Marshall McLuhan: Essentials 

In my early 20's, when I first read McLuhan over a decade ago, I felt like I was let in on a huge, huge secret. So many lightning bolts of insight. I was stunned every chapter. It's like the man had a crystal ball. I still can't believe that Media Ecology isn't a mainstream field of study. It feels like something is very wrong with our world, the way McLuhan, Ong, Postman, and others have been so neglected. Please, folks, go read Understanding Media.

McLuhan is incredibly underrated. He truly had groundbreaking revelations and because he did it in a playful way, he doesn’t get the respect he deserves. And doing it the way he did, reflects the medium he was communicating through

Excellent work, Professor. From McLuhan I have learned: We must interrogate the media that occupy our lives (from Plato and the printed word to Google and the portable phone.)

I would have continued to study philosophy in university if I had encountered a teacher like yourself.

One of the definitions of great is a lone voice predicting the future. Why.. because prediction is such a difficult accomplishment. McLuhan certainly did that. He was championed by the likes of Terrence McKenna; also a visionary. I am pleased that his contribution is being rediscovered. Thank you.

21:15 when he says privacy is the result of an architecture , I instantly think of "cars" and am reminded of micheal hankes first film , the seventh continent and all those phenomenal scenes when the family experiences the world in car ; sealed off from the world the are being washed in a carwash , they observe a car accident as if they are watching a movie... that's insane

2:40 that's one of my favorite Woody Allen, childhood memory, movie scenes but I had no idea who that was until today. Prof, your videos are so fun and understandable! Thank you!

“Staring at the world through my rear view.” - Tupac Shakur

Marshall McLuhan's genius comes from his dedication and honesty. Another important book of his is "Gutemberg's Galaxy". There's also a very good lecture by Tom Wolfe about McLuhan here on RU-vid. Wolfe was McLuhan's friend and makes interesting observations about the Canadian thinker.

McLuhan was scarily ahead of his time! I'd also say his approach to regard technology as primary, and regard humans and media as mutually shaping each other has its similarity with the early writings of Marx.

Excellent presenttion! Very well thought out.

I'm very grateful for this series on media studies. I learned about all these thinkers years ago during my bachelor's degree, but I forgot some things and was probably too immature/lazy to really appreciate other aspects of their work. This really is a fantastic refresher as well as a trip down memory lane. And last but not least an inspiration to engage with the theories again in a new way. Thanks Prof. Moeller and everyone involved with producing these videos!

I love the hidden Marshall McLuhan joke in the Sopranos😅

This is so good. Thank you! I discovered Marshall's ideas through the work of Walter Ong and the book Amusing Ourselves to Death. I was trying to learn about the differences between orality and literacy and applying these concepts t to the world of music improvisation.

The comparison really works for me. Like Zizek, he was sneered at for talking to popular audiences about things in the world. It's interesting how long it's been that this is the fastest way to get banned from anglophone philosophy departments.

Warning at the end is so spot on! Well spoken and timely presentation. Thanks for producing and sharing.

Your presentation was awesome and the walk out really rounded it all up.

Right on. Thanks for sharing.

I read McLuhan at the time, but at Oxford there was no place for his views. Nor for Barthes or Baudrillard! He is so right about the rear-view mirror! Today we can say "Suburbia , and rural America, lives in Yellowstone-land" for those who never saw Bonanza! Or JAG, or Blue Bloods! That comforting place where morality and justice prevail. McLuhan was the only one in the early 1960s talking like this, he saw the coming communications age and how it shapes 'tribes' of identity.

What an interesting and intellectually arresting study you have explored here. Well Done!

Another fantastic video in this series. Really looking forward to you answer about the Spectacle. I would love to hear you perspective on profilicity strategies in the context of Richard Rorty's Ironism. He seems to be providing a strategy for humbly interacting with the profiles of others while contingently accepting your own when he describes the Ironist as: 1. She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; 2. She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; 3. Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Thanks again!

Well said. Thank you for this.

I just recently bought Understanding Media by McLuhan - timing of this vide couldn't have been better!

"I think Marshall McLuhan's work will ultimately be forgotten," says completely forgotten academic.

The medium is the message. Marshall McLuhan 🎯

Everything he described has happened. We are living in this global tech nightmare, a collective hallucination and a crazy world.

Amazing Work, I would love to see and episode on Jacque Lacan! ... (Or even Zizek!)

great as always

Great work as always :)

you look good

Excellent video.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

love these videos!

Awesome summation (and a great channel over-all - thanks for doing this). Maybe covering "media archeology" thinkers like Friedrich Kittler would be interesting as a follow-up(?).

