Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06985_Field_TCUM T550.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 1KB | 16 lines

     The social practices of one generation tend to get
codified into the “game” of the next. Finally, the game is
passed on as a joke, like a skeleton stripped of its flesh. This is
especially true of periods of suddenly altered attitudes,
resulting from some radically new technology. It is the inclusive
mesh of the TV image, in particular, that spells for a while, at
least, the doom of baseball. For baseball is a game of one-
thing-at-a-time, fixed positions and visibly delegated specialist
jobs such as belonged to the now passing mechanical age, with
its fragmented tasks and its staff and line in management
organization. TV, as the very image of the new corporate and
participant ways of electric living, fosters habits of unified
awareness and social interdependence that alienate us from
the peculiar style of baseball, with its specialist and positional
stress. When cultures change, so do games. Baseball, that had
become the elegant abstract image of an industrial society