A 1962 essay by McLuhan, published in the Canadian magazine of that name shortly before The Gutenberg Galaxy made him famous. Cameron calls it his favourite article and returns to it for two things the popular McLuhan is not credited with: the claim that the sheer number of media is what finally lets a person see media at all, and the countervailing note on the pain of living with one's nerves outside oneself. New to it — dialogue 60, where both halves are read in the same session.
Across the dialogues
Promoted from a recurring citation into the session's pivot — the 1962 essay is read at length, dated to the missile-crisis week, and made to carry the argument that multiplicity is what frees us from media rather than what buries us
The essay's central reversal, and the reason it outranks the better-known books here — proliferation is treated as the condition of release rather than of capture, which inverts the standard reading of McLuhan as a chronicler of entrapment.
"I think it is this multiplicity of media that is now enabling man to free himself from media for the first time in history."
The mechanism stated — freedom arrives not through insight but through overload, because no one can inhabit every environment at once and the failure to keep up is itself the waking.
"because of the sheer multiplicity of them, he is beginning to awaken, because he can't live with them all."
Cameron uses the same essay as the standing corrective to any celebratory reading — that McLuhan described the electric condition is not evidence he welcomed it, and this is the text he cites to prove the point.
"This should be read alongside his Prospect essay from a few years before this where he talks about the pain of being alive and having our nerves outside ourselves."
Supplies the 1962 sentence the session's whole account of conditioning rests on — too much media for humans to be conditioned, for the first time in history
The end of conditioning is dated and sourced, which is what lets Bob call the present pre-tribal rather than merely distracted.
"the multiplicity of media. There's so much media that the humans can't be conditioned anymore for the first time in history."
Connections
McLuhan's 1962 essay, published the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis — the source of the "sheer multiplicity of media" passage.
Cameron invokes it to correct the celebratory reading of McLuhan — the same essay carries "the pain of being alive and having our nerves outside ourselves."