You are a wonderful explainer - and spannxxx!!!

so strange, I watched the Sopranos episode with the Marshall McLuhan joke exactly when this was uploaded...

so excited to see this, mcluhan doesnt get enough recognition

McLuhan to became a central focus to me sometime after graduated in English in 1964. He challenged me to rethink much of what I took for granted, much of my rear view mirror driven thought and behaviour. To look into what I was not aware of very differently from Jung and Freud’s approaches. I used his ideas in teaching media always suggesting that srudents notice form. So I would play them the Eagles line “It’s the same old murder movie, we just call it the news.” I also tried to share the idea of a media environment and how we tended to less direct experience and more mediated spaces created by others. Vortex of energy may have been visionary when McLuhan said it, but now it directly visible. For example, in public transit where we see almost everyone being sucked into the vortex of the phones they are each holding in their hands. I agree McLuhan is not a consistent theorist but rather, like Jung by the way, a thinker who constantly circumambulates his subject bringing up what comes immediately to him.

Great video!

Excellent

Ibsen points part of this in Enemy of the people... the leftovers of privacy.

let´s just appreciate that the opening credits for "Bonanza" was play in his totality

Dear Hans-George Thank you for this video. Its really great and beautiful made!!! Hope to se you soon again at CBS

I NEED THAT TSHIRT

AY WHEN YOUR MERCH BE POPIN I NEED IT

21:00 that is genius . Never thought of that . We even invented " privacy " daaaaaaaamn

I don't know if it was an intentional quote, or just a coincidence, but the sentence 'we march backwards into the future ', reminds me of the sentence 'nous entrons dans l'avenir à reculons' by Paul Valéry, in his Discours about history of 1932.

Would you please do a video on Michael Parenti, and his analysis of media. Really wonderful figure (in my view) with a lot to contribute, but usually overlooked. Thanks!

"We shape our tools..." did pop up in an official McLuhan publication -- it was "The Medium is the Massage" audiobook, at the 6 : 30 mark. McLuhan himself, however did not say the line.

как раз недавно хотел разобраться с идеей "medium is the message" и вот те нате!

Thank you for all this contents, very precise and clear! Would you consider to make an episode about William Burroughs and Brion Gysin new media theories? I mean, the cut-ups theory and the Dreamachine (1959), and published books like "The Third Mind" (1977), "The Electronic Revolution" (1970), Gysin's "Permutation Poems" (1960) or the Nova Trilogy: "The Soft Machine (1961), "The Ticket That Exploded" (1962) and "Nova Express" (1964), that derived from the "The Word Hoard" manuscripts written by Burroughs between 1954 and 1958. I think it's necessary to cross their thought ideas and concepts, for instance with Baudrillard, McLuhan, Debord, Chomsky or Foucault.

I was enlightened by McLean in the 60s. Today Digital is extension of our brain

Other than Byung-Chul Han and maybe Rene Girard I know of no other intellectual whose model of today fits so snugly with the actual experience of living atm as prof. Moeller's. Although a shame, it's perhaps inevitable that this kind of content is fairly niche and out of reach to the mainstream, but it could do much for people's sanity and sense making, much more than the self help industry that always oversells and underdelivers on it's promises. I hope these ideas and concepts somehow trickle down the cultural totem pole more abundantly (like a TV show or something), it would be a revelation.

McLuhan is great- extensions and amputations - for instance -medieval reading was out loud and through stained glass - different experiences from us

this was a really good video thank you! marshall m is kind of annoying but kind of awesome.. do RAOUL VANAGEIM next ❤

the medium is the massage

You have a branded T-shirt now.

Hello Professor! Quick question: was the Georg in the very first and very last seconds of the video the real you? Before and after genuinely pretending to be a RU-vid profile? Or did you just simulate authenticity? This is messing with my head.

Hi Hans-Georg, I noticed that you will be doing a video on Niklas Luhmann. Please could you talk about whether you think the code of romantic love that Luhmann described in his book "Love as Passion: the Codification of Intimacy" is still the same today, or has love changed again in the age of profilicity? Thanks.

Shout out to the profilicity shirt for keeping it profilic

What is surprising about the rear-view mirror it's the fact that we can even be looking at something that we have never experienced.

Was McLuhan influenced (or even aware of) Fritz Heider's Thing/Medium distinction?

Where can we buy the t-shirt?

I went to design college in the 1990s and unfortunately in the theory classes they taught Postmodernism derived from French intellectuals which was very leftist and critical in nature. It was interesting but not very supportive of learning how to create commercially viable design the way it tried to 'Deconstruct' everything. I only discovered McLuhan after leaving college and loved the way he was fascinated by the relationship between technology and man. A much more inspiring approach. I have no idea why McLuhan was not taught more in the design education system.

yes v good 👍

I'd say he's a step beyond the Zizek. Didn't he basically predict the internet?

Carefree do you still over references for your video?? I always am hungry to read some of the shorter PDF's shown in the video--but I don't see them in the description!

@Carefree Wandering - Can you do something on your countryman, Friedrich 'Driving the Human out of Humanism' Kittler?

