Lateral Thinking and the Extensions of Man

I have invested in two new books on Ebay, The Use of Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhuan.

I am not one for glorifying film and media theorists, because as soon as you start glorifying them you usually end up becoming a disciple to their ways of thinking.

However, that being said, I make an exception for Marshall McLuhan who quite literally wrote the book on understanding all of media and film AND much of which is still applicable to the technological and sociological developments of today...

"Art as anti-environment becomes more than ever a means of training perception and judgement. Art offered as a consumer commodity rather than as a means of training perception is as ludicrous and snobbish as always... The power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments, by a generation and more, has long been recognized. In this [the 20th] century Ezra Pound called the artist "the antennae of the race." Art as radar as "an early alarm system," as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them." 

- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1966:ix-xi

Equally, lateral thinking is something that I am very big on and it is something that I am incorporating into the format of the Breaking Cinema podcast. I saw de Bono's book going cheap on Ebay, so I though, why not?

"Since Aristotle, logical thinking has been exalted as the one effective way in which to use the mind. Yet the very elusiveness of new ideas indicates that they do not necessarily come about as a result of logical thought processes. Some people are aware of another sort of thinking which is most easily recognised when it leads to those simple ideas that are obvious only after they have been thought of. This book is an attempt to look at this sort of thinking and to show that it is quite distinct from logic and often more useful in generating new ideas. For the sake of convenience, the term 'lateral thinking' has been coined to describe this other sort of thinking; 'vertical thinking' is used to denote the conventional logical process." 

- Edward de Bono, 'The Use of Lateral Thinking', 1967:5

I have already got stuck into both of these and I suspect that Understanding Media will greatly assist with the Mass Communications major of my MTA; likewise, The Use of Later al Thinking should assist with the development of Breaking Cinema.