Dear Research Diary,

Yesterday I worked all day so I didn’t do much related to my thesis. I found Marshall McLuhan’s book The Medium is the Massage and read that in about half an hour, it was really beautiful. He has been mentioned many times as one of AP’s influences from a philosophical/semiotic point. He works mainly with media theory and how technology influences the workings of the human mind. His hypothesis is that we attempt to use today’s technology to fill the role of yesterday’s technology or vice versa. So there is a hesitance to plunge into the future. One part I found particularly interesting was one of the pages on children and education, which said that children are living in two worlds, one is the educational world still kept in 19^th century rigidity of factory effectiveness and censorship, and the other is the “adult world” of television in which children can receive the same information at the same moment as their parents. Neither of these worlds encourage a child to grow up.

This might seem a little bit off topic originally, but it is absolutely not. McLuhan was a huge name in the late 60’s and it’s no coincidence that this title and his other main work Understanding Media were published just before 67’ and probably has a lot to do with the presentation of performance that was made in private.