"You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is amazing."

I just re-read most of this 1969 interview with Marshall McLuhan in Playboy. It's both abstruse and enlightening, and often provocative. One thing I do agree with which is pursuant to my previous post on The Brady Bunch is McLuhan's insistence that all media are an extension of the human body and senses that invariably influence him and his environment deeply. The famous cool/hot media distinction is one that I don't quite get, other than conceptually - Cool media is low definition that invariably invites viewer participation in filling out the details. Television is cool. The telephone is cool. A seminar or conversation is cool media. Hot media extends a single sense in high definition. Radio is hot. Photographs are hot. Film is hot. A lecture is hot - but I think it is overplayed at the expense of McLuhan's wider observations.

Anyway, read that interview. It should take about a week. If only Marshall McLuhan were alive today to tell us how the interwebs and high def TV and 24 hour news cycles conspire to connect us in ways more intimate than ever, but also make us feel more alienated than ever, and are quite possibly going to lead to nonviolent secession. All these things are happening people, and yet we're too immersed to parse it into hot and cold media or whatever MM would have done!

McLuhan also says in the interview that "TV is revolutionizing every political system in the Western world" and, in a pithy representation of the idea that it's the medium that matters and not the message, that "the people wouldn’t have cared if John Kennedy lied to them on TV, but they couldn’t stomach LBJ even when he told the truth." Here is a clip of McLuhan analyzing a 1976 debate between Carter and Ford. It really gets going about half way into it -"You're assuming that what these people say is important." Watch it and bemoan that this mystic is not with us today.