Ever seen Videodrome by cronenberg ? Or benny's video by hanke ?

i think successor to this conclusion is beaudrillard but as thinking about american based style of media village mcluhan must be so much influencial yet baudrillard provides a bigger picture globally in my opinion.

This video was ☑shaping

Very interesting, thank you. Could anyone elaborate the distinction between materialism and technologism? This caught my attention, would the washing machine freeing up women and enabling them to move into the workforce and gaining more equal rights be a technologist or materialist interpretation?

Have you spoken to Bob Dobbs yet?

Some commentators have said that Star Trek is a Western The Frontier etc etc

Language, meaning and self-narrative based on language and meaning is the most prolific and most influentual technology. Every other thing is only a plugin.

11:27 "The Medium is the 'massage'..."

This is an amazing series. Could you recommend any movies or literature that embraces profilicity and reflects on it - even if in an implicit way?

guess i got caught in the "maelstrom" this time. So curious about that "punky" song at the end of your highly informative videos, anyone out there who can help me?

Is Prof. Moeller selling tees?

1) The Medium is the Message 6:20 2) We Shape oure Tools and Thereafter They Shape Us 9:00 3) The Rear-view Mirror 11:11 4) The Global Village 17:00 5) The Voretex of Energie 23:02

20:12 if only the web instituted that kind of feedback

Do you mean “profilicity” or “polificity”?

damn

اووفیییی

In relation to the global village / privacy... Yes, it's obvious that we are losing privacy. And I think it's good, as transparency forces our inner world to be aligned with our representation. That, of course, makes us profilic, as it's not quite possible to present ourselves authentically under such strong social pressure created by electronic media and especially the Internet. However, since the pandemic and significant increase of working from home and reduced traveling in general, it's now different in relation to privacy than it was before. While we are actively curating our public personas, we could be living very different lives privately. It was true even before as the Internet in the current, developed form (cf. "On the Internet nobody knows if you are a cat"), although it was much more about internet-specific culture before 2020, as most people used the Internet, not lived on the Internet. It's different nowadays. It is possible to have a private persona (or private personas), as well. Because, if we compare the pre-Internet way of socializing to the way of socializing nowadays, it's about going to a pub to socialize vs playing an internet game or commenting on a RU-vid video to socialize. And that creates a physical barrier, which actually increases privacy. In other words, we are becoming more connected and losing our privacy, but just as long as it's about our social interactions. It's completely different in the personal sphere, even if it's about our own computer, even it's about using the internet, as marketing companies, like Google, care about us spending money (i.e. they care about our social functions), not about our private lives. And the increasing lack of necessity to interact with others at the same place and time enforces that trend. That dynamic is interesting, as I think that we already feel the consequences in the form of various irrational behavior during the past three years. From the public, social perspective, we've been forced even stronger to conform with the social norms, but our private space has become even more private. Consequently, there should be a bridge between increasingly dissonant relations between our private and social lives. That's not working well if a person is authentic and wants to keep their identity monolithic. Thus irrational behavior. But it's also interesting to explore how those trends are going to affect the future. Profilicity has been created in the pre-Internet era and limiting privacy, as the only practical way to socialize included our bodily presence at the places where people gather (we can now fulfill most of our social needs with Facebook, RU-vid, dating apps etc.). It's different now. It's like the time when modernism was in its zenith during the first decades after WWII, exactly when McLuhan was in his own zenith. Something different appeared on the basis of the previous technological developments.

❤ Galaxy Brains

Man and Technic re hash, I guess... Did he steel Spangler work?!

Impressive how he predicted this new tribalism 😮😮

It is interesting to see that this video didn't get much attention compared to other videos of this channel. Most probably it is because this video is showing the real mirror to the spectators. Nobody likes their true face, so it seems!

I'm trying to figure out how I can function as an error in the system.

He saw… He bloody oath Saw.

Sloterdijk soon?

Sometimes McLuhan would refer to media at "hot" media or "cold" media. I've never been able to understand this distinction and what he meant by it.

McLuhan had a better stylist.

"A world of made is not a world of born."

McLuhan wasn't an incoherent theorist as stated here, because he wasnt a theorist at all, and neither was he political he is way too perceptive to be indulging in ctafting concepts. He is a seer, who could inhabit the center of a paradox and probe in both directions. He is not telling us what to think about anything but is an example of really getting to know something.

He ever, not tribal? Maybe at some point it’s just more obvious than at other points?

M.M., from what I have read, seems to be repeating a lot of German insights for American audiences. Think Nietzsche, Heidegger, Spengler.

So is Bonanza land like, They act like a cow boy, talk like a coy boy, they dress like a coy boy, and we identifying them as cow boys with authentic cow boy traits, with cow boy rules making it possible to interlock identity to the cow boy symbols , or am I being a stupid?

Everyone is connected, yet alone, through internet.

McLuhan is clear than Zizek. Zizek babbles!