Tag Archives: Marshall McLuhan

Communications, Opinion

The Quadra Project – Social Media

“We invent things, and thereafter they invent us.” This is a fundamental principle in the media theory articulated by Marshall McLuhan, but it is rarely considered because we are usually so enamoured by the ingenuity of our inventions that we fail to consider the ways in which they invent us.

A brilliant essay by Jonathan Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid”, in the May 2022 edition of The Atlantic Monthly magazine deserves careful reading and thought. Its insights do much to explain the factious irrationality that has been generated by social media, an adjunct of the internet that was supposed to facilitate and deepen communication, but instead has created angry disputes with irresolvable differences. What went wrong?

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Development, Opinion

The Quadra Project – Population

Civilizations are precarious. They seem remarkably permanent to the people who are living within them, but history has a long list of civilizations that have failed. Some were conquered. However most just extended themselves beyond their problem-solving capabilities until a combination of environmental stresses and internal failures eroded the viability of the structure that held them together.

Our present global civilization is a marvellous accomplishment for humanity, unprecedented in human history. Yet it is beginning to feel precarious because the corrective responses that are needed from us to address its stresses seem beyond our human capabilities. Some of these stresses feel overwhelming because of their immensity and complexity. Others feel overwhelming because they seem to exceed our ability to act collectively with resolve and persistence. The uncomfortable feeling we are getting is that the very success of a global civilization may contain the germ of its failure.

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Opinion

The Quadra Project: Passenger or Crew

The famous Canadian media guru, Marshall McLuhan, when commenting on Buckminster Fuller’s seminal 1969 book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, said, “There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth—everyone is crew.” Like so many of his insightful comments, McLuhan managed to encapsulate a complex and comprehensive understanding in a few simple words.

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Environment, Opinion

The Quadra Project: Eco-Morality

The global environmental crisis is creating a paradigm shift in human consciousness that will change the moral tenor of everything we think and do for the foreseeable future—not just for decades, but for centuries as we become the de facto regulators of our planet’s climate. As the media guru Marshall McLuhan noted, “There are no passengers on spaceship Earth—everyone is crew.”

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Opinion

The Quadra Project: Being us

Our environmental problems are the result of a fundamental disconnection between our understanding of reality and what it seems to be. In other words, we are discovering that the world doesn’t work the way we have thought it works, and that we now have to make major adjustments in how we individually and collectively behave.

Of course, we have always been doing this, both as individuals and as cultures. Our personal experiences, registered through consciousness, adjust our basic sense of reality, and cultures are always undergoing similar changes. Fundamentally new understandings totally remake us. As the media guru, Marshall McLuhan, said in one his intriguingly aphoristic reversals, “If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it.” Consider history.

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