Quixote's Media Meditations: A Prelude to Understanding
A new monthly spell-breaking series on the extorting effects of technology in our time. Dispatches on the global village, AI, literacy, the urge to extend, and media ecology's antidotes to the madness
The first circumnavigation of the globe in the Renaissance gave men a sense of embracing and possessing the earth that was quite new, even as the recent astronauts have again altered man’s relation to the planet, reducing its scope to the extent of an evening’s stroll.
- Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media
A couple of years ago, a dear friend and fellow scholar of the Orphan Wisdom School messaged me and said “YOU HAVE TO TAKE THIS COURSE. YOU WILL LOVE IT.” No preamble, no context, just an ode to our friendship clothed in the intellectual and spiritual joy that can arise when you know you’ve stumbled upon hidden treasure. This is the secret of well-earned learning, that it cannot be hoarded, less it decays.
The cache in question was
’s Understanding Media Intensive. Immediately, I recognized the name and the draw. Years ago, I read the Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man by Andrew’s grandfather, Marshall McLuhan, the prophetic godfather of media ecology and literacy. I was led down a rabbit hole toward the Ongs and Illichs and Bergers and Baudrillards of the world. Through them, I began to court the possibility that our contemporary crisis of technology has a history much older and much, much, more complex than I could’ve ever imagined.Enter UMI. My friend, inhabiting the old coyote trickster, refused to tell me anything about the course, just that I had to take it. So I did. I registered and began to wonder what I might possibly get out of a year-and-a-half-long online course about a book from the 1960s whose title sounded straight out of a first year university course: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. As it turns out, the book has exquisitely transcended the test of time. Despite Marshall’s tomb using examples from his own era to illuminate his insights, they easily translate into our 21st century context. Likewise, his grandson invites those examples to be ushered over the electric threshold into the digital age. It’s a welcome reminder that history is not past, that we’re only taught that it is. This course provokes and, in my opinion, proves as much.
Not long after the first few sessions, my uncertainty turned to welcome perplexity as I began to digest the medium as the message. I became vehemently aware of the effects these “extensions of man.” How my bicycle, computer and cellphone, as examples, have shaped my world and world-view. Not just the mediums they are, but the mediums they also hold or require in order to operate (e.g. the road, precious metal mines, social media, respectively). Not just how a book or an internet meme’s authors try to seduce us into their forested or virtual perspective, but how these tools or technologies shape the author’s creations and world-“view”. This course is about what rarely reaches the surface of our knowing: the architecture, as opposed to the interior design. The context and not just the content.
Scholarly in his own right, Andrew curates and animates the course with a discipline worthy of his lineage. He’s joined by an incredible TA from
, the SF-based organization which co-ordinates the course. Together and typically joined by an intimate supporting cast of rebel academic students, this offering is one desperately needed in our time. Alongside the scholarly dive into Understanding Media, the course is packed full of peripheral McLuhan history, media ecology notes, reading lists, fun, puns, and an optional homework portion which brings the 60’s into the 20’s via our personal reflections.I’m deeply indebted to Andrew, his lineage, and Gray Area for the opportunity to learn in a manner that seems so often lacking. As a way of honouring our time together, I’ve been revising and remixing the best of my homework assignments for you, dear reader, which are currently rolling out on Substack, once a month. They’ll arrive among you as Quixote’s Media Meditations, with threaded themes of language, lineage, literacy, libraries, and limits interwoven among artificial intelligence, imagination, hypermobility, memes, money
PS. Andrew is hard at work preparing for a new edition of the Understanding Media Intensive, which begins on Sept 12, 2023. While you and I may not know each other, I have it on good authority that this course will fashion you a new set of eyes. If you’re interested in seeing differently and knowing more about the course and registration, you can check out details here. If you’d like to follow Andrew or the McLuhan Institute via Substack, you can do so via
.Coming Up
Here is a sneek peak from QMM #1, coming later this week…
As if it wasn’t consequential enough that smartphones and computers keep us locked into a screened-in worldview, effectively removing, if not stymieing us from our sensual relationships with more-than-human worlds, the internet meme further deepens that schism. From what I see in my social media circles, memes are currently the most widely shared and traded content, at least on Instagram, if not Facebook and Twitter. The meme often takes a reaction, reflection, or insight onto a complex topic (because the world is inherently complex and more complex, still, in our time) and reduces it into the most simple and concentrated form of media possible, typically using a few words or a single sentence to describe that very complexity which we seek to understand. In doing so, the meme compartmentalizes and oversimplifies, pushing the myriad and diverse realities of a situation or idea through the pinhole of the social media gaze.
And, as it seems, we love it. The languid light of the flat screen coaxes our eyes toward the simple, the superficial, into the void. Follow, the buttons implore.
Homework
Finally, you can listen to the End of Tourism interview I undertook with Andrew below: