You may have noted I’ve been referring quite a bit to Marshall McLuhan lately. I’m going to add to that a bit more, with a series of posts based on some quotes I highlighted while reading The Medium is the Massage.
The line, the continuum -this sentence is a prime example- became the organizing principle of life. “As we begin, so shall we go.” “Rationality” and logic came to depend in the presentation of connected and sequential facts or concepts.
For many people rationality has the connotation of uniformity and connectiveness. “I don’t follow you” means “I don’t think what you’re saying is rational.”
Visual space is uniform, continuous, and connected. The rational man in our Western culture is a visual man. The fact that most conscious experience has little “visuality” in it is lost on him.
Rationality and visuality have long been interchangable terms, but we do not live in a primarily visual world any more.
McLuhan rightly noted that the ways we organized things around us reshaped how we think of rationality. As the printed text became our primary medium, the sequential became the basis for rationality. In terms of the Myers-Briggs typology the dominant trait would be Sensing over iNtuition. The intuitive has had a tentative place, because their ability to draw connections from seemingly unconnected places is viewed as irrational by those accustomed to needing everything presented in a sequential manner.
As an illustration of this, in seminary I had a class where the professor would not offer outlines and would teach by facilitating dialog rather than going through from point a to point b and so on. For the more intuitive inclined, like myself, this approach was refreshing and helpful to how I learn. Yet to more sensing types this style of teaching was perceived as almost irrational, and at least unhelpful. Why is this so? Because for the modern era, we have been shaped by the medium of the printed text and its sequential manner.
In the broad sense, this is the illustration of McLuhan’s statement “as we begin, so shall we go.” What we start with will shape how we continue to understand. That means for those of us who have grown up with television and the internet, that this is being reshaped. In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan states that the television is leading to us having a much more eastern, connected sort of approach to how we see the world. At the least, the prevalence of the internet and television is reordering how we perceive the world. I sense that this movement is towards a more intuitional approach of viewing information, as both internet and television thrive on juxtaposition of objects that don’t necessarily belong together.
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