsive Chord.
Uh what he means literally is that the image is constituted by a millions of these resonating particles.
And you have no there are no pictures on television. There are no There are no snapshots. There's no no shutter.
There's no camera.
There is a an an outpouring of these small bits of information in patterns that are the entirely active and dynamic.
So, they resonate.
So, he was really saying that the television image is primarily not a visual but resonating form of experience.
>> Yes, with this [snorts] with the glasses. Not behind you. Sorry, I had to go.
No, all right. I'm sorry, you go ahead then. Too too late.
>> Professor McLuhan, is television the ultimate medium or is there worse to come?
>> The You've heard of the hologram?
The hologram goes completely around you.
Television only goes a little bit around you.
The hologram is 360°.
Um but it's been anticipated by these uh the rock music in which you have to become just enclosed in a sound bubble.
Uh the hologram does for TV what rock does for auditory entertainment.
But um the hologram is is technically here.
>> Yes, in the front there.
>> Professor McLuhan, you spoke about us as going out rather for our privacy and coming home for the social aspect. I'd like to hear you comment on that in relation to electronic man's new thirst for meditation, contemplation, mystical experience.
>> Well, I've been asked about the relation of this inside outside on the life of meditation.
Well, as you know, the transcendental meditation is becoming exceedingly popular.
Um all forms of mystic meditation have become very popular in our television age.
Uh the East we have gone very far to the East since television.
Um just as an exercise in awareness and so on meditation has come in very big since television.
>> So, one of the things to give context, McLuhan talks about I don't I can't remember which book it's in or if it was an interview I watched, how he believed that television altered the interior state of Western man to be something more indicative of the reflective disposition of the Oriental man. That Occidental man has become very much like Oriental man through the television.
And that they're more reflective about feelings or emotions. And for him, he believes that without the television, there would be no counterculture. So, whether you think about the sexual revolution, the psychedelic revolution, he believed it was the changing of the interior state of man that gave the precondition for the counterculture where Eastern mysticism and yoga and tantric practices, psychedelic drugs, shamanism, all this stuff flooded into the Western world. He said it's it's because the interior state of man had already been altered to something very much that's more reminiscent to the Oriental due to the electric environment we exist.
Um I'm not I'm not sure that that is a good or bad at all. It just has happened.
And do you think of it as a very significant event in >> I think of it as very significant. Yes, it seems to me almost like a nostalgia for a return to that private self without going outdoors to find it.
>> Mhm.
>> Return to an inner union with God, with yourself, which electronic man seems to need and is looking for in this way.
>> Jane Austen of all people has quite a big comment on that inside outside.
She said that people go outside to be alone just to prove their inner resources.
That they don't need people.
We can make it alone.
And that the romantic movement was based upon this psychic development.
Jane Austen has quite a bit to say about that of all people. I was amazed to come across it in her work a few months ago.
But there there's another American writer um Hawthorne who regarded this American habit of going outside to be alone as an undermining of democracy. He said, "This is sheer aristocracy.
>> Mhm.
>> This is putting only aristocratic thing and it is going to undermine our whole democracy."
So Hawthorne regarded it with great alarm.
The moralist, by the way, is always a a person who never studies effects so much as studies the content of situations.
The studies the figure and not the ground.
Uh this I think is a great concern to advertisers who are here tonight in some numbers. Advertisers tend to study figure not the ground.
They stand to tend to count noses rather than to estimate the pressures under the noses.
The form of noses.
>> Do we have an advertiser who would like to >> And then we'll flip to part three of this same Q&A.
>> bit of that advertising and it changed changed the course of the conversation slightly and it's a serious question, Professor.
>> And just want to remind everyone smash that like, guys. Really appreciate you all being here. Major thank you to everyone who supported. God bless you all. Um major thank you over on Dono Chat to Paris Alexandrew throws in $5 says, "If you believe in Sola Scriptura, then you must venerate Gutenberg."
I [laughter] love that.
Thank you so much, Paris. And Meridoc Brandybuck throws in 10 bucks over on Streamlabs and says, "Me and the gents totally agree." Well, thank you very much, Meridoc Brandybuck.
Interesting name.
Uh thank you very much for the support.
Do appreciate it.
And I saw Austin Detullio threw in another five. Austin, thank you so much, brother, along with Franco Lopez.
And we got 4 minutes left on the the last goal. So, thank you so much, Franco Lopez. God bless you.
>> If the world had not discovered your great thinking and your writing, how would you go about creating a demand for it? What would be your advertising campaign? What would be the the gist of it? And what section of the media would you use?
>> I I put people on.
I put them on. Uh putting people on means teasing them, challenging them, upsetting them, befuddling them. Any comic Any comic puts on his audience by um hurting them.
You can't name a comic who doesn't put on his public by hurting them.
The technique of putting people on, in my case, consists simply in pointing to the things they have ignored, the things that concern them very nearly, uh but uh have been totally pushed aside as insignificant. Um put on A put on is a is a a sort of situation that I study a good deal.
>> Can advertisers use it to affect?
>> Uh advertising is to a large degree put on us and has there has to be a certain comic element in a good advertising.
Comic is always the registration of a grievance.
>> [clears throat] >> You the funny man is the man with the grievance whether it's W.C. Fields or Rabelais.
>> What's what's the grievance of an advertiser? What kind of grievance would it be? Obviously it could vary but >> Ego.
The grievance of course is you're not buying my product.
And uh >> It's just a phrase then.
>> Very simple.
>> So it didn't you like?
>> Yes, in the glass of the stand.
>> Does the fact that Professor Bronowski's book The Ascent of Man, the fact that it was on the best seller list in America for month after month, is that a victory for advertising and marketing or is that a victory for Professor Bronowski's ideals and the message he was trying to get across?
>> I didn't see the his shows and of course The Ascent of Man is a is a popular cliche.
Uh also very nostalgic since that is not necessarily the way things are going.
But No, I I I I know that the best seller is a mysterious thing that is uh mainly created. It's not a spontaneous thing.
Publishers have methods for creating best sellers anytime they have to.
And it means investing a good deal of money in a book. Now his program had many millions of dollars invested in it quite apart from the book.
So a big million dollar program or multi-million dollar program automatically >> Okay.
Um let's see.
Politics, nuclear energy.
I really want to get to this the beginning of this interview. We'll watch a little bit of this. We're not going to watch the whole thing.
Um This is a video of him predicting the internet with Robert Fulford in 1966.
Now, which one do you guys want to watch? You can You want to watch him predicting the internet?
And then this one is a really great overview. I mean, not really an overview, but a conversation with Tom Wolfe about his theories.
You guys have a preference? If not, I'm going to go with this one just cuz uh it's such a personable interview.
>> That's right. He's from uh Fort Worth, isn't >> From Fort Worth, yeah.
>> I I was interested to see in the fact that you were >> So, he's talking to Tom Wolfe, who's from the South. And he's saying that there's a difference in American culture between oral man, which is Southern man, and the printed man is actually the Northern man. And he highlights this delineation from the Civil War era.
>> You were a Southerner, Tom.
And that this relation to an oral tradition is at great advantage to a literary man.
In the 20th century, it's very remarkable that all the best writing has come out of Ireland or the American South.
Uh because of this close relation that the English language has to the spoken word in those areas.
And uh this too seems to have something to do with the existence of jazz and rock as art forms. That without an oral tradition of corporate public address, there this kind of music would not occur.
>> I'm sure a lot of it also has to do with preaching.
>> Well, there again is a public address system.
>> Because there's I really can't think of any part of the country where preaching um among both black and white uh preachers is uh has had such prominence. And where people get so fullsome in their expression, whether it's the very stilted kind of speech that the Southern Episcopalian minister uh uses with the the uh expressions um for forgive us our our our trespasses and at least the very intentional it's kind of an English uh mannerism.
>> those hesitations and those intervals are actually very involving. It makes the audience just hang on the next phrase. It's like a stutterer who keeps you just on the ropes waiting for him to form another word.
>> This this whole idea of an oral tradition certainly did come back with the Beat generation. And you got like I think it was the main contribution people like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and Ferlinghetti made was to just just to break up the academic poetry which had become so strong after the Second World War. And which was a very formal rigid >> Which which kind of poets do you have in mind up by the word academic?
>> Well, the whole everyone the practically everyone who was reviewed in the Kenyon Review in the >> I see.
>> um >> Well, that would include all the Southern poets and the Irish poets and some of the British poets.
