Dr. Herbert Marshall McLuhan had been described as "the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov." He had said, "I've made a strange discovery about the rear view mirror...I've discovered somewhat to my surprise that when you look into the rear view mirror you do not see what has gone pass, you see what is coming. The rear view mirror is the foreseeable future. It is not the past at all." Marshall believed the electronic revolution (radio, television, internet) had turned the world into a global village (because just like a village, anything that happened affected everyone everywhere at the same time). "TV has brought the outside inside," he observed. However, "when everybody is deeply involved in everybody else life, all sorts of strange things start to happen. Man is losing his private identity, his private goals, as he gets involved with other people...The loss of identity creates huge violence...It's like inflation...people want to know who is responsible..."
Marshall described the television age as the 4th world and maintained "the medium is the message." "TV," it was said, "has the special gift of grasping more than one of the senses and affecting the viewer's whole pattern of perception, regardless of what gets into his mind." By 1977, Marshall pointed out, "Nostalgia is the name of the game in every part of our world today including the program 'Roots' but nostalgia is a kind of rear view mirror if you like but it's also a shape of things to come. When people have been stripped of their private identity they develop huge nostalgia (to voice their grievance)...TV creates involvement. There's very little detail with a low degree of information, something like a cartoon. The viewer fills in and he participates in the process. He tunes in and turns on in the psychedelic sense. It's a cool medium. Hot media like radio and the movies are low in participation. Everything is done for you in a hot medium..."
"One of the peculiarity of (the new media)," Marshall theorized, "is that it pushes all the unconscious factor up into consciousness...(The new media) has an irresistible force when invisible. When these factors remain ignored and invisible, they have an absolute power over the user...A medium works on you much like a chiropractor or some other masseur and really works you over and doesn’t leave any part of you unaffected...The medium is what happens to you and that is the message. TV is remaking us in its own image...The new information environment of our (electronic) time encourages everybody to assume a part in the global theater. The change from industrial economy of products and packages to an (electronic) world of information and images has taken place so suddenly that few have had time to recognize the new demands made on us." He also made the observation, "Any kind of sport is a dramatization of the typical and accepted form of violence...All these games are huge ways of discovering, dramatizing what the society you are in is all about. By the way, without an audience these games would have no meaning at all. They have to be played in front of a public in order to acquire their meaning...The game requires the public and the public has to resemble a whole cross section of the community."
James Joyce started writing 'Finnegans Wake' in 1922. The book was published in 1939. One reader remarked, "Most people, like us, read the first page several times...didn't have a clue and gave up...Joyce's mischievous desire to be as obscure as possible has given us considerable leeway." 'Finnegans Wake' sought to explore the fall and redemption of mankind through 4 cycles (music, dance, fables and dreams or theocracy, aristocracy, democracy and anarchy). Marshall insisted, "The work is entirely devoted to that theme (the medium) and the thunders in 'Finnegans Wake' are statements of the effects of particular media. The last thunder of 'Finnegans Wake' on page 424 is television with all its effect social consequences carefully dramatized. 'Finnegans Wake' is a drama. It is a play and the actors in the play are the media themselves." Leon Katz made the comment, "I think the (20th) century’s patheon of writers is Stein, Joyce, Kafka, Proust and Beckett. I have always felt that both Joyce and Stein were discovering their humanity in their writing, not whimsicality. Getting through the veils is worth it for the reader. I think Stein is the greater writer. She is Tolstoy to Joyce's Dostoyevsky. Joyce is profound but tangential to the mainstream of life. Stein is closer to the norm of experience, to what everybody knows. Joyce's final literary recognitions have to do with the darkest corners of the mind. Joyce has moments of incredible insight. But for Stein everything is an epiphany. Yet they are together in the same sense of synthetic overview. In 'Finnegans Wake' the last word is 'yes'. In Stein it is 'Everyday is Saturday'. The great yea-saying. It's the summation of both. That's what I love most deeply: the power of their assent after knowing as much as they can know."
