"Part of why this concept is so elusive is that the words ‘medium’ and ‘message’ have multiple inflections, though ‘is the’ makes it seem like you should know exactly what’s going on. "
I may be of some service here to dispel the nature of the mystery!
Please indulge me in this example; when you knock on the bark of a tree with your hand the tree is "hard". However, when you invent and then use a SAW it is seen that there are both harder woods and also softer woods and this leads us as far as a a political impasse between Canada and the USA over the softwood lumber dispute!! That is some reach for the humble saw.
Therefore, the saw, an extension of our body, allows us to shape our world (in this specific case a tree) but we are in turn shaped BY this extension of our body. Our ability to alter hardwood and softwood has also altered our view of the world because before the saw all trees were tough as nails :)
With the car being an extension of our foot and the internet being an extension of our nervous system we turn into a human Swiss-Army-Knife!! Each "medium" through which we interact with the world changes the world around and us and therefore changes us as well. Please think of yourself from now on as a walking, talking Swiss-Army-Knife and the phrase the medium of the message becomes clear.
That is to say, that the medium (in this case saw, an extension of our teeth as with that ol' faithful Canadian symbol - the beaver) is the message because now that the saw is an extension of our body the "signal" sent by our nerves to and from our brain and the world only exist because of how the saw extends our teeth.
Finally, this phrase now allows us to understand the plague of the 21st century. When something that WAS an extension of our body (like the pay phone, the fax machine, the type writer, the landline phone) is no longer of use we suffer that technological amputation! What WAS once a fully formed and operational limb extending our body had now been chopped off, and many a human and political or educational institution, has felt the ghost-pain of this amputated medium (or limb, no pun intended).
In the end, it is the MEDIUM (saw, car, hammer, internet, telescope) that is the MESSAGE that we are to pay strict attention to.
By employing Edgar Rubin's 1905 figure/ground analysis we may navigate Edgar Allen Poe's maelstrom and thus be the sailor that navigates away from amputation and ghost pain and towards the artist that pays attention to the present and is now swamped by signals from the past and the future.
From page 8 of Understanding Media; "the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs".
In this case the saw and how it leads to an international incident for the economies of our country, but it holds equally true for any and all media that extends our bodies and turns us into living Swiss-Army-Knives including the car and the internet.
"Humans are the sex organs of the machine world," Marshall said in the Toronto Star long ago, "except when you chop them off because of digital overexposure which leads you to think you're neither a man nor a woman, because in digital space, in fact you are neither."
“Within astrology itself there is syntactical structure that gets good results much of the time.”
Citations *desperately* needed.
Otherwise, largely recapitulates the history of MM’s famous phrase with the distracting shoehorning of known facts into a self-admittedly subjective “syntactical structure”.
Busted. I have been scamming the McLuhans since 2015 and my father purchased his Ph.D. on eBay. I don't know anything about astrology except what I learned from YouTubes.
Also every night I hold a seance and invite St. Marshall into the room and pretend to do an astrology reading for him. I tell him how his chart resembles those of Nic Tesla, Bucky Fuller and Jean Shepherd. He always rattles my pencil cup and it sounds like he's saying "true enough." Then mysteriously my typewriter turns on.
Astrology doesn't need a footnote. Astrology IS the footnote. For information on its syntax, see the Table of Essential Dignities per Ptolemy et al, or the Thema Mundi, very similar concept. The latter lays out the basics in 400 BCE, around the time of the development of music theory (both are based on the classical Greek division of a wheel into 12 modes).
You’ve evolved the grift over 2.5 millennia. Gotta keep up with the rubes 🤷♂️
Regardless, it doesn’t matter if you strip most of the woo: it’s ALL woo, all the way down.
You can dress it up however you like, but using a system based on mapping the then-visible planets’* positions on an arbitrary set of stars that have been retconned to match a prior epoch’s polar alignment is a pretty silly way to determine anything here on Earth.
Yours truly,
As astrophysicist
PS Not sure what this has to do with your father though.
Unless of course he has a “PhD” in astrology, which is in fact as valuable as a degree acquired from eBay.