But the acade- the academic the establishment the poetic establishment you might have built up around the academic study of Pound and Eliot and Yeats.
>> I think the people who took off from Pound and Eliot and who were writing after the war were really neglected neglected the the oral side of say of someone like Eliot or Pound and were were more in love with the fact that someone like Pound was filling his work with with the scholarly allusions, with mythical allusions and it became I became a totally >> No.
mythic study, you know.
And very anthropologically oriented, archaeologically oriented, very learned.
But the fact is those poets themselves came out of the age of radio and would have been unthinkable without that radio ground around them.
And the whole of the English language took on a tremendous new oral life from radio.
I'm sure that this was carried straight on into jazz and rock music.
>> A lot of poets were being in in England particularly were being read on the air, weren't they? And uh >> And recorded. I And uh there there was a great uh disc presentation of poetry in the uh '30s especially.
>> And this is you know this has become even truer today in the when so many poets really make their living uh it's only way they can make a living is going around to universities and giving readings. And I really think it's done a great deal for uh uh for poetry because >> On the other hand there has been a a demand for this. The this the the public wants uh to confront the poets. But the surely the the the poets have been writing for radio. There have been all sorts of radio poet poetry played and poems written and songs written for radio and for TV.
Why why why don't we just uh um consider the tremendous publics opened up to what formerly had been rather limited publics with the written or printed forms. The tremendous new publics opened up by the television and radio for poetry and drama and stories.
>> A big mistake people uh writing for those medium make is that that they don't collect their what they've done for television or for radio and put it in a book. Cuz once it's in a book it's it exists for the first time in the official in the official sense. I discovered myself that I wrote I must have written 110 magazine articles. It's even true in in print it's magazine articles. Once I collected them into a book >> they take on a totally different character.
>> Yeah.
>> Well, they're more portable.
The magazine gets uh is expendable and is disposable.
The book is still retained. The pocketbook, of course, tends to suffer the fate of the magazine.
It gets handed around from person to person and tossed into corners and so on.
But, the uh various You feel that the writers often get lost just in the media.
They toil away as script writers for film, for TV, for radio, and their work doesn't show.
>> It disappears into the ether, really.
And then uh they become very frustrated.
And >> But, by going to campuses and reading to big publics, >> Anyways, I highly recommend you guys watch this. This is a fantastic discussion. We'll wrap up with uh him predicting the internet in 1966.
Again, if you guys have never read Marshall McLuhan, you should.
You should. Go get Again, if you like intellectual history, I would I would start with this one, The Gutenberg Galaxy. This is him talking about media from a historical perspective and how it shaped I mean, fan just very, very interesting things about East and West Christendom, the the Greeks verse uh the Renaissance, how the Renaissance was an antiquarium of uh the the oral man's culture. Uh really fascinating stuff. Global Village is a good one. Medium is the message is probably one of the more famous ones, and Understanding Media is a good one.
So, with that, let's listen to him predict the internet in 1966.
>> Because if you suddenly, if you've noticed, the mood of North America has changed very drastically. Things like the safety car couldn't have happened 10 years ago.
>> Why is that?
>> Well, it's because people have suddenly become obsessed with consequences of things. They used to be obsessed with mere products and packages and launching these things out into markets and into the public. Now, they've suddenly become concerned about what happens when these things go out on the highway.
What happens when this kind of program gets on the air? What happen They want safety air, safety cigarettes, safety cars, and safety programming.
This need for safety is a sudden awareness that things have effects.
Now, my writing has for years been concerned with the effects of things, not their impact, but their consequences after impact.
TV, unlike the fantasy world, the escape world of the movies, TV creates enormously serious and realistic-minded sort of person, well, almost oriental in his inward meditativeness.
I think that >> This is the teenager of today.
>> Yes, he's becoming almost oriental in his inwardness.
>> He's so thoughtful and serious.
>> No, grim.
Whereas the the movie generations of the '20s and '30s were a coon-coded bunch of superficial types, had a good time, and went to college, but not for knowledge and that sort of thing.
Uh all has changed.
>> And changed because of television, because >> Very much. Television gave the old electric circuitry that is already here, gave it a huge extra push in this direction of involvement and inwardness.
You see, the circuit doesn't simply push things out for inspection, it pushes you in to the circuit.
It involves you.
