From What is The Message?:

If you would like a rare view of someone experiencing the McLuhan Vortex – McLuhan, of course, having been strongly influenced by the “Vorticists,” Eliot, Yeats, Joyce – you simply must see the course weblog for this semester’s Mind, Media and Society II. On the blog so far, class members are asked to reflect, react and respond to both selected readings and the class seminars. “Bad” Bruce has certainly been caught in the McLuhan vortex, as you can tell from his response to this passage from Understanding Media:

Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. With our central nervous system strategically numbed, the tasks of conscious aware ness and order are transferred to the physical life of man, so that for the first time he has become aware of technology as an extension of his physical body. Apparently this could not have happened before the electric age gave us the means of instant, total field-awareness. With such awareness, the subliminal life, private and social, has been hoicked up into full view, with the result that we have “social consciousness” presented to us as a cause of guilt-feelings. Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather than categories, and of total social involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual separateness or points of view. In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (Understanding Media, p. 47)