An astrophysicist has no right to call astrology woo. The "big bang" - now there is some fucking woo. It all just came out of a big bang some where, and one day you were walking your dog.
have you seen the recent image of 44 million galaxies all interwoven like endless webs of Laniakas? (The Milky Way is part of a vast superstructure of galaxies which are being drawn toward the Great Attractor. This is a standard feature in the universe, i.e., the universe as we know it is made of these intricate patterns of galaxies.) At the core is a node...massive a gravitational anomaly...the bang is abstract and misses the point of what we can see and model now...
This link contains a video and also an interview with the team leader from U Hawaii, Brent Tully, who assembled the data on how the local group, the Virgo group centered on M87 and a much vaster supercluster are all part of the same thing.
Pluto is rising; it is in the chart and one of the most promonient planets, in the last degree of Leo. (The two charts are the same but one is 17c and one is 20c.) Uranus and Neptune are in a seprate aspect pattern in the early fixed signs with the lunar nodes. A case could be made that they are part of the same pattern but I am presenting them in this article as different patterns for clarity. One of my central illustrative points is that Pluto is in the process of changing signs; once in Virgo it is clearly in aspect to Neptune, as it is today. This is one of those situations where it could go either way but I am keeping the interpretation as basic as posisblbe for a non astrological audience.
Well, “the bang is abstract” if you mistakenly think of it as an explosion IN spacetime (like a big bomb), rather than OF spacetime (the clichéd surface of an expanding balloon metaphor, wrought in all 3 spatial dimensions).
That is, it’s not “abstract” in the same sense of a metaphor, as might be generously said of an astrological syntactical structure: it’s abstract in the sense that few of us, myself included, can truly visualize such higher dimension phenomena. Mathematically it is very precise. (Unlike astrology claims).
As for the rest of of your post … okay. Not sure what you think it means with respect to foundations of physics and the nature of reality, but here’s a tip: the “core” of the structures being discussed is NOT the Centre of the Universe 🤦♂️
"Part of why this concept is so elusive is that the words ‘medium’ and ‘message’ have multiple inflections, though ‘is the’ makes it seem like you should know exactly what’s going on. "
I may be of some service here to dispel the nature of the mystery!
Please indulge me in this example; when you knock on the bark of a tree with your hand the tree is "hard". However, when you invent and then use a SAW it is seen that there are both harder woods and also softer woods and this leads us as far as a a political impasse between Canada and the USA over the softwood lumber dispute!! That is some reach for the humble saw.
Therefore, the saw, an extension of our body, allows us to shape our world (in this specific case a tree) but we are in turn shaped BY this extension of our body. Our ability to alter hardwood and softwood has also altered our view of the world because before the saw all trees were tough as nails :)
With the car being an extension of our foot and the internet being an extension of our nervous system we turn into a human Swiss-Army-Knife!! Each "medium" through which we interact with the world changes the world around and us and therefore changes us as well. Please think of yourself from now on as a walking, talking Swiss-Army-Knife and the phrase the medium of the message becomes clear.
That is to say, that the medium (in this case saw, an extension of our teeth as with that ol' faithful Canadian symbol - the beaver) is the message because now that the saw is an extension of our body the "signal" sent by our nerves to and from our brain and the world only exist because of how the saw extends our teeth.
Finally, this phrase now allows us to understand the plague of the 21st century. When something that WAS an extension of our body (like the pay phone, the fax machine, the type writer, the landline phone) is no longer of use we suffer that technological amputation! What WAS once a fully formed and operational limb extending our body had now been chopped off, and many a human and political or educational institution, has felt the ghost-pain of this amputated medium (or limb, no pun intended).
In the end, it is the MEDIUM (saw, car, hammer, internet, telescope) that is the MESSAGE that we are to pay strict attention to.
By employing Edgar Rubin's 1905 figure/ground analysis we may navigate Edgar Allen Poe's maelstrom and thus be the sailor that navigates away from amputation and ghost pain and towards the artist that pays attention to the present and is now swamped by signals from the past and the future.
From page 8 of Understanding Media; "the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs".
In this case the saw and how it leads to an international incident for the economies of our country, but it holds equally true for any and all media that extends our bodies and turns us into living Swiss-Army-Knives including the car and the internet.
