Pepper's Ghost
The title "The Medium Is the Massage" is a teaser—a way of getting attention. There's a wonderful sign hanging in a Toronto junkyard which reads, 'Help Beautify Junkyards. Throw Something Lovely Away Today.' This is a very effective way of getting people to notice a lot of things. And so the title is intended to draw attention to the fact that a medium is not something neutral—it does something to people. It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around, chiropractically, as it were, and the general roughing up that any new society gets from a medium, especially a new medium, is what is intended in that title"
Can You Spot All the Ghosts in the Machines?
Marshall McLuhan , "Understanding Media",
In Understanding Media, McLuhan describes the "content" of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.[11] This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. As society's values, norms, and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions that we are not aware of.[12]
Excerpt from "The Technical Mediation of Public Memory"
Without a retentional framework, the technical structures we use to communicate are inherently incapable of holding the content of the present to the tribunal of the past. Control of the present in this situation becomes a matter of taking up space within the medium, of the combinatorial flicker of rapidly generated content within familiar frames. Mark Fisher described this as the reduction of all memory to formal memory—the memory possessed by Jason Bourne, the amnesiac spy turned provocateur who, unable to base present decision making on a memory of the past, is nevertheless equipped with a set of reflexes and hardwired methodologies for navigating the apparently senseless and ahistorical circumstances he finds himself in (Fisher, 2009, p. 64). In culture and in the news media, the rational unity of content is replaced by an aesthetic unity of form: narrative coherence with brand consistency. Power in such a medium is a matter of proficiency in the techniques of framing, not in the production of valuable content (since the capacity to publicly stabilise value is the very thing that has departed).
VaporWave
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