Amusing Ourselves to Death

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is
sent.

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

All advertising advertises advertising.

The future of the book is the blurb.

Gingkopress writes:McLuhan's words stretch and bend, or reverse conventional thinking, providing surprising new contexts and challenges to what he termed the hidden environment. Environments in McLuhan's sense are colossal misconceptions that have little legitimacy in experience. Because they envelop us in a world-view, environments are intrinsically imperceptible. Trapped inside the environment, like Plato's cavemen or fish in a tank, environments escape notice, and make us aware of only a very limited field. An 'environmental thinker' is for McLuhan a gullible actor who merely mimics expertise. Regurgitating concepts cud like, he is blissfully unaware of the closed circuit within which he swims as he surrenders perception. Environments swallow us whole. We depend on an outsider, or a foreign element, or a bygone era, or a radical contrast of any sort, to bring wakefulness. These are called counter-environments. Without them, environments remain imperceptible. Like the distorting imagery of the surrealist, McLuhan's percepts/probes ambush the environmental thinker, the faithful believer in the emperor's new clothes. He is knocked out of his conceptual armor. Anything in opposition to the conventional order can be a counter-environment: new technologies, street art, dream interpretation, crime, novel ideas, cults, minority groups or opinions, any form of satire, anything that topples normalcy and offers a fresh gestalt or disorientation. The bold language of the probe is counter-environmental. It doesn't require truthfulness as such in every case, though it may hit upon it frequently. The purpose of the probe is to stretch the truth in into a what-if mode. Often, the surprise element is saved for the end, as in ''privacy invasion is now one of our most important knowledge industries'', or ''obsolescence is the moment of superabundance''. Claudel's line ''the sky was so blue only blood could be more red'' is typical of the poetic strategy of participation in depth by break-up. Languages that lack sensuous imagery are environmental.