"Reading McLuhan" by Jim Andrews

[EXCERPT]

>>Transplants, artificial organs, cloning, the car, with all its odd power to move us, these are just a few examples of a symbiosis of man and machine. These examples are very much extensions of the body, most obviously, rather than extensions of the mind or the nervous system. Media technologies are primarily extensions of the mind and the nervous system, according to McLuhan.

>>For instance, print is an extension of the memory. Our memory is extended outside of ourselves. We don’t need to remember what is recorded. We can pick it up and re-member it. It was a dismember of us until we re membered it to us. Jacki Apple, an American radio producer, has said that radio provides people with the soundtrack for the movie of their day to day lives, particularly the young. Radio can fill acoustic space in a way that television or even movies cannot fill visual space. A guy with his shades, in his car, with the radio turned up loud, is transforming acoustic space in a way that would require acid for visual space, or sleep and dream. Speed radio’s D.J.s play a role that must be slick and of the moment. Now and now and now. The time is now and you are of the moment, driving powerfully into the future along the razor edge of now. You are in the time and space of the speeding moment. Speed radio is the pulsing beat of the collective, tribal drum. It extends us into the auditory space along the edge of a now that is always moving and almost ahead of its time.