- cross-posted to:
- wikipedia@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- wikipedia@lemmy.world
“Us and Them” (Pink Floyd song cover) performed by Lucia Lilikoi, lyrics: Up and down… and in the end It’s only round and round, and round. “Haven’t you heard it’s a battle of words?” The poster bearer cried
The Overton window is the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse. The key to the concept is that the window changes over time; it can shift, or shrink or expand. It exemplifies “the slow evolution of societal values and norms”.
For climbing the Babel Tower, University of Toronto Professor Marshall McLuhan points us to Irish author James Joyce’s year 1924 onward “Finnegans Wake” media ecology lessons:
“Joyce is, in the Wake, making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all the phases of human culture and technology. As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let’s make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious.” — “The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects” by media analyst Marshall McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore, and coordinated by Jerome Agel. It was published in March 1967