When you put a new medium, it >> Now, Sky, you're absolutely right. So, this stream really connects with the conversation we had with the second Industrial Revolution with Nikola Tesla talking about the electric revolution and what he was a part of in the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries and how he set the stage for very you know in in many ways Tesla created the technology for the electric world we live in.
McLuhan living in that world post Tesla is describing the effect of digital electronic technologies on our lives.
And we did the last live stream I did before I left for Montana cuz it was the MK Ultra stream which is about how they manipulate and control the mind itself of which we got into electrodes with Dr. Jose Delgado and some of his research in the 1950s Ewen Cameron the Canadian doctor and Canada who figured out psychic driving and how to break the psyche of people.
So the CIA was absolutely interested in McLuhan's theories. Not that McLuhan was working with the CIA.
In fact he was a traditional Catholic even though he was culturally in the 1960s kind of associated with the counterculture because the counterculture loved his work so much but his work wasn't value laden. It was quantitative. It was not qualitative. So he didn't say if it was bad or good he just gave a quantitative analysis of what he saw was happening and the counterculture the hippies loved it because for them the archaic revival returning back to primitive man breaking down the print culture construct of Christendom and literate man all of it was celebrated.
Now as I told you privately like the quote that I used at the opening of my book Return to Babylon he viewed the electric age and what it was bringing in as a form of Antichrist. It was a false mystical body.
So you know keep that in mind when you are listening to him and he's not providing qualitative, although privately we have found things after he died.
But, he's talking about the quantitative effects of these new mediums and it I don't know. It's just It's just fascinating. I don't know if you guys find him as fascinating as I do, but it it's fantastic.
And it truly is part of this larger general theme as Scott mentioned, the CIA read and listen to everything this guy said. Absolutely, because they are interested in how these technologies can be utilized to manipulate us, which he said I mean, just like uh literate man being more susceptible to propaganda because often you have to read propaganda.
Right? Oral tribal man is more manipulable through his emotions, getting him to act cuz he has less patience, he has less self-control.
He's more participatory, all these different things. He's He's uh a participant, not an observer, where literate man, especially printed man, can separate himself. So, it it's very interesting when you start looking at these media theories and and wonder how it is that the intelligence agencies are utilizing to manipulate all the populations around the world in various ways.
Every nation is and every intelligence agency is very much interested in these types of things.
>> to a play in a in a given population, all their sensory life shifts a bit.
Sometimes shifts a lot. This changes their outlook, their attitudes, changes their feelings about studies, about school, about politics. Since TV, uh both Canadian and British and American politics have cooled off almost to the point of rigor mortis, our politics require uh much more hotting up than the TV medium will give them.
A TV is ideal, as you will see, when you get two experts like ourselves discussing TV. The This is good TV because there's a process going on of mutual challenge, discovery, and processing.
Now, TV is good for that, and same with ads.
Uh if the audience can become involved in the actual process of making the ad, then it's happy. It's like the old quiz shows.
They were great TV because it gave the audience a role, something to do.
They were horrified when they discovered they'd really been left out all the time cuz the shows are rigged.
Now, the This is a horrible uh misunderstanding of TV on the part of the programmers.
But, in the same way, most advertisers do not understand TV media. Did you know that most people read ads about things they already own?
They don't read things to buy them, but to feel reassured that they have already bought the right thing. In other words, they get huge information satisfaction from ads far more than they do from the product itself. This the uh the What where advertising is heading is quite simply into a world where the ad will become a substitute for the product, and all the satisfactions will be derived informationally from the ad, and the product will be a merely a number in some file somewhere. Instead of going out and buying a package book, uh of which there have been 5,000 copies printed, you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs, your problems, and say, "I'm working now on the history of Egyptian arithmetic. I know a bit of Sanskrit. I I am uh I'm qualified in German, and I am a good mathematician." They said, "It'll be right over." And they at once Xerox, with the help of computers from the libraries of the world, all the latest material just for you personally, not as something to be put out on on the bookshelf.
They send you the package as a direct personal service. This is where we're heading under electronic information conditions. Products increasingly are becoming services.
>> What kind of a world would you rather live in?
Is there Is there a period in the past or a possible period in the future you'd rather be in?
>> I I I'd I'd rather be in any period at all as long as people are going to leave it alone for a while. Just let go of Just leave it now.
