Dissolving Transforming

Beginning on this new path, a consideration of the first, untitled, preface-like page of The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan.

To begin with, McLuhan explains the "mosaic or field approach" that his book will develop as "the only practical means of revealing causal operations in history."   Again, a confirmation, as "mosaic" also roughly describes my plan of week by week jumping from one small bit of one book to one small bit of another to another small bit of yet another.    I made the plan not really knowing, though curious to know, what such a plan of attack might reveal--who knows?  Perhaps causal operations in history.

McLuhan goes on to assert the galaxy, event-constellation or environment under study "is itself a mosaic of perpetually intersecting forms that have undergone kaleidoscopic transformation--particularly in our own time"  (The Gutenberg Galaxy was published in 1962)   The particular kinds of events constituting this "galaxy" are changes in technology, and the ways those changes constitute not passive or neutral events but rather "active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike."   As examples he asserts that alphabets and writing created the environment or ancient empires, that the stirrup and the wheel greatly expanded the scope of such empires, that printing from movable type created "the public" and nations as we understand them.   Finally, in the twentieth century the shift from mechanical to electrical technology has been (and continues to be) a most active process indeed and one the major historical shifts of all time.

For McLuhan, the individual, the public and nations are all products of  "an intense and visually oriented self-consciousness, both of the individual and the group,"  and this intense visual consciousness is itself the product of words on the printed page, hence the world of that period from the 15th into the early 20th centuries was a "Gutenberg Galaxy," since Gutenberg invented the printing press. 

However, "electrical circuitry does not support the extension of visual modalities in any degree approaching the visual power of the printed word,"  so that, paradoxically, those processes which have nurtured and supported the individual, the public and nations are no longer with us in the same way.   Since the advent of film, recordings, radio, television, computers and the internet, whatever an individual was, whatever the public was, whatever a nation was have been being dissolved or in whatever fashion, fundamentally transformed.   It was to describe this transformation that McLuhan coined the term "global village."   Today we are witnessing, not just in the US but all over the world,  a resurgence of populist nationalism.  Perhaps this resurgence has much to do with the anxiety of the sudden (in historical terms) dissolution/transformation of such basic things as our sense of individuality, of being the public, of being a nation.

https://www.amazon.com/Gutenberg-Galaxy-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/144261269X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485559537&sr=1-1&keywords=marshall+mcluhan+the+gutenberg+galaxy

http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/