McLuhan, Fallacies and Facts
Fallacies are more important than facts - However, data of merit won’t disappear. There has always been a gravitational pull, with an arcane selection process, upon people to produce towards truths and the nature of reality - It has always been and should always be - It’s just a different level. We’ve just gotten used to one phase of mass media, with an unqualified or unattenuated distribution of knowledge, however we are probably entering a different phase with the rise of the Global Theater over the Global Village.
Fallacies are more important than facts
— Marshall McLuhan
The world runs on fallacies - We have abundant recent evidence of a multiplicity of fallacies 
. Perhaps this is because the Reptilian Brain is really the dominant brain - Logic and reason can be exercises in frustration and futility, but if you speak to the monkey, you can make the monkey dance. I think what happens is that our pre-cognizance of death channels the Reptilian Brain, and that is why it is so easily spoken to and is so forceful.
Now that we are no longer a global village, but a Global Theater [~well, we are still a global village, of course, but have undergone metamorphosis, through cable, satcom, cellular networks, the internet, HTTP, Hulu, YouTube, Twitter, Skype, etc, into the Global Theater, where much of life experience is theatrical~], where we become our own network programmer, and all else becomes program content. Where once experience programmed us, we now program our experience. That seems pretty important to think about. Is it bad? Is it good? Is it all bad or all good? - If not, what are the good parts, what are the bad parts? Can just the good parts be re-combined?
Some thoughts are that it is a natural process, paralleling (since we are commodifying information - but on a different calendar/timetable, since the information age came after industrialization) the process of mass production efficiencies, the creation of inventories, the creation of marketing to deal with surpluses, the metamorphosis of marketing response to the evolution of production/consumption/inventories, etc. However, everything’s always different and never the same, and consequently there’s things going on such as: More and more of information production, marketing, and promotion/advertising is being done by the information consumer. Other dynamics, too: Successful products spawn countless imitators, and so successful information products also spawn countless clones, repurposing, recycling, hopefully with some transformation into startling new forms.
We really need to know how our cognitive organization is getting reinitialized and reformatted. If we thought more about it, we might actually determine what is happening to us right now, instead of after the fact. But so far, we have not been able to understand the current, much less the future. We only know phonetic orthography (our applied visual technology of an oral form) is forked, cognitively, from the cognitive technology of oral phonetics. There is no cognitive linearization/seriality with oral culture - It is largely nonlinear.
Literate/Alphabetic man, however, came to view his world through a perceptual reformatting by the technologies of his orthographic (rather than oral) phonetics. He thought in serial bits, like the bits of his orthographicalized language, the serial string of bits into words, word strings into sentences, sentence strings into paragraphs, etc. He developed a compartmentalized consciousness. He came to suspend his judgement, an effective method for rational thought, but also a further divorcing from the dynamic field that is reality. He formulated a grid cognizance, like the fields of his writings, and expanded this grid to towns, plots of land, the gridification of his universe. He developed triangulation, geometry. Fast forwarding: With Gutenberg’s press, he applied Gutenberg’s first instance of uniform repeatable parts to mechanization.
Yes, Gutenberg’s press is a good example. Mechanization rose from his model of uniform repeatability. All the great thoughts, all the brilliance ever printed mattered less towards mechanization than the simple, powerful comprehension and leveraging of his model of mechanization. The industrial age really started with Gutenberg - However, not thinking of it through the lense of media effects, it was simply a printing press.
First we shape our tools, then the tools shape the man; and the tools themselves create and shape other tools.
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