“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it” (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964).
Here is a quotation from one of the pioneers of modern "Media Studies," Marshall McLuhan. Right now, I am inclined to reflect generally on McLuhan and his methodology, rather than the content of this particular quotation (it's interesting, but I have to think more about it before writing).
We still have a lot to learn from Marshall McLuhan. The tweedy literature professor at the University of Toronto liked to examine how forms of media affect our perceptions. His 1964 book Understanding Media was written in an aphoristic style, which McLuhan found useful for "probing" new issues and provoking others to think about them. In his many years of teaching literature, McLuhan wrestled with the "problem" of "disconnection" between teachers and students growing up in mid-20th-century Anglo-America (many teachers would say that this is still a problem in 2025). He saw that the unprecedented rise of mass media was having a much deeper impact on the way students - and people in general - were perceiving and experiencing things, which tended to "shape" the environment and forms of their awareness, intellectual development, and communication. In articles and books published after World War II, McLuhan began to analyse and probe the impact of modern advertising (The Mechanical Bride, 1951) and electronic media in the context of the dominant "print culture" that had shaped the Western ways of learning since the revolutionary invention of the printing press in the 15th century (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1961). He had a lot of fascinating insights about how media technology influenced historical developments in ways that were not much noted or studied at the time.
With Understanding Media, McLuhan dealt with the major cultural changes that were being fostered by "new media," especially the electronic audiovisual communications device that was finding its way into every living room in the affluent world and was becoming increasingly accessible everywhere on earth: Television. What Professor McLuhan didn't expect in 1964 was that his precient thoughts and his questioning and probing style would be taken up into the dramatic and wildly experimental decade that was emerging, and that his own persona would rise to celebrity status. By age 60, McLuhan had attained the status of a media guru, an "icon" of the TV age ("icon" is one of many terms he coined and/or repurposed specifically with reference to the social impact of media). But he remained focused on his work and "detached" from his ballooning image, except to treat it as another phenomenon to probe and question, while appreciating its ironic and humorous aspects.
McLuhan's emphasis on understanding the impact of media was an effort he undertook in order to cultivate a wisdom about the gains (and losses) of media technology for human ways of living, learning, and communicating - and how to foster a "media ecology" to focus on the primacy of the human person in new media environments. He didn't particularly invite all the attention he received (in fact he saw many grave dangers in emerging media) but his open analytical style and his awareness of the magnitude of the ongoing new media revolution gained the attention of a wide variety of personalities in the explosive and confusing cultural shifts of the late 1960s-1970s, up until his own illness and death in 1980.
Marshall McLuhan wanted to get people to think, because he was aware of the history of communications media (beginning with the fundamental developments of spoken and written language), and the influence of media on human perception, on how humans receive and process information, and on the formation of dominant cultural mentalities. Media "extend" the reach of our senses, changing the way we interact and communicate. This can enrich us in many ways, but it is also prone to "unbalancing" our natural sense integration and the construction of communicative "symbols," and thus potentially distorting our process of coming to know and engage reality in all of its factors.

JJ could say many more things about Marshall McLuhan, but I want to introduce here a blogging approach that I call "Quotations, Thoughts, and Aphorisms," which is in part inspired by McLuhan's efforts to understand media. McLuhan recognized his own ignorance, a learned ignorance, and put forth many tentative statements (like the one quoted at the beginning of this long post, which I'm not going to consider further today) and questions that might awaken insight into the powerful developments of his times (and ours). I can no longer afford to wait until I have "thought everything through" (which seldom happens anyway) before expressing what's going on in my mind and in my studies. There is an urgent need to explore the impact on human society and culture of the emerging new forces of this ongoing tumultuous epochal transition we are experiencing in various ways all over the world. So I embark here on another broad categorical literary experiment in my blogging efforts. The QTA segment may or may not become a "future feature" on the blog. Let's see what happens.One mode of exploration begins (but doesn't necessarily end) with a quotation. I often post (or visually present) quotations on the blog, and I shall continue to do so. Some quotations stand on their own, while others prompt commentary. Perhaps such commentary will develop as I write it into it's own independent post.
Providing a bit of context, commentary, or just appropriately-placed sarcasm will also increase the range of what I can quote. In this way, I can post not only edifying quotations, but also some of the more clever, sometimes nasty, but paradoxically perceptive statements that recent history's more ambivalent or downright villainous characters have said or written.
"Political power comes from the barrel of a gun" (Chairman Mao Zedong).
Too much of what Chairman Mao said remains relevant and influential today. These words are relevant to China at this very moment, where Emperor Xi Jinping may be struggling to maintain his power within the current "Communist Dynasty" that rules over a fifth of the world's population (unfortunately, the "dynasty" remains entrenched). But I'm not going to go down this rabbit hole right now. Stay tuned...
My "Study Projects" (East Asia Studies, Media Theory, Technology and Culture) are populated by more rogues than saints — as well as a vast majority of people navigating the stormy waters of perplexity, ambiguity, and/or attempts at compromise. There is much material here for critical thinking and "sorting through," as well as expressions that shed light on recent historical events and the immense sufferings of peoples. Some of them are shocking, but they identify spheres of historical memory of the recent past that must not be forgotten.
Also, at this point in my life, I have many "musings" — questions, tentative assessments, hunches, intuitions, quips, and many (oh so many!) ironic observations. It might be better to try to formulate and express them, rather than just ruminating about them inside my head.
And I have plenty of ideas and tendencies of thought that are wrong and/or foolish. Why confine them to my over-cluttered brain space? Perhaps some "fresh air" will disperse them into the wisps of incoherence that they truly are, or at least turn them around in the right direction.
My research projects these days lead to more questions than answers, and more awareness of my own ignorance. I am beginning to learn how to formulate good questions and sketch out what seem to me to be pathways toward insight. The most important work of my life is not something I will be able to finish. At best, I might manage to outline a "Preface" to the study of themes and environments that the coming generations will not be able to ignore if humans hope to live more fraternally in a technologically supercharged, globally interactive world that is simultaneously ecologically imperiled and full of gigantic new possibilities.