/lit/ - Literature

>>22694806
Yes.
>I would like to temper this enthusiasm by taking seriously McLuhan's own formula: "The medium is the message," or "Massage-Message.” What this really means is that television has no message apart from itself. It does not transmit anything, whether information, thought, or artistic creation. It is itself the message. What it implants in us as message is itself. The pictures that it presents have no meaning. This is why they must be short and striking. Dancing is more televisual than yoga, a papal visit than meditation, war than peace, violence than nonviolence, the shouting of a charismatic leader than reflection that expresses ideas, conflict and competition than cooperation. Ecology does not go over well on television. Non-messages go over best. All that remains is a general haze out of which only the screen itself emerges. We are given no information about reality. There is in fact no information on television, only television itself. An event is not news unless television carries it. One moment, some weeks, it is excited about Biafra, the next about Cambodia and Pol Pot, the next about the Boat People, the next about Israel, the next about South Africa. We are shown the same pictures again and again (a process that is becoming more common all the time). Suddenly millions of viewers are worked up about injustice in Israel or South Africa. But then it is gone in a flash. The situation, of course, is still the same. But television cannot follow it any longer. On television everything has to be very simple (pictures!). There are the good guys and the bad guys. Again, viewers want something new. Only what is new is interesting. Things must not go on too long, even tragic things, or they become boring. There is a total confounding of the important and the new. The taking of hostages is very important. The progressive seizure of Cambodia by Vietnam is not important because it is not new. In effect, viewers are watching a show. There has to be action and it must not go on too long. When television stops dealing with a question, the question no longer exists. This is what shows us that television is itself the message. Television does not communicate information. Information communicates television. We are merely consumers of information, that is, of that which television has dramatized. This is why the televised message is really a massage of the brain, of knowledge, of memory. This massage causes all that we have seen yesterday to disappear.

>>22319041
>An illustration of the incapacity to "grasp political affairs" when a man is plunged into the news and becomes a specialist is William Shirer and his book on the Third Reich. Shirer operated consistently from inside the news as he found it in the archives, and did prodigious work in unraveling events—to arrive at precisely nothing. Limited by being a diplomatic journalist, he was not able to retrace anything but the diplomatic elements; limited by his concern with news, he remained at the most superficial level. In reality, he understood nothing of Hitler's Revolution, its economic components, or its nature. All we learn from him is that on June 16, 1938, at 21 hours 2 minutes, Hitler, wearing a pair of gray trousers, said such and such. And the book was a bestseller.

>>21814213
>Pseuds like Ellul are criticized in his works, because it doesn't matter how much you think about a problem if you don't make an attempt to solve it
He participated in environmental movements against the French State, housed anarchists during the Spanish Civil War, fought against Nazis in the French Resistance and wrote dozens of books concerning technique (which is itself an action). He did more than Ted ever did.

>>21543118
Because they read hacks like Sartre instead of Ellul.

>>21418603
>As always, we may rely on Bernard de Jouvenel’s grasp of reality, and, in fact, everything we have been discussing is summarized by him. He was among the first to discern that, instead of being accidental, the uninterrupted growth of power was the natural course (and neither hypothetical nor yearned for) of history, and that with human efforts, the state exerted an irresistible thrust: “We cherish the cry of liberty that resounds at the outset of every revolution, and we do not realize that there is no liberty without the burden of power. . . . First, we had the rule of Charles I, Louis XVI, and Nicholas II, followed by that of Cromwell, Napoleon, and Stalin. When nations rise to overthrow tyranny, those are the masters they see oppressing them. . . . The Cromwells and Stalins are not casual consequences or accidents arising from social ferment; they are in fact the appointed terminus toward which the turmoil inevitably led: the cycle began with the removal of insufficient power, only to end in the consolidation of absolute power. Revolutions are the liquidation of a weak power and the implanting of a strong one. . . . Revolution resounds with the cursing of tyrants, yet they find no tyrant at the start, but themselves create him in the end. . . . Power is revitalized at its source, imparting unimpeded motion to the nation because the turmoil has swept away obstacles to social progress. Revolution installs tyranny, the severity of which depends on how thoroughly the aristocracy has been uprooted. . . .” Finally, Jouvenel rounds out his remarkable etching with this phrase: “In the last analysis, revolutions are made for power, not for mankind.”

>>21341268
They are always forgotten...

The technological society or The technological bluff?