Tentative placeholders for Week IV Content

View Donovan Livingston's Harvard School of Ed Graduation Speech. 

“On turning to the Work in Progress we find that the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct expression--pages and pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. This rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation. The form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfill no higher function than that of stimulus for a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling comprehension. . . Mr. Joyce has a word to say to you on the subject: “Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is just as harmful; etc.” And another: “Who in his hearts doubts either that the facts of feminine clothering are there all the time or that the feminine fiction, stranger than facts, is there also at the same time, only a little to the rere? Or that one may be separated from the orther? Or that both may be contemplated simultaneously? Or that each may be taken up in turn and considered apart from the other?”

Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read--or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.”

― Samuel Beckett

 
Marshall McCluhan's The Medium is the Massage, in a nutshell.
The full text of the 1967 book is available here. McCluhan on Tetrads, shared by Cam B-H. 

The medium,  , of our time — electric tech- 
nology — is reshaping and restructuring patterns of 
social interdependence and every aspect of our 
personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re- 
evaluate practically every thought, every action, 
and every institution formerly taken for granted. 
Everything is changing — you, your family, your 
neighborhood, your education, your job, your gov- 
ernment, your relation to "the others." And they're 
changing dramatically. 

Societies have always been shaped more by the 
nature of the media by which men communicate 
than by the content of the communication. The 
alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is ab- 
sorbed by the very young child in a completely 
unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. 
Words and the meaning of words predispose the 
child to think and act automatically in certain ways. 
The alphabet and print technology fostered and 
encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of 
specialism and of detachment. Electric technology 
fosters and encourages unification and involve- 
ment. It is impossible to understand social and 
cultural changes without a knowledge of the work- 
ings of media. 
The older training of observation has become quite 
irrelevant in this new time, because it is based on 
psychological responses and concepts conditioned 
by the former technology — mechanization. 

Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling 
of despair invariably emerge in periods of great 
technological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of 
Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying to 
do today's job with yesterday's tools-with yester- 
day's concepts.