Star Wars and Back to the Future Show How Movies are Still the Stories that Shape our Tribes

This week has seen mega hype surround the release of the new Star Wars trailer and Back to the Future day. And whilst perhaps we've shifted some of our viewing over to high rating, high production TV like Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Breaking Bad or Mad Men...so that movies aren't having the influence the once did, the adage still runs true: narratives shape our lives.

#mcprobe :: it started here

Being too young to have been exposed to McLuhan in his heyday, my discovery came a number of years ago was kind of like pulling a loose thread on a woolen sweater. Like many, my first exposure was to his most infamous aphorism

the medium is the message

but without notice, it became: the medium is the massage; the medium is the mess-age; the medium is the mass-age; the tedium is the message; and  the tedium is the mass-age. All of a sudden I had my hands full of loose wool and McLuhan was saying "See, it's a unicorn".

M.E. Monday #7

M.E. Monday comes this week from Lance Strate:

"Individually and collectively, the relationship between human beings and their environments is one that is fundamentally indirect. Externally, stimuli excite and irritate our sense organs and nervous systems. Internally, we construct a map of the environment out of the various excitations and irritations that we experience, a map that may be more or less structurally homologous with the outside world, but a map that is, simply stated, not the territory  itself, as Korzybski famously put it...And out relationship to the outer environment, being indirect, is therefore mediated, hence McLuhan's observation that the medium is the message" (On the Binding Biases of Time, 2011).

M.E. Monday #3

This week, here's a little gem from Neil Postman:

"New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thought develops" (Technopoly, 1992).