"Humans are the sex organs of the machine world," Marshall said in the Toronto Star long ago, "except when you chop them off because of digital overexposure which leads you to think you're neither a man nor a woman, because in digital space, in fact you are neither."
Love this!
“Within astrology itself there is syntactical structure that gets good results much of the time.”
Citations *desperately* needed.
Otherwise, largely recapitulates the history of MM’s famous phrase with the distracting shoehorning of known facts into a self-admittedly subjective “syntactical structure”.
There’s a message in there, I’m sure.
Maybe it takes a grifter to see it, though.
Busted. I have been scamming the McLuhans since 2015 and my father purchased his Ph.D. on eBay. I don't know anything about astrology except what I learned from YouTubes.
Also every night I hold a seance and invite St. Marshall into the room and pretend to do an astrology reading for him. I tell him how his chart resembles those of Nic Tesla, Bucky Fuller and Jean Shepherd. He always rattles my pencil cup and it sounds like he's saying "true enough." Then mysteriously my typewriter turns on.
Astrology doesn't need a footnote. Astrology IS the footnote. For information on its syntax, see the Table of Essential Dignities per Ptolemy et al, or the Thema Mundi, very similar concept. The latter lays out the basics in 400 BCE, around the time of the development of music theory (both are based on the classical Greek division of a wheel into 12 modes).
Right.
You’ve evolved the grift over 2.5 millennia. Gotta keep up with the rubes 🤷♂️
Regardless, it doesn’t matter if you strip most of the woo: it’s ALL woo, all the way down.
You can dress it up however you like, but using a system based on mapping the then-visible planets’* positions on an arbitrary set of stars that have been retconned to match a prior epoch’s polar alignment is a pretty silly way to determine anything here on Earth.
Yours truly,
As astrophysicist
PS Not sure what this has to do with your father though.
Unless of course he has a “PhD” in astrology, which is in fact as valuable as a degree acquired from eBay.
An astrophysicist has no right to call astrology woo. The "big bang" - now there is some fucking woo. It all just came out of a big bang some where, and one day you were walking your dog.
Thanks for the laugh, Eric 😹
If someone today tells you they KNOW what caused the Big Bang, they’re a crackpot.
But, my dude, there was a “Bang”.
We understood that very well long before we had transistors 🤦♂️
have you seen the recent image of 44 million galaxies all interwoven like endless webs of Laniakas? (The Milky Way is part of a vast superstructure of galaxies which are being drawn toward the Great Attractor. This is a standard feature in the universe, i.e., the universe as we know it is made of these intricate patterns of galaxies.) At the core is a node...massive a gravitational anomaly...the bang is abstract and misses the point of what we can see and model now...
This link contains a video and also an interview with the team leader from U Hawaii, Brent Tully, who assembled the data on how the local group, the Virgo group centered on M87 and a much vaster supercluster are all part of the same thing.
https://planetwaves.fm/laniakea/
* Neptune & Uranus were a big oversight for most of that time, yeah?
And are we or are we not including Pluto?
Niburu?
X? 😹
Pluto is rising; it is in the chart and one of the most promonient planets, in the last degree of Leo. (The two charts are the same but one is 17c and one is 20c.) Uranus and Neptune are in a seprate aspect pattern in the early fixed signs with the lunar nodes. A case could be made that they are part of the same pattern but I am presenting them in this article as different patterns for clarity. One of my central illustrative points is that Pluto is in the process of changing signs; once in Virgo it is clearly in aspect to Neptune, as it is today. This is one of those situations where it could go either way but I am keeping the interpretation as basic as posisblbe for a non astrological audience.
Well, “the bang is abstract” if you mistakenly think of it as an explosion IN spacetime (like a big bomb), rather than OF spacetime (the clichéd surface of an expanding balloon metaphor, wrought in all 3 spatial dimensions).
That is, it’s not “abstract” in the same sense of a metaphor, as might be generously said of an astrological syntactical structure: it’s abstract in the sense that few of us, myself included, can truly visualize such higher dimension phenomena. Mathematically it is very precise. (Unlike astrology claims).
As for the rest of of your post … okay. Not sure what you think it means with respect to foundations of physics and the nature of reality, but here’s a tip: the “core” of the structures being discussed is NOT the Centre of the Universe 🤦♂️