The stars are so big,
The Earth is so small,
Stay as you are.
Published in 1967, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects is by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore and published through Bantam books. Its approach was quite novel, building on the literary tradition of the United States expatriot, Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons.
With almost absurd juxtaposition of image and text, the reader is transported through the realms of positive polarity cognitive dissonance, but it's not really. Because you get it, and right way. The only recent book I could compare it to is David Byrne's Your Action World.
Near the beginning is a photograph of a well-manicured female hand, with a wedding ring adorned. The hand is titled somewhat. One may surmise the female is of an upper class. Underneath this lovely hand are the words: 30-million toy trucks were bought in the U.S. in 1966.
And so it goes, complimenting a page stating that "youth instinctively understands the present environment--the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth. This is the reason for the great alienation between generations Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new environments created by electric informational media."
It is also a precursor to David Byrne's the New Sins in its way of critically examining the fabric of morality (as reality) in a style where Marcel Duchamp meets Theodore Roszak's under-read From Satori to Silicon Valley or The Making of a Counterculture.
For me to say much beyond this would do the prospective reader a terrible unjustice. Enjoy at your local paperback bookseller.
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act--the way we percieve the world. When these ratios change, men change.
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