Boiled down, the theme of Peter Keough‘s “The Medium is the Movie,” a 3.5 Boston Phoenix piece that I stopped reading two thirds of the way through because I didn’t feel a sense of gathering force, is that “reality and truth are fluid, and are dictated by whoever is behind the camera.”
I think we all know that. A more interesting idea, to me, is how the constant streams of fluid media are taking over everything…how fewer and fewer of us seem to live or think or create in organic, three-dimensional, tactile ways or realms.
Cowie also quotes a 1964 Marshall McLuhan line, submitted in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, that ‘we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time…we approach the final phase of the extensions of man — the technological simulation of consciousness.’
This “might have sounded a little over the top” 44 years ago, Cowie states, but “not so much now.”