“The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”
The thought process behind this is to understand the importance of the medium being used to convey or spread an idea or a message and how the effectiveness of that communication differs depending on the medium being used. For instance, if you want to explain a complex topic to a small child, visuals and images to explain the same would be anytime more effective compared to text. As it is mentioned in the book that the medium is a look-around to see what’s happening around us, it is a collide-oscope of interfaced situations.
It is very interestingly pointed out how a modern-day child who is used to receiving information through today’s advanced technologies like the television, radio, apps that summarize news in an interesting manner like inshorts and other forms, would be lost and uninterested when he enters the nineteenth-century environment that still typifies the educational establishments where information is sparse but ordered by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects and schedules.
“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”
I had never thought of the wheel as an extension of the foot; a book as an extension of the eye; clothing as an extension of the skin; electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system. It is very intriguing to think on these lines and understand the message that the author wants to convey.
“The thing of it is, we must live with the living.”- Montaigne
The entire book talks about the divergence in the mediums through which the people in the previous centuries communicated and spread their views opposed to today’s used methodologies. It points out that the young generation today reject goals. They want R-O-L-E-S i.e. total involvement. A publisher in Chicago points out the power of memory, he aptly talks about the influence one could have on others simply by remembering accurately everything they see, hear or read. Movies have become a very strong medium of putting forth ideologies and breaking the traditional norms, talks about the important and the sensitive issues that surround us.
“Art is anything you can get away with.”
Following on the above lines, I read the Oulipo, which is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. Raymond’s way of story-telling where 14 lines on each page are printed on individual strips, so that every line can be replaced by the corresponding one in any of the other poems. It is an interesting collection of literary techniques where these writers are not bound by any rules and regulations and can use any pattern to convey their work. The philosophy of Oulipo seeks to connect poetry and mathematics, two seemingly incompatible areas of study, together.
Thank You