Topics mentioned include: the Viet Nam war and future conflict, figure and ground, ‘women’s lib,’ discarnate condition via electric media, the Global Village, effects precede causes, telephone, electricity and magic, Euclid and visual space, the alphabet, the videophone, Orwell and 1984, Marxism, W. K. Wimsatt, mimesis, hot and cool media, the instant replay.
by Bob Dobbs, 25 January 2022
Amazing!
This is the night I first heard that the “global village is in the room”.
That is one of the most important insights from MM.
Once I got that, I had caught up with McLuhan.
I no longer had the “terrestrial” view of the “village”.
A couple of years later I saw his use of “global membrane” in the article on Burroughs and I knew that was the more appropriate phrase for MM’s “room” pattern.
Twenty years later I heard the “room” point on Nelson Thall’s recording from a 1974 MM class that Nelson was attending.
I’ve never heard it described ever again, so MM wasn’t saying it in public at all.
So, the night I heard it on Jan.22/73 was the luckiest McLuhan experience for me.
I’ve been walking around with that knowledge for almost 50 years and nobody ever talked about it.
Aside from Barry Nevitt, nobody would actually speak about what McLuhan said.
They would usually just quote somebody who was critical of MM.
Frank Zingrone would show up sporadically.
He later apologized for that, in print.
Bob Logan hadn’t shown up, yet.
Neither had Carl Scarfe.
And Derrick De Kerckhove wasn’t attending the Monday Night seminars but he might have been translating FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE into French by that point.
But I don’t know who recorded the session.
I never saw a machine and I thought it was understood that no recordings were allowed.
People would have been too self-conscious.
By the mid-70s Eric was attending a school in Dallas.
Now, what’s awesome is I remembered the voices and even recall some of the faces of the talkers, as I listened to the 55 minutes.
Because they usually were students and would attend for a few months and then disappear.
But I would notice them since I attended almost every Monday Night session.
Occasionally I’d bump into them around Toronto.
In all those eight years I never said a word… except once in 1977.
Thinking of saying something was too distracting.
I wanted to HEAR everything McLuhan said.
I’d talk to people after the session was over when people mingled.
Thanks to the virtual tactile environment we live in, I re-cognize most of my life, it has become increasingly apparent to me.
