I Have Read This Book

And I would submit to you that what is talked about in it was already discussed, at least in part, by Marshall McLuhan's books about how changes in what extends our faculties; in essence changes in how we use extensions as tools; about how those changes have profound effects on not only how we perceive reality, but also how we conceptualize in it. And certainly his work was an extension of Harold Innis's book "The Bias of Communication."

I believe that this "trivialization" that is discussed here is a result, in major part, because of how the electrification of sales in general got us into the process of the "commoditization of everything."

The irony for me in this is that it was Mcluhan's success in describing so many aspects of how message, as content, was only part of the story of the effect of media (hence his famous "the medium is the message."). That, in fact, different media used exclusively fostered specific kinds of sensory emphasis. And that by understanding what each medium emphasized, you could tailor your message to coincide with the already in place carrier wave of effect of that media type, to put it in other words. He got so good in fact in parsing what would work the best in print ads, or radio, or TV, that he became the darling of the Ad business and things started going down hill for him from that point on, as he seemed to trivialize himself in the process of becoming famous.

Understand, however, that these developments came in combination with the other effects of electrification, not the least of which was its unbelievable effect on our ability to produce in the first place. So much so, in fact, that now any one nation could produce enough for the entire world if the rest of the world would allow it (a fact that William Greider pointed out in one of his books). But because the livelihoods in each nation all depend on each nation making things that they can sell, we were forced, as a now global economy, into a new kind of accelerating competition. One where it would be both information utilized to the max in order to gain product advantage (in either features and/or production efficiencies) so as to out sell the other guy, but also to use information to out message the other guy in order to brand better than him. And out of that, unfortunately, have we now pushed information, and media channel control, to new extremes of manipulations and machinations. And certainly our sense of reality has suffered greatly for it as a result.

How TV trivialized our culture and politics