The semester is getting crazy and my wrist is killing me from all this typing. Is my laptop an extension of my wrist/brain/arm/eyes... to use McLuhan's idea of media as extensions of the senses...or is it the other way around? here a few notes:
***medium is the message/media are an extension of the senses
I find it hard to believe that people used to write everything on paper, including novels and philosophical texts that in printed book form are hundreds of pages long. The Constitution was of course famously drafted by hand. The famous Domesday book in England is thousands of pages long, as were Bibles copied by monks. Didn't the wrists of drafters of these documents hurt too after awhile?
I can appreciate McLuhan for this concept of "the medium is the message", and also for taking analytic emphasis away from the content of media towards an understanding media as any kind of technology that extends our senses, thereby changing our consciousness in some way. Media were criticized back then as they are now for disseminating controversial content. How do they impact our learning and understanding by triggering or enhancing certain cognitive functions? In Understanding Media, McLuhan conjectures that forms of media allow fuller engagement with humans, as he believes in the case of television and the media of our electric/electronic age. How true is this? He makes the comparison that while print individualized and privileged the sense of vision, television brought about more sensory awareness and viewer participation, as well as greater geographic and cultural awareness. I am left wondering what is it about television's characteristics that contribute to emergent human attitudes and perception vis-a-vis print?
I used to hate television, but I love it now- I love the stories and the short time commitment I have to an episode. I don't think that I subscribe wholesale to "the medium is the message", but I certainly think that types of media certainly contribute to the making and shaping of a message. Maybe during McLuhan's time, television did bring more "reality" into the household. In the fifties, when Understanding Media was written, writers, actors, producers, camerapersons, light, sound and makeup artists crystallized their skills into the format that we most associate with television: 1-hr episodes with intermittent advertising. Sitcoms from that time period are less interesting to me in some ways that other kinds of shows, like ones that taught cooking, or game shows where people could win big. The advent of television was the advent of a new babysitter and ersatz parent: kids could be entertained by moving sound and image in a safe environment, at home, and maybe even learn a little in the process of viewing. People watched events like the moon landing or sports events take place in a way that photos just did not communicate- in a breathless, "I am watching this happen live" kind of way. Advertisements were much much longer back then and generalized to a wide audience of viewers, perhaps to a much different effect than than they do now, in small, customized bits and pieces, on the tops of our screens or embedded into the videos we watch online.
***global village/tribes
Television seems like one way to utopia/peace as McLuhan describes it, the whole global village metaphor and all. I don't like his hot/cold media spectrum. Also I cringed a lot when I read all of McLuhan's generalizations about literate and preliterate humans and their dispositions to certain kinds of thinking..what did he, a celebrity academic, know about the functions of tribal society anyways? Does he realize that tribal society is not necessarily harmonious...but full of conflict and tension and emotional or political manipulation like any kind of human organization?
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I tend to agree that the use of the word "tribal" is more distracting now than it is helpful. On the other hand, the concept might be a useful tool to think with. Do you think it is true that the pre-electronic literary age was one in which people spent more time alone in their own heads (because reading required this) and that now people more often engage in a kind of collective electronic brain space? If so, I could see how this could have some sort of effect on how people think of themselves and their relationship to the collective. I don't think this is all he means by "retribalization", but it is part of it. A kind of return to epic poetry group reception.
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