McLuhan is famously hard to summarize or to structure hierarchically… or to put into a short elevator speech describing and revealing what he was/ is all about.

This YouTube audio lecture is one of the more accessible ways in to Understanding McLuhan, but it’s still not a walk in the park. One may turn on YouTube’s auto generated closed captions, to aid in comprehension, to the extent that it does. LOL.  Sometimes the captions resulting are comically off and absurd, and sometimes it helps to “read the text”…something McLuhan would surely have commented on were he alive to see this version of YouTube presentations.

Repeated listenings help to absorb his POV, which kind of sinks in based on time immersed, and number of immersions. Early on (1:45) he says the rather large shift between visual world to acoustic world presents new challenges for learning and teaching in the all-at-once electric age. (One also needs to know just what he means when he uses the words “visual” and “acoustic” as they are his own particular meanings, not what we might immediately think when we hear those words.)

When he’s talking there’s also a rich subtext as he comments about a zillion different things…so we have to listen carefully, and connect the dots actively, to “get it”. The mysterious part of his POV back 50 years ago, is how much of what he says seems to be simply explaining our world in 2018. The question is “how can he be doing this?”…what is his core awareness that just creates all these useful insights? Is there one? McLuhan is so seemingly ahead of his time, that many during his time could barely get started on what he is talking about.

Much of which seems a little self-evident today. Or is he an extraterrestrial who was sent to “Help us out” a bit? =^)

I guess history has its prophets, often unrecognized in their times, although McLuhan was all over TV shows, and in various articles and stories and guest lectures etc. So he was recognized in a way as someone saying insightful things, provocative things…and he sometimes was provocative to a fault…but at the same time he was often misunderstood.

One way “in” starts with his insight into the western Greek phonetic alphabet, of which he says the origin is very obscure. We have to “Read” in a very rule defined way, left to right, line by line, to assemble meaning from meaningless symbols. He says there’s no other mainstream language that’s like this…not Hebrew, not Arabic, not Hindu, not Chinese…which all use elemental units that do have some meaning, however small.

Phonetic writing requires using our sense of sight in a very narrow, circumscribed, limited way, which he calls “visual”. When we are reading phonetically, we exclude all our other senses, (even eliminating the spoken word when we learn how to read silently). McLuhan says we really really need to grasp what that does to our perceptive process, and how it determines the kind of world we experience or “know”, and create to live in.

McLuhan was a medieval scholar, which included some years before the transition to ubiquitous printed text, so there’s that big change he was able to “get”.  He was able to use that core insight to also see the transition from the visual world of print, to what he calls the aural world of electronic media.

He also was a James Joyce scholar, which tells us a lot, because he could understand and “get” the multiple allusions of meaning all at once, such as Joyce created. McLuhan also had something to say for today’s seniors: this is a period when Seniors can lead “discovery”. He meant that all the accumulated knowledge and experience of seniors created a field of knowledge that might act as a catalytic field for our new way of “knowledge as connections”. The richer the field of knowledge, the more valuable the curation.