For the last few weeks I have been exploring the fact that in all communication the user of whatever medium is the content. This turns out to be merely an ancient Aristotelian observation that the cognitive agent itself becomes and is the thing known. While noticing the enormous hiatus of media study in the Western world, I began to back-track a bit. Discussion with philosophers here revealed the obvious. The Greeks had provided entelechies or had studied the patterns of energy / relating to natural forms, but had ignored the same where art and technology A were in play. This gave me the main clue. The Greeks and their successors regarded Nature (phusis or physics) as an artefact. Having entelechized this massive product of their own literate technology, they never turned to the subsidiary technologies that were the extensions of man. However, they would have admitted at once, if asked, that any actuation of human potential generates an entelechy or pattern of energy that is new. It was not until Poe and Baudelaire that these patterns began to be studied. This was after industrialism had already abolished most of the Greek and Roman Natura. With the coming of electric technology whatever remained of Greek Nature was scrapped so that today we are back where they started with primitive Existence. They had reared the figure of Nature on the ground of Existence. They had done it by classification. The new ecology will use other means.
Letter to John Wain, April 2, 1971, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 431
Year: 1971
Chapters:
Ecology | User as Content
↪ Also at #1648
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan