/lit/ - Literature

Marshall McLuhan.

Sharp, witty, perceptive, and broadly applicable. A highly literate man but steeped in oral tradition. Can be approachable to normies, but tremendous depth is there if one is willing and interested to dig.

>>22414364
For me, it's one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. I read it over ten years ago and I still think about its contents regularly. Few other books have been so useful in understanding what's going on in our modern artificial world (that is: our world comprised of human artefacts).

It's demanding, but playful and insightful. Filled with witty aphorisms and unexpected connections between pop culture and classic literature. Reveals the profundity within the trivial. McLuhan gives his readers an extremely rich and fun pair of spectacles to view and contextualize our past and present. This isn't a work laying out fixed concepts, but a collection of percepts. It's like a book of intellectual toys you can pick up, rotate, mash against one another, and see how it all works. There's a lot of fun to be had reading McLuhan, and he's extremely underrated.

Read the Media Ecologists, folks. McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman.

>>21727902
No u.
The medium is the message.

I am not necessarily interested in a demolition of technology or the regression of innovation. I'm interested in raising awareness of the impacts of technology on the self and our culture. We just dump endless "innovation" into the larger environment without bothering to consider it's effects. We need to stop and consider what values are important to us, what's sustainable, and what kind of people we want to be. SLOW THE FUCK DOWN.

We're becoming shallower, more anxious, more hedonistic, more atomized, and more reactionary. The technological environments we have created have made us who we are.

The Internet isn't a thing in the environment. We live in the environment the Internet made possible.

Read McLuhan.

>Teach the cattle to read
>The cattle choose not to read
Inconceivable.

>>9378884
>tfw Media reshapes man in its own image
>tfw you can already see the internet massively reshaping humans in its own image (sexual dimorphism, cognitive patterns, concioussness encompasses the entire planet, short-circuiting of all existing reward mechanisms)
>tfw already the havoc REKT by the cybertubes goes far beyond the massive and mostly unexamined impact of 20th century technologies like TV and the process is just accelerating
>tfw probably at the beginning of a terrifying a new stage in human evolution
>tfw spend 1hr a day synchronizing your brain to the very matrix of deterritorialisation, the autism mainframe, psychically communing with sexual deviants and psychotic ideologues

>>9091257

I never realized how much it was actually Marshall McLuhan who says a lot of this stuff first. Even before Land, Baudrillard...

>Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.

>Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

>>8528156
u wot m8

which are the best places to find literature online? looking for fiction and critical theory mainly.