Resuming the line-by-line reading of Bob’s Trump / Tech Body booklet at p.109, the session opens on two of Cameron McEwen’s questions — what Bob means by lockdown, and how the Global Theater becomes the Global Membrane . The first half works them into a single figure: the invisible resonant node everyone already shares, of which all the visible hardware is only the “content.” Bob’s 2020 “lockdown” turns McLuhan’s media fast inside out , and the second half swings memoirist — the mythic-stages lockdown ladder read off p.110, the six schools of media ecology, and a close on laughter as “the reconciliation of yes and no” .
Key Topics
- Bob’s ground formula: “the global theater is the content of the Global Membrane” — the whole visible world of hardware playing inside the resonant node no one can see.
- The Tiny Note Chart’s number 14 decoded — the 1 the integrated membrane, the 4 the Tetrad interplay whose “mood mud” is quadrophrenia.
- Donald Theall’s synesthesia / coenesthetic pair, with Web 2.0 as the “director’s chair” that seats the individual inside the membrane.
- Cameron’s recurring counter-move — every new grasp is a “shortcut,” “a handle for us, not for it,” so scientific progress is also “a kind of scientific retreat.”
- The lockdown series Bob reads off p.110: world, solar, universal, and mythic government, each unlocked only by laughter.
- Bob narrates his six schools of media ecology, Toronto to his own radio voice, and the McLuhan-vs-Fuller TV debates with Harold Channer.
Notable Quotes
"Human beings are the swimmers in that membrane."
"Communication between people on the matching level is a miracle. Very rare, precise matching."
Outline
- 0:00:19 — Lockdown: Bob Rule and the COVID inversion
- 0:04:12 — The Global Theater as content of the Global Membrane
- 0:09:51 — The number 14: oneness, fourness, and quadrophrenia
- 0:11:10 — The individual, the coenesthetic, and Web 2.0
- 0:14:09 — Language as anti-environment; ESP as extension
- 0:19:59 — Orality, literacy, and the telegraph break
- 0:25:07 — The shortcut: the handle and scientific retreat
- 0:45:30 — The Android Meme: bits and pattern recognition
- 0:53:58 — Conversation as renaissance; media ecology
- 01:07:38 — The lockdown series: solar, universal, mythic government
- 01:14:46 — Memories of the Centre
- 01:37:47 — Reading p.110: holeopathic cliché probes
- 01:47:12 — Radio to TV and the six schools of media ecology
- 02:02:46 — Cliché, archetype, and the probe
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- From Cliché to Archetype — the archetype as “stable” against the improvised cliché-probe (Elvis as a cliché probe)
- Counterblast — “non-verbal mental gesture” as ESP, p.23
- Take Today (with Barrington Nevitt) — the “scraps” that get tossed around while the membrane can’t be bought or sold
- The Gutenberg Galaxy — the student team that “corrected all the quotations in a single night”
- Through the Vanishing Point (with Harley Parker) — the book Parker gave seminars on
Other Works
- Eric McLuhan, Electric Language (1998–99) — the Internet as an extension of proprioception
- Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era — words that “have become drugs”
- Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations — contrasted with a “clash of mythic stages”
People
- Bob Dobbs (host; media theorist and “language artist”)
- Cameron McEwen (host; author of the McLuhan-and-Joyce “cul-de-sac” framework)
- Marshall McLuhan (the source everything is read against)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan scholar; the synesthesia / coenesthetic pair)
- Eric McLuhan (Marshall’s son; Electric Language)
- Barry Nevitt (McLuhan collaborator; co-author of Take Today)
- Joe Keogh (McLuhan’s great correspondent; “I don’t repeat myself”)
- Harley Parker (McLuhan collaborator; Through the Vanishing Point)
- Marge Stewart (McLuhan’s secretary, who corrected his prose)
- Harold Channer (New York public-access host; Bob’s McLuhan-vs-Fuller foil)
- Alan Steinfeld (host of Bob’s first TV interview, April 14, 2000)
- Buckminster Fuller (the Fuller side of the Channer debates)
- Nam June Paik (video-art pioneer, ahead of Channer with the camera)
- Sylvère Lotringer (founder of Semiotext(e); the second school)
- Arthur Kroker (Montreal media theorist; the third school)
- Neil Postman, Derrick de Kerckhove, Robert Logan, Bruce Powe (the diasporic “book” school)
- Nelson Thall (Bob’s Toronto-school associate)
- Teilhard de Chardin (the electric break as “a biological event”)
- Gregory Bateson (mind as anti-environment)
- Klaus Schwab (World Economic Forum; “own nothing and be happy”)
- John Cage (“highest purpose is to have no purpose”)
- Frank Zappa (xenochrony; the artist who couldn’t just talk)
- Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis (the “men of 1914”)
- Eric Havelock (the source of “negotiability”)
- Bronislaw Malinowski (phatic communion; language as anti-environment)
- Ted Carpenter (“you participate the sun”)
- Elvis Presley (the cliché probe that became rock and roll)
Closing
A sprawling, generous session that pins Bob’s whole cosmology to a single figure — the world as content of an invisible membrane — and then, turning to memoir, quietly documents the Toronto milieu and the radio-to-TV career out of which that cosmology was built.
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