Response to "The Medium is the Massage"

One point Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore make is that collectively we expect "new media to do the work of the old." As a society we are always striving to create something new, but we're so set in our ways that we feel the need to relate the new back to the old. We need to go beyond this comfort zone and work to be open to new ideas.

Another idea I found interesting was "the poet, the artist, the sleuth," being anti-social can see the world for what it is. Being an artist allows people to view the world as it relates to them. Artists are not bound to view the world in a certain way; their perceptions are made up for themselves. Artists are encouraged to expose a new outlook on the world which is often more truthful than those examined by an "average" person.

The last idea that I was amused by is that the ear favors no point of view. We are surrounded by sounds. We can hear sounds from all around us, as opposed to vision which we can only see what appears in front of us. I found this to be an interesting observation I have not made before. This book plants ideas of the bizarre that most people don't tend to think about.