>> But they're not going to, are they?
>> No.
So, the only alternative is to understand everything that's going on and then counter neutralize it as much as possible, turn off as many buttons as you can, and uh frustrate them as much as you can. I I am uh resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what's happening.
Because I I don't choose as to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Now, uh this uh many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favor of it. Uh the exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly to be something I'm resolutely against.
And this seems to be the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button.
>> So, let that be a message for all of us in regards to how the technology is not only affecting us, but changing us. And as regards to the global village theory of Marshall McLuhan, the electric age is returning us back to a primitive tribal sensory ratio. We are truly returning back to an archaic form. Now, as I said, he speculated this was may potentially leading toward a medieval resurgence, but I argue, especially since the 21st century, with when we look at culture at large with transgenderism and homosexuality and scarification, tattoos, piercings, polyamorous relationships, really what we're seeing is a drive past the medieval era straight to the archaic. And in that sense, I it's an idea I actually share with Terence McKenna. He talks about the archaic revival.
And in many ways, that is exactly what I'm seeing occur right now. So, for anybody who's interested in these theories, I know Marshall McLuhan can be a difficult entry point for a lot of people, but I highly highly encourage people who are interested to learn more of Marshall McLuhan's theories. He is truly one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, and at the same time one of the most forgotten thinkers of the 20th century. Um I would say probably in the last decade he's got a little bit more resurgence in popularity, especially in the age of the speculation about AI and where it's all going, but dude, check out his work, um and smash that like. Thank you all for so much for being here. Let me just double-check What do you guys think about McLuhan?
How many of you guys have knew of McLuhan before the stream?
Propaganda by Edward Bernays was a huge eye-opener when I first read it. Yeah, I was thinking about doing a stream on Edward Bernays.
A lot of people don't even know who he is.
Clipper said he never heard of Marshall McLuhan. Do check out Marshall McLuhan.
I'm telling you, it is worth the investigation.
Scott said, "Going to go get book list right now. Thanks, Doc." Well, of course.
Thank you, brother, for being here. And thank you all for the support.
Seems like it, but it's not real. Just steroid >> [sighs and gasps] >> What?
Uh okay. Uh Bingo Vigo, I like the new name. He says, "I didn't know much about him, but I heard of his quote the medium is the message."
Yeah.
Yeah, do do check him out. I'm telling you, it is worth the investigation.
Yeah, I know Dr. Crispy had heard of him before.
Oh, and thank you very much. Uh, 27 Ortho Bro said just subscribed. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Well, thank you very much, Ortho Bro. I appreciate you guys being here.
Thank you all for the support. Let me just double-check, make sure I don't miss anyone.
Do you guys have some I have a few ideas on some future streams. Curious if you guys have any suggestions. Is there any content you guys are absolutely dying for?
Oh, Paul says, "How are you, fellow Hoosier?" I'm doing well, man.
Where where you at in the Hoosier state?
Bingo Vigo says, "Every stream is Every stream is a gem."
Uh, many thanks in Christ, Dr. Well, thank you, Vigo, for for being here. And thank you all for the support. I truly truly appreciate everyone who supports my work and essentially supports me and my wife.
Uh, God bless you all. Seriously, thank you so much.
President throws in 20, says, "Climb down off a roof to send this."
>> [laughter] >> Oh, thank you, President Uh, very, very appreciative of the $20 super chat. And I'm glad that you got off the roof safely.
Was able to send that. Appreciate the the donation.
Crispy said, "Interesting stream." Oh, you're in Richmond.
In Richmond, I know where I've been to Richmond.
You're over there where my my parents' family are all from New Castle, not too far away.
Uh, Clipper said, "Episode requested.
Orthodox Church's view on the Enlightenment and its effects."
Okay.
I've kind of talked about all that multiple times, but maybe a specific stream would be worth doing.
Thank you, Clipper. That's a good idea.
>> [laughter] >> COVID booster stream. Yeah, we need to we need to promote everyone to get their booster shots.
Well, that's your That's your job, doctor.
Dr. Crispy.
Thank you, Clipper. I appreciate you being here, man.
It might finally be time for the Norman invasion stream. Yeah.
Norman invasion.
Basil the Bulgar Slayer.
I have a handful of other streams that I was going to do just off uh my own interest, but I want to do whatever you guys are most interested in.
