Tag: Marshall McLuhan

Was the Rolling Stones 1969 Hyde Park Concert crafted using McLuhan’s ideas?

Was this concert crafted using McLuhan’s ideas? Or, is it as it appears, a prime example of a return to tribalism via electronic media? Early in the video, Mick Jagger even speaks about the audience as participants.

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As far as I am able to determine, there is nothing documented that indicates The Rolling Stones were consciously crafting the Hyde Park concert around your father’s ideas. As artists, they were certainly responding to the cultural trends that constituted the focus of his work, so I can understand how it might seem that way. That being said, I did find the following interesting reference to the counter-culture in the Marchand biography.

“If McLuhan was unhappy about the assault on the Church by theological revolutionaries, he was not particularly pleased about the use of his work by cultural revolutionaries such as Abbie Hoffman, who in 1968 was saying, “The Left is too much into Marx, not enough into McLuhan.” When Hoffman published his Revolution for the Hell of It in 1968, McLuhan regarded it simply as a manifesto for the new tribalism. What was absurd, according to McLuhan, was that Hoffman seemed to think it meritorious to embrace this tribalism, when such embrace was almost as automatic, in the new electronic environment, as taking off one’s sweater in a warm room.” (Marchand, 1989, 206-207)

It seems reasonable to assume that the Stones were reading Hoffman and may well have been avid McLuhan-ites. I will certainly ask them if I ever get the chance! By the way, I particularly liked how the automatic nature of the tribal embrace was an issue for [McLuhan]. This makes perfect sense, since he stressed the need to observe the effects, and potential dangers, of new media environments. The tragedy of Altamont, only five months after Hyde Park, would seem to bear this out.

Thomas MacFarlane
Author of The Beatles and McLuhan, Understanding The Electric Age

Screen reading and literacy

New York Times Web Site with video ad

A hypothesis for investigation is that screen reading is an impediment to understanding. Conventional reading develops distinction and concentration. Reading on displays tends to confusion and distraction.

Eric McLuhan’s Fordham Experiment with film (albeit more of a demonstration) seems to show that light on, light through alone is significant. And that would just be comparing reading on a paper page versus an eReader.

At a major newspaper’s Site, there might very well be animated popup ads demanding attention, flavoring the experience more like the Star Wars cantina than a library. And there’s no location at a newspaper Web Site. In the paper copy, news, opinion, sports are in different neighborhoods, immediately indicating value and relevance. Online, everything and anything resides in the same one click away long house. With print reading, everyone is literally on the same page; the physical experience is identical for all. Published through the Internet, text differs according to screen size, specs and configuration. For Online reading, it’s very likely that ads and suggested Pages will vary from user to user.

A high level of literacy was an important factor in the American Revolution. Any George III of the future will be secure in knowing that when his Thomas Paine writes Common Sense, very few will even try to read it on a small screen. And for most of those that do make the attempt, something will appear over to the side about an actress in a bikini and that’ll be that.

BMW Diesel TV Commercial — “Do that again.”

Do note the curious call to action: “It’s time to come clean.”

This current ad uses the dynamic (Freudian) unconscious to associate the word “diesel” with “dildo.” Here’s the yang to the Svedka robot’s yin.

In Marshall McLuhan’s 1951 collection of essays, The Mechanical Bride, he discussed the conjunction of the sexual and the mechanical in the shared mind. Here’s just a bit from McLuhan’s preface:
“Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now. And to generate heat not light is the intention. To keep everybody in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads and much entertainment alike.
. . .
“But amid the diversity of our inventions and abstract techniques of production and distribution there will be found a great degree of cohesion and unity. This consistency is not conscious in origin or effect and seems to arise from a sort of collective dream.”
. . .

From the essay Love-Goddess Assembly Line:
“. . . one of the most peculiar features of our world — the interfusion of sex and technology. It is not a feature created by the ad men, but it seems rather to be born of a hungry curiosity to explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique, on one hand, and, on the other, to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way.”
. . .

From the essay The Mechanical Bride:
. . .
“It would be a mistake, therefore, to equate the intensity of the current glamour campaigns and techniques with any corresponding new heights of man-woman madness. Sex weariness and sex sluggishness are, in measure at least, both the cause and increasingly the outcome of these campaigns. No sensitivity of response could long survive such a barrage. What does survive is the view of the human body as a sort of love-machine capable merely of specific thrills. This extremely behavioristic view of sex, which reduces sex experience to a problem in mechanics and hygiene, is exactly what is implied and expressed on all sides. It makes inevitable both the divorce between physical pleasure and reproduction and also the case for homosexuality. In the era of thinking machines, it would be surprising, indeed, if the love-machine were not thought of as well.
. . .
“. . . is a popular dream art which works trance-like inside a situation that is never grasped or seen, And this trance seems to be what perpetuates the widely occurring cluster image of sex, technology, and death which constitutes the mystery of the mechanical bride.”

From the essay The Tough as Narcissus
. . .
“The terror inspired by wild beasts, which led tribal societies to get psychologically inside the tribal totem animal, is being repeated today to the degree that those who are confused or overwhelmed by a machine world are encouraged to become psychologically hard, brittle, and smoothly metallic. The slick-chick and the corporation executive, as they now register on the popular imagination, are already inside the totem machine.”

Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key

Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key
This is one of the most important books ever published! And of course that means nothing in these days when the jacket of every penny dreadful is tattooed with blurbs that would make the author’s mother blush. But here it is true; if between the covers there was nothing but the introduction by Marshall McLuhan — if all the other pages were blank — this would still be something that everyone should read.
(BTW, McLuhan’s “pattern recognition” IBM aphorism went on to be echoed by Gibson.)

As now all the world’s a stage for Marketing — a president one day playing pilot and the next Western sheriff, hocus-pocus WMDs, the peace candidate president that follows rendering the Mediterranean Mare NATO, global warming the apocalypse now and we’re told to focus on gay marriage — the only stray glimmer of hope is in raising the subliminal out of the unconscious. That’s what Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key can do for you.