After seeing Anthem’s thread in Psychology called The Importance Of Grammar, I was reminded of a video my friend recently uploaded on linear thinking. Is Grammar so important or is it another form of modern OCD?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gg1HzZ57ps[/youtube]
OH come ooooon [gets impatient]
You post in threads about eternity and existence and nietzsche and death and meaning and being and nothingness and enlightenment all day. What about a little edge?
In truth, I get embarrassed following you around. You had to pick an old hippie icon didn’t you? Mcluhan was saying some pretty wild shit back in the 60’s. Today it’s almost taken for granted. “The medium is the massage.”
I found the clip to be a little juandiced toward all social development. I agreed with some, but it ignored the advantages and played to mostly negatives. Moving from oral tradition to the written word did leave much behind, but it also created a powerful organizational tool. Whether you like organization is another thread, but most of what we would call civilization (as well as un-civilization) depended on written language.
What intrigued and still intrigues me is how all mediums organize spatial space without us even thinking about it. You watch TV? Look at how the seating in a room is organized to provide maximum viewing, and it is forbidden to be in any space that blocks the viewing of the TV by another person. No one even thinks about it, it’s built in to the medium of TV itself.
But this isn’t just a phenomenom of written language. Look at the oral tradition of theatre. The speaker(s) on a stage looking out to an audience and the audience sitting in nice convenient rows looking back at the speakers on the stage. That came very early in history before the written word was widely available. The storyteller in the middle of a group of people is maybe a bit more romantic than actual.
Still, “progress” says that shortly, implants that project directly to the brain with all the “latest” will be available. Will linearity fade away or be reinforced? At that point, the “matrix” becomes possible, and the technology, the medium, will either free us or enslave us.
Entertaining video 
First off, everyone speaks grammatically, from the most to the least civilised. It’s a universal human constant. If someone says she “ain’t got but no bread”, then whatever that means it will describe the same relation as when she says shy “ain’t got but no cheese”. And the relation of that construct to what she means when she says she “didn’t got but no bread” likewise. In learning new languages as an adult (for example as an immigrant) one often makes mistakes in grammar because one applies one’s mother-tongue grammar to the new language - but children raised in a second language by non-native speaking parents will speak a grammatically-consistent version of what their parents teach them. Grammar’s not modern.
The argument that writing freezes language is a strange one. Similarly, that writing eliminates ambiguity… Given that it’s Marshall MacLuhan, it must be my lack of understanding of where he’s going with his point, but writing is a tremendous force for ambiguity. It baffles me slightly why an authority on media studies and literature would say that, when that ambiguity is pretty much what he studies and teaches on. His focus on medium over content was at the time fairly revolutionary, but maybe he’s overstating his point, playing the antithesis in the hope that the synthesis comes along later.
Writing freezes information, of course, that is its value. It doesn’t freeze context, and that is its weakness.
Echo,
Allow me to offer some encouragement. The 21st century is not some place where novel ideas spring up like Athena from the head of Zeus, without historical precedents. While it is worth considering that some ideas presented in the past have forfeited their explanatory power due to ideas derived from current discoveries, it is seldom, if ever, appropriate to claim that the new ideas are without historical antecedents.
If thought is organic, which I believe it is, we learn by extending the known into the unknown.
You might have recognized that the use of the word hippie as a derogatory term suggests a biased objection based on the worst kind of historical revisionism, not on any careful examination of Mcluen’s ideas.
As you post your ideas in philosophy forums, beware of self-proclaimed experts or authorities. If they were who they say they are, they would be publishing in journals, not posting in philosophy forums. Beware of those who consider word games as more important than discussions of ideas.
That being said, Mcluhan’s idea of the media being the message is still being discussed by neuroscientists and philosophers who have published since 2000. And, the concept of linearity in thought or physical processes is still a good idea to discuss.
The shortest distance between two points is the straight line. Translated into thought processes, this simply means that linear thinking gets us to manipulation of matter, change of the environment to which we must adapt, as Mcluhen notes, fast. It gets our sentences structured and our thoughts organized. Of course, rigid linearity is a creative anathema and a social stagnation. Have we reached such rigidity?
Apologies for the above tirade. I, like you, suffer in these forums from battles of ego, a game I abhor.