Environments are invisible. Their ground rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns allude easy perception.

Marshall McLuhan

I’m currently savoring a book titled The Medium is the Massage, by old-school (i.e. pre-internet) media theorist Marshall McLuhan, with graphics by Quentin Fiore. For me, this volume is a visual, spiritual, and soulful experience.

The title was supposed to have read “The Medium is the Message” but the typesetter made an error (”Massage”). McLuhan enthusiastically embraced the typo, exclaiming, “Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!” There are four possible readings for the last word of the title, and each is relevant: “Message” and “Mess Age,” “Massage” and “Mass Age.”

McLuhan asserts that the linear nature of language shapes our world view such that we perceive time and space as inherently linear. He then explains:

Until writing was invented, [wo]man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog… Primitive and pre-alphabet people integrate time and space as one and live in an acoustic, horizonless, boundless, olfactory space.

I strive to foster precisely this acoustic, horizonless, boundless, olfactory relationship with time and space. Floating free in an ambient universe. After all, time is an invention; so too are borders.

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

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