I am currently embarking on the journey of reading Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage for the first time. I have set up a distributed reading group here after discussing with Rafael Alvarado and Ed Webb the idea of a distributed, open space for aggregating our reading reflections. Keep in mind anyone can join the fray by adding their tagged feed to the site here, what’s nice is that the feed for this site will act as an instant aggregator that will link you back to the original blog posts by the various folks involved.
I’m personally not ready to post about the book just yet, having only started it, but doing a preliminary search I discovered the audio version of The Medium is the Massage via Ubuweb here, and it is a total lambian treat. Ubuweb has both sides of the album (or at last I imagine it was an album) and interviews with McLuhan from the Dick Cavett Show in December 1970 as well as on Speaking Freely from Jan 4th, 1971.
Below are all the audio links, enjoy as we begin
Download The Medium is the Massage, Side A
Download The Medium is the Massage, Side B
Download Marshall McLuhan on the Dick Cavett Show in December 1970
Download Speaking Freely hosted by Edwin Newman features Marshall McLuhan 4 Jan 1971, Public Broadcasting/N.E.T.
Thanks, Jim. Great find. I’ll see if I can get my hands on a copy of Massage. We should really take a look at Understanding Media also.
Mikhail,
You mean I get to break intellectual bread with you again? Disco!
FUCK, can you believe it!!!
I’m reading for the first time Medium is the Massage!! in book format (here in Latinoamerica we read fotocopy version from the book in our university time)
To be honest…I lost the book last two days in my backpack but last night I Find and go to sleep with the book over my stomach
SO, Fucking Believe it!!! at the same time than you Jim…sorry by the surprise bur it’s amazing than the tumultuous time about Internet and the ways to appropriate of the MEDIUM carry us to McLuhan…maybe the only one who risk a theory about the influence in our brain and behaviour by the new media
I’m too reading Collective Intelligence from Pierre Levy….it’s a amazing, amazing book, the virtual agora is almost (I hope so) the Obama Campaign
Martin,
Great edupunk minds follow the same path 🙂 I’d love to get your take on the book, I am just starting it, and the audio it self is pretty spellbinding, I love the multiple modalities the book appears in. Also, I love the idea of the internet as a virtual agora, a public sphere for ideas. This is particularly important as developers and planners increasingly erase those public spaces in physical space. I often think that the planning of the US in the late 20th century (or under late capital) has been pretty intentional logic of alienating us through the physical space we inhabit. Perhaps the internet provides one way to counter this, though with it comes its own set of problem as we all know.
The Dick Cavett segment is a fabulous find. This guy had more one-liners than Groucho.
“Every joke is a grievance.”
“There isn’t an ad in the subway that isn’t good for hours of conversation”
The genius of insights that seem totally obvious after you have grokked them 🙂
What a boon. Thanks for pointing these out.
Ed,
He is really ajoy to listen to, and I love his demeanor, almost as if he was just pointing out the obvious realities we are faced with yet refuse to acknowledge. Which makes his resonance with our moment all the more understandable.
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