1. At work and play with Marshall McLuhan
Gardner Campbell
Posterity will judge

2. McLuhan I
When the perverse ingenuity of man has outered some part of his being in material technology, his entire sense ratio is altered. He is then compelled to behold this fragment of himself “closing itself as in steel.” In beholding this new thing, man is compelled to become it. Such was the origin of lineal, fragmented analysis with its remorseless power of homogenization…. Myth [by contrast] is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects. In an age of fragmented, lineal awareness, such as produced and was in turn greatly exaggerated by Gutenberg technology, mythological vision remains quite opaque.

3. McLuhan II
[James Joyce] … accepted the grotesque as a mode of broken or syncopated manipulation to permit inclusive or simultaneous perception of a total and diversified field. Such indeed is symbolism by definition—a collocation, a parataxis of components representing insight by carefully established ratios, but without a point of view or lineal connection or sequential order.

4. McLuhan III
For what is meant by the irrational and the non-logical in much modern discussion is merely the rediscovery of the ordinary transactions between the self and the world, or between subject and object…. Literacy had made of the enlightened individual a closed system, and set up a gap between appearance and reality which ended with such discoveries as the stream of consciousness.

5. McLuhan IV
For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs…. The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no “content.” And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all.... I am in the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them. Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.

6. McLuhan V
The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.

7. For Your Breakout Session
Choose one “enterprise system” at your college or university.
With that system in mind, ask these McLuhanesque questions. You’ll be asked to share your most interesting or surprising answers with the larger group.
How does this “enterprise system” recreate its users in its own image? (“In beholding this new thing, man is compelled to become it.”)
How does this “enterprise system” block “inclusive or simultaneous perception of a total and diversified field”?
If “the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs,” how would you describe the “message” of this enterprise system?
If “the serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity,” how might you identify a serious artist for your staff who might help others “encounter technology with impunity” by becoming “an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.”
EXTRA CREDIT: Respond briefly to this blog post: