File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1996/96-09-01.085, message 54


Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 08:30:34 -0700 (PDT)
From: { brad brace } <bbrace-AT-netcom.com>
Subject: Thall (fwd)


-------------------------------------------------------
Comments From Nelson Thall.
(Nelson Thall is the Director of Research for the
Center, and former assistant to Dr. McLuhan, former
Chief McLuhan Archivist for the University of Toronto,
and former president of the Marshall McLuhan Center for
Global Communications.)

* Beware the culture jammers!
Twentieth century man is not awake but walking asleep.
He has had too many novelties thrust at him. These have
made him numb and unaware, inducing at the psychic
level a trance-like stupor.
The new information superhighway is potentially the
most colossal toy ever designed. With it, education,
entertainment and business will become
indistinguishable inside a global theater dominated by
rapid movement of information.
Today 'culture is our business' and 'business is our
culture'. We have handed over our culture and  our
identities to corporations and managers who are not
responsible for the results only for profits or losses.
Their profits. Our losses.
These corporations unknowingly fulfill the role of
creating ersatz culture and therefore 'jam' real
culture. They are the culture-jammers.
To survive the culture jammers, one must be  able to
observe reality -- not to "extract fiction" from it,
which is what ersatz culture-makers (like Hollywood)
would have you do.
Real art does not always have a plot -- this is one of
the keys to truly understanding our world. Reality is
hugely more rich and complex than a James Bond movie.
The most important discovery for all students of media
to understand is that the necessity of the "story" in
culture was only a method of disguising human defeat --
the story substitutes dead formulas for living social
facts.
Nor must we continue to rely on archaic concepts for
processing and observing our most urgent problems.
Recall the story about two Navaho Indians who were
having a leisurely chat by smoke signals when an atom
bomb explosion occured between them at some distance.
Later, one of them sent up a comment." Gee, I wish I'd
said that!"
We must change the way we perceive, and soon. It's now
time for a new generation of real artists and real
thinkers to emerge and to jam the culture-jammers.
Time is getting short.

-------------------------------------------------
Extracts only -- Comments and Projections from "The
McLuhan Analyst(TM)" (private internal newsletter available
only to patrons of our non-profit Center):




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