McLuhan Sighting

"Philosophize This" dedicates an episode to Marshall McLuhan. It's very good.

The podcast is here.

The transcript to the podcast is here.

You ask people that question what would you rather be? Blind or deaf? And 99% of people say they'd rather be deaf...because our culture is so visual in terms of how it communicates. But how might that sample size change if a new media or technology was introduced that communicated primarily through audio? You know, McLuhan once said:

"We don't know who discovered water but we know it wasn't a fish. A pervasive environment, a pervasive medium is always beyond perception."

The big point to McLuhan is this: the messages that these media of written language are sending to us...go far beyond the actual content or subject matter of the thing that's being written about. There are latent messages being sent that as fish in the water we just don't perceive.