Recent passage
June 16, 2009
“Travel differs very little from going to a movie or turning the pages of magazines…people…never arrive at any new place. They can have Shanghai or Berlin or Venice in a package tour that they need never open..Thus the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that we have encountered before in some other medium”.
-Marshall McLuhan
Chapter Title- “The Photography: The Brothel-Without-Walls”
Book-Understanding Media.
What of this?
i don’t know that i get it. maybe i need more to put it in context.
the assertion is we never arrive at new places [im guessing not physical but intellectual growth? change?] and backed by that we instead are inundated with iconography and imagery of the world which we then assign to stuff in this generalized museum-esque view of the world around us.
this would seem like the individual is pretty defined and you twist the world to your understanding limited or whatever. I think more than what you see or hear, people are effected by their internal thoughts and mood. I can say the exact same thing to the exact same person, but if i said it one day to them and if i instead said it to them at a different day and time- I’d likely have very different responses and interpretations by who i converse with. So we’re traveling all the time- right? shits in constant motion and we try to make it simpler maybe by telling ourselves it fits into these pre-conceived notions and icons and ideas. Maybe that fits with this, the world is tangible but not defining, we have these artifacts around us but its the people that interpret and define them and do so based upon your own thoughts than what is out there.