LISS/STEPVR Apple Ad

[Michael Bailey]

gary webb wrote:

and for no particular reason, I'm going to stick my thumb out, though will
need to go more Claudette Colbert, to hitch a ride to this wagon... I'm
kidding of course... Is it just me, or does it feel oddly necessary to
watch the Apple 1984 commercial?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA
Â
It's hard to say the PC world was anymore enlivening than the televisual
world it purported to replace, and the same could be said of the mobile
transformation 20 years later...Â
About that televisual culture,

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/imagine-all-the-people

"That, of course, is not what happened. Modern technology has indeed
consummated the televisual era, but with results quite opposite those the
imagineers expected. Instead, a curious form of Hobbes’s war of all
against all was unleashed. Online, each “netizen†produced more and more
opinions, fantasies, dreams, interpretations, and criticism. Marshall
McLuhan forecast the situation in his concept of the “global village
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226672980/?tag=thenewatl-20>†— not a
boundaryless and harmonious Eden sought by the imaginative social engineers
of the world elite, but rather a hot, crowded, fragmented, and fractious
realm, one much like the “world†that social media, to the shock of the
elite, became."Â


In the MIT press version of McLuhan's Understanding Media the introduction
coyly gives a post-60s update on the work's reputation (the MIT version was
published in 1994):Â

"The alarms and excursions associated with Understanding Media didn't
survive McLuhan's death  (on New Year's Eve 1980, at the age of 69), and
perhaps was to be expected from artisans still working in a medium that the
decedent had pronounced obsolete, the obituary notices were less than
worshipful. Informed opinion had moved on to other things, and McLuhan's
name and reputation were sent to the attic with the rest of the sensibility
(go-go boots, Sgt. Pepper, Woodstock, the Vietnam War) that embodied the
failed hopes of a discredited decade."Â

Let's take it from the man himself (pg.16):Â

"Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of
industrial marketeers, the nonliterate with the semiliterate and the
postliterate. Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result
of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns
of information."Â

Televisual culture is ubiquitous for Zoyd & C., so much so that he is an
active participant. And like Bigfoot, to whom he is compared, are staged TV
moments, not real life random acts.


-------------a) Tom Wolfe, I think, did a sendup of McLuhan as English
professor living the dream of having people actually listen to him. Still
think McLuhan made some good points!

b) That net community in the quote, it is like Van Meter's commune behind
the Cucumber Lounge: "bickering raised to the level of ceremony"

c) thanks for hopping in - 1984 ad was topical for VL, with the lady ninja
throwing that projectile and stickin' it to The Man!

wow, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable!
like Prairie "when she couldn't get her hands on a car, she'd hitch a ride
and try to talk the driver into letting her take the wheel. She could get
anywhere in Southern California as fast as wheels could move."

That's the beauty of the LISS/STEPVR - the president is also a member, the
rider can be the driver, the topics are out there!

d) ish mailian made the good point that the new-car smell is still fresh on
the radio play. I'm going to break out some 50 year old German skills to
try to appreciate it. It's beyond funny how slow this will be.

peterhooper promised a new take after the 1st of 2021, suggesting LISVR as
the new title: Love is Strange Vineland Read.
("Love is patient" as St Paul wrote)
Seems right amount of elision: epizootic/pandemic by then should have
abated, and most people can self-police the size and/or salinity of their
topics.

e) did you ever get to the Bob Dylan concert in Ann Arbor last fall?
Love to hear about it if you did!