This is the famous image of Marshall McLuhan that appeared on the cover of The Medium if the Massage, 1967. It's on top of Understanding Media and War and Peace in the Global Village. All are relevant to this course and to an article I'm writing with Karen Powell and Tiffany Walter, which we'll submit to an on-line journal so that we can use hyperlinks, pictures, and video. I'll share a version when it's ready.In the meantime, here's vintage McLuhan in TheMistheM:
First he quotes A. N. Whitehead: "The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur."
The MM speaks: "The medium, or process, of our time--electric technology--is reshaping and restructuring patters of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life....Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men [sic] communicate than by the content of the communication. The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. [MM was known for outrageous hyperbole...read on. LBB] Words and and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways. The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media." (p. 8) Now meditate on the idea that the first desktop computers came along in significant numbers around 1982. More to come.
2 comments:
i got "the medium is the massage" a few weeks ago, based on your suggestion. i'm quite enjoying it. here's another fun quote:
"Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay."
i'm interested in what he says about "pattern recognition," though i'm not yet certain what he means.
I'm not entirely sure either, Sean, but I do know that he believed that print made us think in linear ways (see his ruler). When hypertext came along, all kinds of people wrote that it would free us from this. Now that it's really arrived on websites, blogs, etc., do you think that it has? Many people (Ong, Goody & Watt, Logan, and a new book people are reading that I can't recall right now) have written about the move from orality (sometimes called "oracy") to literacy, sometimes calling the results the "alphabet effect." Interesting stuff in a digital environment. --Dr. L
Post a Comment