Joanna Goode

Education 253A

May 14, 2001

McLuhan, Marshal, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997)

Chapter 14: Money: The Poor Man’s Credit Card

Money began in nonliterate cultures as a commodity (rats, whales’ teeth)
Growth of idea that money is a currency rather than a commodity
Money has power to specialize and rechannel human energies to separate functions
Money translates and reduces one kind of work to another
Money, as a social means of extending and amplifying work and skill in easily accessible and portable form, lost much of its power when paper or representative money came into being
As a social medium or extension, money creates social and spiritual values, such as in women’s fashion
Also a specialist technology as it separates work from other social functions
Fixed-price system and uniformity of commodities based on printing; compare with bargaining in many other cultures
Our system of fixed-pricing creates abstraction and detachment
From coins to paper to credit, there is a steady progression toward commercial exchange as movement of information itself
Work does not exist in nonliterate world, instead, work begins with the division of labor and specialization of functions and tasks
Nonliterate man can accept any staple as money
As money separates itself from commodity form and becomes a specialist form of exchange, it moves with greater speed and greater volume
One result of the acceleration of information movement and translating power of money is the opportunity to anticipate the transformations by hours or even years
Money as a medium; not a closed system and does not have meaning alone; rather, a translator and an amplifier, power to substitute one thing for another
Provides a natural transition to number because of money collection
Relationship between inflation & deflation of money and psychic effects (such as Germany after the First World War)

Chapter 15: Clocks: The Scent of Time

Great cultural change when time became though of as something that happens between two points; duration

We divided time into uniform, visualizable units

Duration began with division of time; time became separated with rhythms of human experiences

No longer measured by uniqueness of private experiences gradually pervaded all sense life

Chinese / Japanese measured time by incense, sense of smell indicated seasons and zodiacal signs

Hopi Indians think of each thing as making its own time and space, rather than containing events in time

In this age of space-time we look at multiplicity rather than repeatability of rhythms; social organization at a global scale

Clock synchronizes human tasks

Time takes on character of enclosed or pictorial space that can filled in, divided, subdivided

Once time is enclosed and divided, it becomes possible to use time more efficiently; "Parkinson’s Law" — (work expands to fill available time: the observation that work always expands to fill the time set aside for it)

Literacy enforced by the clock created abstract time; ie. "time for dinner" — based on clock and not hunger

Clocks accelerate pace of human interaction

Humans no longer base time on seasons rhythms and reoccurrence

Clock and alphabet reduced universe into visual segments and ended the music of interrelation

Chapter 16: The Print: How to Dig It

New perception of space as uniform and continuous
Basic function of media is to store and expedite information
Illuminated manuscript promoted lettering which given stress of sculptural degree
Newspaper headlines tends to push letters towards iconic form, near to auditory resonance
Movable type introduced mechanization of handicraft by segmenting and fragmenting integral action of lettering
Lewis Carroll utilized non-Euclidean geometry and used discontinuous space-and time in writings
Nigerians and spatial relations; does not have 3-dimensional perspectives
As retinal impression is intensified, objects cease to cohere in space of their own making, rather, become "contained" in uniform, continuous, and "rational" space