Recap of themes

1. McLuhan's argument that the visual is fragmentized while the audible is all-encompassing, is flawed.

2. The serial form lends itself to Henry Jenkins' convergence culture theory, specifically participatory culture.

The Medium: Recorded Sound

The question: How does the medium affect the message?

Sound, The Spoken Word:

(McLuhan, pg. 110)

Marshall McLuhan says:

The ear favors no particular "point of view." We are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us... Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships.

[Sound is all-encompassing and cannot be separated into fragments.] (McLuhan, pg. 111)

Most people find it difficult to understand purely verbal concepts. They suspect the ear; they don't trust it. (pg. 117)

Do you suspect what you hear? Do you doubt its accuracy?

McLuhan's claims about the visual:

The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together...Its use fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms. (pg. 44)

Unlike sound, the visual is all fragments and limited perspectives.

Everything was dominated by the eye of the beholder. (pg. 57)

Artists only painted what they saw, not what they imagined. Visual thinking is limited because it ignores everything someone knows to be true or thinks to be true.