First the sentence, and then the evidence!

First of all, welcome to the first post on my blog/portfolio for Cat 125: I/Eyegasm.  For my first post, I will be talking about two pages (pg. 42 and 43) that caught my attention in Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Massage."

After doing some research on this image, I discovered its origin lies from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where the King and Queen of Hearts are with a jury and conducting trial on a Knave.  In the image above, the King is waiting for evidence before coming up with a verdict for the prisoner.  however, the queen is suggesting to issue the sentence first, before looking at the evidence.

To be honest, the first things that came to my mind after seeing these two pages was the age old question of what came first, the chicken or the egg?

Source: http://media1.iterated-reality.com/2015/03/ChickenOrEgg.jpg

However, the difference between these two is that the first scenario is a much more serious topic, and involves the life of someone who may be innocent.  In my opinion, the author of the story was trying to satire the eagerness of people to make uneducated decisions without thinking things through.  In our modern society, we have the system "innocent until proven guilty" for a good reason, as we would rather have criminals running around than innocent people having to pay for crimes they did not commit.

So how does this excerpt from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland relate to McLuhan's "The Medium is the Massage," and more importantly - how does it relate to this course?  In the pages immediately after these two, McLuhan talks about how rationality and visuality have been around as long as life.  Without rationality, an audience cannot understand the message being portrayed - regardless of the medium.  This connects to the excerpt from Wonderland because the Queen's thinking is flawed - you can't declare a sentence on someone without having the evidence to back it up.  Furthermore, this relates to the overall theme of our course "the self," as we need to make sure that we ourselves are rational beings.