"A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion"
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McLuhan is skewering a paradox at the heart of modern consumer culture: a society that runs on selling experiences to people who no longer share the thick, inherited scripts for having them. If social ritual is thin and communal meaning is anemic, “tone” doesn’t arise naturally from shared customs; it has to be manufactured, packaged, and taught. The jab is in the engineering language. “Blueprints and specifications” is how you talk about machines, not weddings, funerals, dates, or office parties. McLuhan’s point is that commercial society ends up treating feeling as a design problem.
Calling the members “ascetic and indifferent” is strategic provocation. He’s not praising restraint; he’s describing a population trained to keep desire private, expression regulated, and etiquette optional. That emotional minimalism creates a vacuum. Into that vacuum pour instruction manuals for living: etiquette books, lifestyle magazines, self-help, branding guidelines, “how to” content, even the unwritten rules encoded in advertising. Commerce doesn’t just sell products; it sells templates for what it should feel like to be the kind of person who owns them.
Context matters: McLuhan is writing from the mid-century media boom into the early television era, when mass media wasn’t merely reflecting culture but standardizing it at scale. The subtext is slightly bleak and slightly comic: we’ve outsourced the emotional calibration of our lives to institutions that can monetize it. When ritual collapses, the market steps in as the new priesthood, issuing liturgies in the form of style guides and consumer choices.
Calling the members “ascetic and indifferent” is strategic provocation. He’s not praising restraint; he’s describing a population trained to keep desire private, expression regulated, and etiquette optional. That emotional minimalism creates a vacuum. Into that vacuum pour instruction manuals for living: etiquette books, lifestyle magazines, self-help, branding guidelines, “how to” content, even the unwritten rules encoded in advertising. Commerce doesn’t just sell products; it sells templates for what it should feel like to be the kind of person who owns them.
Context matters: McLuhan is writing from the mid-century media boom into the early television era, when mass media wasn’t merely reflecting culture but standardizing it at scale. The subtext is slightly bleak and slightly comic: we’ve outsourced the emotional calibration of our lives to institutions that can monetize it. When ritual collapses, the market steps in as the new priesthood, issuing liturgies in the form of style guides and consumer choices.
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| Topic | Deep |
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