Marshall McLuhan on the Apollo Space Mission

   

           “After the Apollo astronauts had revolved around the moon’s surface in December of 1968, they assembled a television camera and focused it on the art. All of us who were watching had an enormous reflexive response. We “outured” and “innered” at the same time. We were on earth and the moon simultaneously. And it was our individual recognition of that event which gave it meaning.

            A resonating interval had been set up. The true action in the event was not on earth or on the moon, but rather in the airless void between, in the play of the axle and the wheel as it were. We had become newly aware of the separate physical foundations of these two different world and we willing, after some initial shock, to accept both as an environment for man.

            “The tetrad, like the metaphor, performance the same function that the camera di in the Apollo 8 mission: it reveals figure (moon) and ground (earth) simultaneously. The left brain with its sequential, linear bias, hides the ground of most situations, making it subliminal. Left-hemisphere thinking, as a dominant mode, is linear and tends to place emphasis only on the connected; it is steeped in a priori notions of order, masking the complementarity of both right and left brain modes. 
- Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers (The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21^st Century)

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But what if we didn't actually land on the moon?