Like most specifically. So, I know Emperor Basil II.
The Norman invasion.
It tends to be the the same audience on some of those more military history oriented streams. I love those. I love them.
Um But, yeah.
That's a good idea.
Oh, update on World War III prophecies.
Yeah, I was just speaking with the Escaton Vigil last night, actually. And I was texting back with him. He's got a handful of new things. So, we'll probably be doing some World War III prophecy streams here in the near future, especially regarding Erdogan. Have you been following some of the rhetoric between Israel and Turkey right now?
It's pretty serious. Um I would I would say it be open to the possibility Israel takes down Erdogan in a in a flight of some sort. That his personal plane is traveling to or from Turkey.
And all of a sudden his flight gets hit or something strange happens. You know, recently there's actually a plane crash that was believed that had potentially had Erdogan, but killed another prominent official in Turkey. So, a lot of interesting stuff going on between Turkey and Israel right now.
Vigo says, "I do like science, tech, and philosophy, history as well, and do how they tie into the Orthodox paradigm, but I have nothing specific in mind." Well, I got tons of ideas to come up with, so I'll come up with some few. I know we're going to be doing a lot more interviews.
So, I'm going to be reaching out. I know Dr. Mo is coming on this Friday, my godson Michael Moller. We'll be talking about beta boys and what you need to do to not be a beta, especially regards to testosterone and your own personal health as a man.
Um and then I have a handful of priests I've been reaching out to. I know I want to reach out to Dr. Zachary Porcu to talk about modernity.
So, anybody that you have that you would like to see me do a stream with, I'm going to be reaching out to tons of people. I want to start doing at least eight interview a week moving forward.
So, that's one of one of my goals.
So, Anyways, all right guys. Well, I will be back. We got family stuff tomorrow, so I won't be able to do a stream tomorrow, but I'll be doing a stream Friday with Dr. Mo and may do another one Saturday, but I got tons of content that I'm trying to get out. Now that I'm finally back, life is settled.
I am excited for the next few weeks.
Let's just put it that way. Tons and tons of content. So, don't forget guys, we're starting the reading of the Book of Enoch. The complete Book of Enoch is what we're doing over at the Logos Academy.
So, if you guys aren't members and you want to join us, we are reading through the entire Book of Enoch together starting June 30th. I'm going to be putting out a little promo video on the channel here.
But any of the men that want to join us, if you're interested in the Nephilim, the Watchers, you know, all that different stuff, we'll be reading each book um each week and looking at it from an Orthodox perspective and trying to find Orthodox resources to discuss it. So, if that's something you're interested in, please join us over at the Logos Academy. And if anybody wants to sponsor a stream, if there is a topic that your heart desires, >> [sighs] >> please use this link and purchase a stream and I'll reach out to about what topic it is that you would be interested in. Kurd said, "Father Paul Girgis was amazing." Yeah, I loved him. I'd love to I'm going to reach out to him and see if he would do another interview cuz that was phenomenal. I I really really enjoyed that man.
I thought the Book of Enoch was non-canonical. It is non-canonical. No one said it was canonical.
But we're going to be reading it as a group of men at the Logos Academy.
So, a lot of people have talked about the Book of Enoch or the Watchers or the Nephilim, but a lot of people haven't actually read all five books of the Book of Enoch. So, that's what we're going to be doing. It is non-canonical.
And the Orthodox tradition does not accept it as canon because of the dubiousness of the author. It's definitely not written by Enoch based on the time in which it uh sort of manifests itself in history. But at the same time, we have saints that reference the Book of Enoch.
So, the church holds a position in which even though it's not an authoritative canonical text, we don't exactly know who wrote it.
It does have some type of tradition we can see that early Christians were influenced by it in some way. So, we're going to be reading it all together and trying to make sense of especially in light of Spielberg's Disclosure Day movie that's coming out, aliens this, aliens that, all that different stuff.
So, anyways, if you'd like to join us in reading the Book of Enoch, do it do that over at school.com/logosacademy.
school.com/logosacademy.
And if you're interested in sponsoring a stream, please do so.
Um would greatly appreciate it. So, all right, guys. With that being said, I'm going to hop off here and I will see you guys in the next one. Major thank you to you all. I love you guys. Thank you all for the support.
And as always, until next time, God bless.
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