The eye

The sight is the most valued and used sense human beings have. The sight is the first of the senses someone refers to when describing a newly acquired perception of the outer world. The sight is not the only sense we have, there are others which perhaps, can give higher satisfaction and more complete comprehension of the world as a whole. Even if I have now acquired such awareness, I chose to name this article “the eye”, because of a new acquired perspective about the world of media. I know it’s been written more than forty years ago, though this book I finished to read yesterday, can give you very actual insights. As maybe many of you have already guessed I am talking about Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media”.

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Uncountable and priceless would be the quotations from his book I could now report here, though I prefer to write my own perceptions, ideas. I have to say, reading this book has not been an easy task at all. Written in a very rich english, there was no single page in which I couldn’t find any new word, any word I could avoid checking on the dictionary. Thus, as a non – mother tongue speaker I proceded very slowly, trying to find out each word I thought to be worth of looking for, each expression, each reference and quotation. One of the biggest gifts this book has given me, aside from the totally new approach to media perception, has been the overwhelming and surrounding culture it brings to its reader. Quotations, unvaluable reading suggestions, sharp and clever comparisons. All of these I explored, thanks to a new medium, whose complexity and richness allowed me to have access to a totally knew field of knowledge. And so, I found my self reading wikipedia’s profiles of Lewis Carroll, Maria Montessori, Michel Foucault, Florence Nightingale, buying foucault’s “The order of things” or planning to buy Capek’s “The philosophical impact of Modern Physics”. I found my self devouring the last chapters of this book while listening to Stravinsky and Bela Bartok’s music, in order to better understand what the author was talking about while describing the dialogue form of music.

It was hard reading this book for me, though I am glad for having read it, since I desperately needed it both for my thesis and for my culture. It would be easy though useless telling you something about the content of the book, about its sharp and revolutionary view of media, but this wouldn’t be the right place, because to know these things is sufficient to read this book. I will rather tell you that it was a real pleasure to find myself, once again deeply involved in a subject different from my usual one: business.

There are books which makes you know

There are books which makes you see

There are books which makes you feel

as your palm handing the world