Been so long since I read him, I haven't bothered much to look at what people currently parse from that familiar (too-brief) slogan.

But in this opus linked, I think that author is close to my recollections. Particularly the phrase, the change of scale or pace or pattern - resonates with some hardly new observations of the ilk, "mankind suffers from a lack of 'scale and relativity'" -- which is itself a high scale generality, approaching that meta- vantage point.

At the time when McL achieved his (more than) 15-minutes of fame, ie mid-'60s.. when Understanding Media was first published, this was a bloody metaphysical level analysis of our preoccupation with a mechanical habit of 'analysis into infinite pieces' / yet with damn little thought about the subtle consequences of the growing mass of techno- inventions being thrown into the mix.

That all the throwing was almost exclusively a trajectory about $-making and ~ nil re the ripples that were overlapping - if one bothered to notice - was certainly pukka Murican.

As typically, too - 'we' have yet to grok his message about messaging; I doubt we shall have the attention span today, for any serious review.. even if we are more needful of that than in 1964.


RIP Marshall; you're still too advanced for a permanently adolescent kultur.
(Note that '64 was fully immersed in ongoing deep trauma of the JFK assassination - and before the MLK, RFK ones completed the preparation for the election of a Nixon - six months after RFK.)

I've maintained that 5/68 marked the exact inflection point of steady disintegration --> down to where a GWB even, could become a 'President' (!) McL's incisive work apparently made nary a lasting difference - then or now. Just rich fodder for a subsequent bunch of soc-sci theses as make no difference to the mass, or to our 'direction'.


Ashton