DOMED STADIUMS AND PINBALL MACHINES.

DOMED STADIUMS AND PINBALL MACHINES. Kids, you may never have encountered Marshall McLuhan, but he was a very influential critic in the sixties. I always found him interesting. McLuhan was a professor of literature who became increasingly interested in the medium that a work of art used rather than the content of the work itself. The shorthand for this was “The medium is the message.” For example, he argued that the printing press changed society from an oral/aural culture to a predominantly visual one. And reading made people more individualistic. (This wikipedia article describes a number of his ideas.) McLuhan was prominent at the time that the first domed stadium, the Astrodome in Houston, opened. The Astrodome was controversial, and McLuhan was asked for his opinion. It would be, he thought, like being inside a pinball machine.