huge collective surgery carried out on the social body

»The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.«

— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man.

Is the future of storytelling the future for advertising?

Digital technology has led to massive changes in how people consume content, information and entertainment. This has meant a period of unprecedented change for the communications industry, and a blurring of the lines between disciplines.

Paddy Adams, Director of Strategy for global media agency Manning Gottlieb OMD, examines how to create more memorable, entertaining and engaging interactions with people through combining increasingly sophisticated storytelling techniques, whilst making full use of the latest advances in data management and algorithmic planning.

via Power to the Pixel and thepixelreport.org

The demand for it

»Perhaps the most obvious closure or psychic consequence of any new technology is just the demand for it. Nobody wants a motorcar till there are motorcars, and nobody is interested in TV until there are TV programs. This power of technology to create its own world of demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of our own bodies and senses.«

— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man.

The disembodied user

»Any medium presents a figure whose ground is always hidden, or subliminal. In the case of TV, as of the  telephone and radio, the subliminal ground could be called the discarnate or disembodied user. This is to say that when you are on the telephone, or on the air, you do not have a physical body. In these media, the sender is sent, and is instantaneously present everywhere. The disembodied user extends to all those who are recipients of electric information. It is these people who constitute the mass audience, because mass is a factor of speed rather than quantity, although popular speech permits the term mass to be used with large publics.«

— Marshall McLuhan, New York Magazine, March 17, 1978