Episode 71: The Medium is the Message

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2020

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On the surface, the phrase "the medium is the message," prophetic as it may have been when Marshall McLuhan coined it, points a now-obvious fact of our wired world, namely that the content of any medium is less important than its form. The advent of email, for instance, has brought about changes in society and culture that are more far-reaching than the content of any particular email. On the other hand, this aphorism of McLuhan's has the ring of an utterance of the Delphic Oracle. As Phil proposes in this episode of Weird Studies, it is an example of what Zen practitioners call a koan, a statement that occludes and illumines in equal measures, a jewel whose shining surface is an invitation to descend into dark depths. Join JF and Phil as they discuss the mystical and cosmic implications of McLuhan's oracular vision. REFERENCES McLuhan, Understanding Media The Playboy interview McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects Graham Harman, American philosopher Clement Greenberg, American critic Dale Pendell, Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft Brian Eno, British composer Marshall and Eric McLuhan, The Laws of Media: The New Science _ Jonathan Sterne, _The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (editors), The Essential McLuhan Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America David Fincher (director), The Social Network _ Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema I _and _Cinema II Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin Eric Havelock,_ Preface to Plato_ Walter J. Ong, American theorist Plato, [Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic(Plato))_ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdstudies.com. Hi, this is Phil.
0:50.8	Welcome to Weird Studies.
0:53.5	Dedicated listeners will have heard J.F. and me mention Graham Larkin,
0:57.7	whom I nominate as the official Weird Studies spirit animal. I met Graham 17 years ago when we were
1:05.0	both postdoctoral fellows at Stanford University. One of our first conversations was about Marshall McLuhan, who I'd never read.
1:13.7	I told Graham that I heard he was a Timothy Leary kind of figure, a showboating bullshitter
1:18.9	who was big in the 60s and whose reputation declined once people weren't dropping quite so
1:24.0	much acid.
1:25.3	Graham's eyes bulged, and he told me in no uncertain terms that I had to read him,
1:30.6	starting with understanding media, which I did. I spent much of fall 2003, curled up in Green Library,
1:38.0	feeling the book cutting new paths in my mind. It was like discovering a map to a part of the
1:43.6	world that had somehow remained undiscovered.
1:46.5	I'm not only talking about the subject matter, which was interesting enough. It was something else,
1:52.4	something I didn't even have words for yet. As it turns out, the words I was looking for were weird
1:58.4	studies, and I can credit Graham, not only for introducing
2:02.0	J.F. and me in 2015, but also for setting my feet on the path I have walked ever since I finished
2:08.1	graduate school. Understanding Media is McLuhan's most influential and probably greatest work.
2:15.1	Published in 1964, it became an unlikely bestseller among
2:19.3	counterculture intellectuals like Chester Anderson, a sci-fi writer and beat poet turned hippie
2:25.1	who mused on McLuhan's masterwork in a 1967 issue of the legendary San Francisco Oracle.
	...

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