The Guardian carried an article the other day by Alison Flood about a bookstore in Japan that stocks and displays only one book at a time - and I couldn't help thinking about McLuhan's observation that new technologies turn outmoded technologies into art forms.
This has always been one of my favorite of Marshall McLuhan's discoveries. In his day, the impact of motion pictures on the theater, once a mass medium, now the "legitimate," i.e., culturally elite stage, was a prime example. As was penmanship, once a necessity, converted by the typewriter into an admirable talent. And, of course, poetry, in Homer's time a pneumonic necessity, had since the invention of easy writing with the alphabet long since become a high-art form.
Examples abounded. In my Digital McLuhan, I offered some of my own. Delicatessen, once treated with spices and preservatives natural and artificial to preserve the meat, became in the age of refrigeration something to be sought after for its taste. And speaking of cool, the convertible car, once driven so the driver and people in the car could be physically cool, was transformed by air conditioning into something driven to look, i.e., be culturally, cool.
Which brings us to the bookstore in Japan, which just opened this past May. Japan has long been known as a place in which single paintings are hung a wall, so they can be admired without competition, and eventually replaced by another painting. Under the pressure of the Kindle, which makes a myriad of books all but instantly available, the printed book has now become something more than it once was - an object to be displayed, like a work of art, before it is read. The Kindle, in other words, has turned the printed book into an art form - at least, in Japan.
For further application of McLuhan's thinking to our current age, see
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This has always been one of my favorite of Marshall McLuhan's discoveries. In his day, the impact of motion pictures on the theater, once a mass medium, now the "legitimate," i.e., culturally elite stage, was a prime example. As was penmanship, once a necessity, converted by the typewriter into an admirable talent. And, of course, poetry, in Homer's time a pneumonic necessity, had since the invention of easy writing with the alphabet long since become a high-art form.
Examples abounded. In my Digital McLuhan, I offered some of my own. Delicatessen, once treated with spices and preservatives natural and artificial to preserve the meat, became in the age of refrigeration something to be sought after for its taste. And speaking of cool, the convertible car, once driven so the driver and people in the car could be physically cool, was transformed by air conditioning into something driven to look, i.e., be culturally, cool.
Which brings us to the bookstore in Japan, which just opened this past May. Japan has long been known as a place in which single paintings are hung a wall, so they can be admired without competition, and eventually replaced by another painting. Under the pressure of the Kindle, which makes a myriad of books all but instantly available, the printed book has now become something more than it once was - an object to be displayed, like a work of art, before it is read. The Kindle, in other words, has turned the printed book into an art form - at least, in Japan.
For further application of McLuhan's thinking to our current age, see
The Newsroom 3.4 was especially McLuhanesque tonight, as the guy who wants to buy ACN comments that "books are like the new art," because we like to look at them on a shelf, and do our reading on Kindles. If printed books are indeed becoming a new kind of art, this would be a great example of Marshall McLuhan's observation that outmoded technologies become art forms. When I first heard this years ago, the first thing I thought of was the convertible car, which was first invented to keep the driver physically cool, but, with the advent of air conditioning in cars, became stylistically cool for the driver to drive in. Then I thought about delicatessen - the spices first introduced to extend the shelf life of meat, now used, in an age of refrigeration, because we like the way the spiced meat tastes. But the Kindle turning the printed book into an art form is an excellent contemporary example.
