Mcluhan
The first quote to really stand out for me in “Essential Mcluhan” was at the very beginning, “To contemplate the products of our own appetites rather than to anathematize the people who are keen enough to exploit them…” was what really started my interest in this book. Generally we point the finger at corporations who invest an incredible amount of time and money figuring out how to get into our heads, how to sell us something. Mcluhan however urges us to take a look at our own “appetites”, to basically do the same thing that the advertising and marketing people have been doing all along.
He questions why it is that something so impacting of our lives is not investigated further. Despite the fact that we all know what the billboards and commercials are expecting us to do we simply go along with it. When surveys come out telling of the negative impacts a certain add has on a certain demographic group, society as a whole points our fingers and demands something be done (to that company of course). Mcluhan suggests that maybe we should be looking a little deeper into how we as a society think, and so desperately consume. As a responsible society we should at very least attempt to educate ourselves on why it is that so many of these adds and slogans work, even when we do not realize it. Then it might be possible for us to break away from this mindless intake of material and start living the way we want to rather than the way we are told we want to, if that is even possible.
This is just one of the things I got out of this reading, “Essential Mcluhan” will require much more than one week of reading and a one page paper even to summarize.