Notes : Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

Chapter 1

"In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message."

the evil  starts with Descartes. 

There is no such thing as a straight line in nature, nor are there paradoxes in nature.

a straight line is an abstraction, and an abstraction is a thought object. and the world of man from the time of Descartes has worked entirely in thought objects and thus have divided and conquered the world. 

idea here being a man working on abstractions can scale - imagine the factory floor

a man on a conveyor tightening a nut is not really building a car. the system is .

and thus systems were birthed

 man is not a beast nor the apex predator, though we often say so. he is but a cell

the apex predator today is America. the real America is formless and shapeless, yet it creates wealth for its followers, death and despair to its enemies , all by virtue of its factories ,people and the thought objects they hold. the true power of America lies in factories - not necessarily the ones within its shores. 

And nothing is a truer depiction of divide-to-control  as is a factory. 

the heart-beat of the world we live in today,  is the concept of division of labour. 

and while everybody follows division of labour, this particular avatar involves Labour and Capital as attributes. mankind has been following division of labour forever. the team has always prevailed over the single the lone wolf   from the age of  hunting teams . birth of agriculture started the ever-increasing cycle of cultivation vs population and as a side effect cities developed as intersection points for the different groups of people. 

a though object is not enough to result in action, it must be mapped to feelings and connected to the way of life of the human.  

a concept is a thought object. a thought object is something that you put in your head, and like the matrix, it load a world for you

to divide is to draw a straight line through a thing

to arrange ideas in a straight line also cuts through the clutter of the world