This post

• Is about media
• Is about a book about Marshall McLuhan
• Ends up being about the technology I used to read the book
• Probably reaches a bit at the end
• Doesn't mention that McLuhan spent some of his formative (academically) years in St. Louis
• May have too many parentheses

I mostly post about media here. Sometimes I focus on ethics or aesthetics, but it's media nonetheless. No matter how much Lacan I pretend to understand (and the much more I roll out in certain social situations because I am that guy), the patron saint of all over-thought (and under-theorized) media writing is Marshall McLuhan.

So I read Douglas Coupland's new book, "You Know Nothing of My Work!" It's a McCluhan biography (and an Annie Hall reference), but–and this is a flat-out guess–it's a biography McCluhan might have enjoyed, if only for its presentation. Coupland has sometimes struck me as too precious (the cover of this book shows HTML tags of the title on a CRT TV with rabbit ears and a two-button mouse attached) or too willing to be weird for the sake of being weird, but his style works to great effect in this situation. His prose is clear and his flourishes are appropriate. For instance, he publishes map website directions between two important locations in McLuhan's life. It's extraneous, but informative. It's also something that, right now, has crossed from technical innovation to extremely useful novelty. The latter term is a contradiction that's almost the exclusive to this time in the web's history.

Coupland expresses a certain Canadian, media-obsessed, meticulous kinship with McCluhan, but he's also honest in a Kill Yr Idols (aesthetic, approach and definition) sort of way. He points out McCluhan's worst qualities: his bad attitude; his homophobia; his penchant for BS; his contradictions. It's all there, in a pocket-sized book that feels like a cross between a well-sourced Wikipedia entry, a pretentious message board post, a YouTube comment and a love letter. 

The real point to this whole setup is that I read the book electronically...on the Kindle iPad app. It wasn't meant to be read this way. (There are no special features inherent to the medium. Apart from bibliography links in the text, it was a lot like reading a big Word document.) But there is one feature of the application (programmed by Amazon, not written by Coupland or chosen by the publisher) that changed my interpretation of the book...social highlighting.

Like Apple's iBooks, the Kindle application lets readers highlight and write notes in the text. The Kindle app takes this one step further, though, and lets readers see what other readers have highlighted. I had this feature off on my first read through, but I've switched it on and I feel like I need to read the book again. Here's what I highlighted in the text:

Marshall was interested in the way modern culture homogenizes and renders modular all the things it touches–something as simple as time, for example. Before clocks, there was sunrise and sunset, but there was no way of standardizing time. With clocks, time was reduced to discrete hour chunks like hamburger patties, the same no matter where you go on the planet or, for that matter, outer space or even another galaxy. With music, there was the invention of the musical score, which turned religiously felt psalms into mere notes on a page. And of course, farm animals such as cows were homogenized into...hamburger patties.

In a way, McLuhan's ideas become like a song we all know the tune of but not the full lyrics, and so we read into him whatever comes to mind. Forget poor-players and strutting; twenty-first-century life is karaoke–a never-ending attempt to maintain dignity while a jumble of data uncontrollably blips across a screen.

"Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas." Alfred North Whitehead

"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding." Marshall McLuhan

"Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think." Marshall McLuhan

The first three quotes help make sense of McLuhan's work. The last two are interesting. But that's my opinion. Here are the most highlighted segments (and the number of readers who highlighted them) from the app, as of March 13th 2011:

The voice inside your head has become a different voice. It used to be "you." Now your voice is that of a perpetual nomad drifting along a melting landscape, living day to day, expecting everything and nothing. (3)

"Terror," he went on to say, "is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time...In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture." (3)

"The medium us the message" means that the ostensible content of all electronic media is insignificant; it is the medium itself that has the greater impact on the environment, a fact bolstered by the now medically undeniable fact that the technologies we use every day begin, after a while, to alter the way our brains work, and hence the way we experience our world. (4)

And he saw the world as a book created by God, and believed that there is nothing in it that cannot be understood–and that we fail to try understanding it at our peril. (3)

A belief in the existence of a master plan largely underpinned Marshall's adult thinking and behavior, both privately and publicly. His unwillingness to keep specialized realms ghettoized defined him giving him public fame and academic sorrow. (3)

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." (3) [This is a G.K Chesterton quote]

Along with Father William McCabe, there was father Walter Ong, a young Jesuit whom Marshall tutored. (3)

"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding." Marshall McLuhan (3)

"Innumerable confusions and a feeling of profound despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition." Marshall McLuhan (3)

"Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think." Marshall McLuhan (4)

I agreed with two of the ten most popular highlights, and those two are the quotes that have little to do with McLuhan's most famous work, and more to do with their potential to be recycled into conversations. This makes me wonder what I or the other readers must be missing. Why are the excerpts I highlighted to point out underpinnings of McLuhan's theses not popular? Further, why is a piece of information about Jesuits McLuhan worked with so popular? I say it's popular because three people highlighted it, and, at most, we know that five people have read this book electronically (the four who highlighted two of the quotes and me).

Am I misunderstanding McLuhan's philosophies or are they? Are any of us? Perhaps I just found different parts of the book interesting. Either way, it's possible that everyone who read this Kindle book found the quote about mass transportation interesting and worth noting. That tells us something about the people who have read this book, and it's made me think about the text differently.

The insights I've gained aren't exclusive to electronic books, but they are rare in print. To know someone else's favorite excerpts, I would have to

Borrow a copy of a book from someone who freely marks in their texts

Join a book club or otherwise discuss the book with peers

Neither would give me a global perspective, though b might if I joined an online book club. Neither option protects anonymity entirely, and neither allows the reader to be passive and still see what others have highlighted. The electronic version of the text is, for all purposes, like a new print copy. Someone with no friends and no desire to discuss a book online can now know what other people found most interesting or worth remembering; they can have an instant insight into the popular interpretations of books. Perhaps highlights will be like sharing or liking a link on Facebook–some people do it to further the conversation, others to show agreement, others to seem informed and keep up appearances. Maybe highlights are already like that. 

Maybe it's the fact that I'm thinking about McLuhan, but I think this is much bigger than it's made out to be. Books are now a two-way street. It's not the fact that an e-book requires no paper or printing press, the true revolution of electronic books is that the fundamental function of the book can be changed with a simple user preference. The printed word was once a way of distributing one idea to many people. Now, many ideas can be presented as one, indicated by a dotted line below a sentence.