McLuhan's 1975 contribution to Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe, edited by C.W.E. Bigsby at Bowling Green University — the text read line by line across dialogue 58. Bob flags the title as anomalous, since uniformity is a Gutenberg category McLuhan usually refuses, and it is here that the camp/junkyard passage and the instant-replay sentence sit side by side. New to it — start with dialogue 58, where it is read in two passes.
Across the dialogues
Enters the archive as the late-McLuhan text the pair had been missing — a 1975 essay in an American-culture-in-Europe anthology that turns out to carry the instant-replay formulation whole, and is read twice in one session because its own argument is built by repetition
The essay is placed and its oddity flagged at once — a McLuhan title built on the one Gutenberg category he normally reverses.
"the title by McLuhan is The Implications of Cultural Uniformity."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 58 (13 Oct 2022), 37:38
The essay's motto for camp, which Bob says McLuhan took from a Toronto junkyard sign and Cameron suspects he invented — the session's governing image for what a culture does with its obsolesced services.
"Throw something lovely away today, help beautify junkyards."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 58 (13 Oct 2022), 38:54
The sentence the essay repeats within itself, and the one the pair read as anticipating the smartphone — attention retooled from ends to the pleasure of recognizing form.
"Living in a new environment of instant electric information has shifted American attention from specific goals to the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition, a change most obviously manifested in the TV service of the instant replay."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 58 (13 Oct 2022), 44:47
Connections
The essay supplies the sentence the concept is built on — the replay as the externalizing of the cognitive principle.
Bob pairs its instant-replay passage with the 1970 headline "sensory input is not experience."