[the invisib1e hand]

Marshall MacLuhan had came out with his brilliant book, The Medium is the Message, pointing out the perils of TV. One of the worst problems is that no one who watched it full time could concentrate on anything for longer than about 10 or 15 seconds—the amount of time the camera rolled before switching to the next shot. Sesame Street supposedly taught kids how to count and spell, but what it really did is unhinge their minds, so they couldn’t concentrate on anything for longer than that proverbial 15 seconds.

I'm still trying to get my head around "Understanding Media." In fact, it comes to me in little bits, and it's phenomenal. We take media for granted, and probably can't fully appreciate how it completely distorts reality -- even something as simple as a photograph is completely out of context by its very nature and susceptible to being reinterpreted by its viewer(s) in ways that have little connection to the reality of the event it portrays. That sort of power is not to be abused...but alas...

[Cicero]

Marshall MacLuhan was an almost unprecedented phenomenon—a hugely popular media star who was also a genius with traditional moral values. The only one of his kind in the postmodern world, unless maybe you turn to someone very different like Flannery O’Connor.

I’ve read several of his books and essays. That one is the most significant, but they’re all worth reading. And underneath it all is someone with very traditional religious views—but he managed to phrase them in such a way that the religion-hating intellectuals were taken in.