1.27 Mcluhan's Later Life, Three of the Four Laws of Media, and Photographs and Motion Pictures

Dilettantery

"The goal of science and the arts and of education for the next generation must be to decipher not the genetic but the perceptual code. In a global information environment, the old pattern of education in answer-finding is of no avail: one is surrounded by answers, millions of them, moving and mutating at electric speed. Survival and control will depend on the ability to probe and to question in the proper way and place. As the information that constitutes the environment is perpetually in flux, so the need is not for fixed concepts but rather for the ancient skill of reading that book, for navigating through an ever uncharted and unchartable milieu."

-Marshall and Eric Mcluhan, Laws of Media (1988)

"The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come to attend to itself by means of reflection. This axiom gives us the universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit."

-Giambattista Vico, Scienza Nuova, 1725

sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/rj2mc5/127_mcluhans_later_life_three_of_the_four_laws_of/?