Marshall McLuhanBesprekingen
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Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man door Marshall McLuhan
"There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening."
The "art" aspect is pretty poor and I really don't appreciate stuff like mirror text.
"Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog." Really? Is there any reason to believe this at all?
"The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible." No reason to consider this true.
"In tribal societies we are told that it is a familiar reaction, when some hideous event occurs, for some people to say, "How horrible it must be to feel like that," instead of blaming somebody for having done something horrible. This feeling is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving into—a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with everybody else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore." First, "tribal societies"?? Lazy as hell. There's a lot of ideas about "primitive" society in this that are just claptrap. And second guilt is just as private. Like he regularly says that technology is making the world more connected and social yet the reality is that things haven't changed much in that respect and if anything we've become *more* atomised - the reams of analysis about neoliberalism bear this out.
"The poet, the artist, the sleuth —whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted," he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are." Very unpleasant "sheeple" style talk, no reason at all to believe this really.
I really think humour actually works to reinforce existing prejudices - it's generally done before thought, based on your pre-existing ideas.
"Formerly, the problem was to invent new forms of labor-saving. Today, the reverse is the problem. Now we have to adjust, not to invent." The problem is always to invent new ways of labour-saving, because that's capitalism. We have always needed to adjust to changes, it's a constant. There's been several serious changes in the past 1000 years (emergence of capitalism for a start). This is not new and not accurate.
He claims that television will not work as a background. Heh. His idea that television means the viewer participates whereas other mass media is just a "packaging device" makes no sense and is never explained.
I disagree with most of what he says and he never argues it or anything, it's just there. It feels super wanky, like adbusters or something. There's even a John Cage quote about how the I-Ching helped him find "joy". There are a few ok bits but it's not worth going through the rot.
"Hollywood is often a fomenter of anti-colonial rebellions" is stretching the truth a lot.
Talk about "Orientalizing" the West is gross and racist and makes no sense.
The idea that electronic media brings us into a village again has not really been borne out at all.
Will appeal if you love going on about "spectacle", "sheeple" or talking about how revolutionary twitter is. Will not appeal if you want decent politics, good arguments, good writing, good analysis, or good art. Admittedly I'm probably being unfair with a 1 star rating, but I'm sick of technological fetishism and there really wasn't anything convincing or exciting in this.
Le forme possibili della chiesa del futuro: McLuhan specula sulle possibili evoluzioni della Chiesa e come i media possano influenzare la sua struttura e funzionamento.
Queste sono solo alcune delle idee principali trattate nel libro. Per una comprensione più approfondita, sarebbe consigliabile leggere direttamente il testo.
In "La luce e il mezzo. Riflessioni sulla religione", Marshall McLuhan esplora la relazione tra religione e media attraverso diverse prospettive. Ecco alcuni modi in cui McLuhan affronta questo argomento nel libro:
Natura della conversione: McLuhan indaga sulla natura della conversione religiosa e come i media influenzino questo processo. Esplora come i mezzi di comunicazione possano influenzare le credenze e le pratiche religiose delle persone.
Visione dei media nell'ottica della Chiesa: L'autore analizza come la Chiesa cattolica e altre istituzioni religiose vedano e utilizzino i media nella diffusione del messaggio religioso. Esplora come i media possano essere considerati strumenti per raggiungere i fedeli e diffondere la fede.
Forme possibili della chiesa del futuro: McLuhan specula sulle possibili evoluzioni della Chiesa e come i media possano influenzare la sua struttura e funzionamento. Esplora come i cambiamenti tecnologici e mediatici possano plasmare la forma e l'organizzazione delle comunità religiose.
Queste sono solo alcune delle idee principali discusse da McLuhan nel libro. "La luce e il mezzo. Riflessioni sulla religione" offre un'analisi approfondita della relazione tra religione e media, offrendo spunti di riflessione su come i mezzi di comunicazione possano influenzare la fede e la pratica religiosa.
Marshall McLuhan, nel suo libro, esplora la relazione tra religione e media da diverse prospettive. La sua prospettiva sulla religione nel panorama dei media è stata influenzata dalla sua fede cattolica. McLuhan ha sostenuto che i media possono influenzare la fede e la pratica religiosa delle persone, e ha esplorato come la Chiesa cattolica e altre istituzioni religiose vedano e utilizzino i media nella diffusione del messaggio religioso.
Inoltre, ha speculato sulle possibili evoluzioni della Chiesa e come i media possano influenzare la sua struttura e funzionamento. McLuhan ha anche sostenuto che la comprensione della religione e dei media richiede una partecipazione attiva alla comprensione di come i messaggi vengono trasmessi e ricevuti.
In generale, la prospettiva di McLuhan sulla religione e sui media è stata influenzata dalla sua fede cattolica e dalla sua comprensione dei media come strumenti per la diffusione del messaggio religioso. "Il mezzo è il messaggio" è un "messaggio" chiaro. Il "Verbo" è il "Mezzo" e anche il "Messaggio".
Gosh, how do I even begin talking about this one. It took me almost 4 years to finish it; I had to take breaks from our from time to time. It's one of those books that seem to be written for a different kind of focus, and so densely packed with information and connections that you start feeling overwhelmed in no time.
He has a way to just dump information. In the same sentence he links Einstein's Theory of Relativity to MAD Magazine ("relative" understanding opened the door to cartoons and MAD's cynicism); in another wheels and Krazy Kat (wheels extend men's reach; bricks extend Krazy Kat's).
Still, he has a way to see and explain patterns others have ignored; it's no surprise many of the lessons from this book are still repeated to this day, and many future predictions turned out to be accurate (if painfully described).
Reads like the extensive ramblings of a madman that was correct more often than not.
> POUR COMPRENDRE LES MÉDIA, de Marshall Mcluhan (et Jean Paré) - Ed. Seuil Poche. — Inventeur de l’expression “village global”, McLuhan est généralement considéré comme LE premier penseur à avoir imaginé le “système nerveux” d’une planète intelligente, à savoir (bien avant internet, mais la préfigurant incontestablement) le réseau médiatique qui nous relie les uns aux autres de manière de plus en plus dense, au point que nous transformons littéralement l’espace-temps autour de nous... et donc notre conscience.
—Nouvelles Clés
Os meios de comunicação como extensões do homem
Gordon describes this work as a revisionist history. As far as I understood, McLuhan did not review the standard history, with the result that I, who do not know the standard history, could perceive only one side of the dialogue. Not helpful.
He critiques printing, which partially revolves around the technology of the alphabet. Allegedly, the alphabet trains us to see things in a connected and continuous way. Since the alphabet and words involve breaking things down and constructing meaning, he says that this fragmenting is how humanity now thinks.
Fragmented compared to what? My admittedly limited understanding of non-literate people is that they tend to have ideas about the world that are “connected.” How could one move about the world not believing things are connected? What does “continuous” mean anyways? Also, modern communications technologies don’t function too different from the alphabet, if any have supplanted it at all. For instance, memes take images out of their context and use them to represent a mood, idea, opinion, etc. Isn’t this breaking things down and constructing meaning through fragmenting?
He points out that the printing press was the first instance of mass production and alleges that reading facilitates a private point-of-view involving detachment and a cult of individualism. He’s arguing that networked society brings us back into oral dialogue of the village, since we all have access to communicate with each other instantly. Hence, the “global village.”
The critique of the printing press is probably fair, and I can understand detachment and individualism resulting from solitary reading. But where does reading aloud fit into this, or talking about a book with others? Reading can facilitate dialogue or be as individualistic as listening to someone talk on TV. Printing and reading are surely worth critique, but nothing like the rigorous dialogue of ancient Greece has come about since the spread of TV and the internet. Instead, attention spans have declined while our understandings of things have become shallower, as Nicholas Carr puts it.
Furthermore, though communications media has brought people the ability to communicate across the world, we are living in a period where nationalism and racism are surging. Perhaps our situation mirrors the “global village” McLuhan heralds, but Othering has remained. Rather than virtual distance and communication technology, this ugly human tendency is likely rooted in politics, the economy, and psychology.
He believes the discord between generations in the Sixties results from society’s expectations that older technologies are expected to solve contemporary problems. He homes in on schooling, which deploys older strategies for imparting fragmented knowledge, meanwhile children receive a wider image of the adult world simply by watching TV.
He argues that electric technology fosters involvement and participation. He probably meant it in a good way, but this reminds me of the computer application Slack, which acts as a chatroom for workplace “teams”. Prior to Slack, there was not expectations for a work colleagues to be in constant communication. Instead, you would do your work, and talk to co-workers when you needed to.
Slack brings co-workers together in a space paid by the employer, who have the possibility of surveilling and reviewing the communications. Employees know this. Slack then acts as a centralization tool. The participation and involvement are synonymous with increased productivity. We are always there, always in-tune to the details of the work, and always available for informal communication.
McLuhan argues that instead of “the public,” electrical technology supposedly creates “the mass” who use multiple “modes of exploration” rather than walking around with ones’ own fixed POV. Here it is obvious how McLuhan doesn’t make arguments, he issues proclamations. What is a “mode of exploration”? Is it just that I think the masses’ ideas instead of those brought to me by the schoolteacher or book? That just seems like groupthink.
If printing caused fixed POVs, how does this vague “mass” offer new modes? What new modes? How are they able to break the fixed POV? Aren’t TV shows and movies also shown from the same POVs: first-person, third-person, ensemble, etc?
Overall, I think McLuhan was onto big societal transformations taking place in the Sixties. He just exaggerated the responsibility and role of media technology in bringing it about. He was right to point out the importance of the media/medium, but his mistake was being optimistic about it.
Taking its cue from the saying, "the medium is the message" and altering it to fit their own message, McLuhan and Fiore present the argument of how the electronic media is slowly lulling us into not realizing the dramatic changes and new perspectives this technology is creating.
Their 'writing style', if it can be called such, is a provocative, visually-impacting array of photographs, unique texts, quotes, humorous cartoons, and other images to give the reader a better understanding of the ideas being presented. While there is a slight danger of their message being lost in its unorthodox presentation, (two pages, for example, are printed with the text upside-down), their argument is solid and restated in unique ways throughout.
The book is revolutionary in the way it shows how electric technology is continually changing our government, our families, our jobs, and our social relationships. While the evidence and the way it is presented does reveal its origination in the earlier part of this technological movement, the words nonetheless show its relevance to our time period.
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danielx | 30 andere besprekingen | Jan 25, 2021 |
danielx | 30 andere besprekingen | Jan 25, 2021 | McLuhan argues that people are often engulfed in the medium's content that it blinds them from the medium's actual effect. The way that we transmit and receive information is more important than the information itself. In Understanding Media, he wrote that it is the "medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action." The medium is the extension of ourselves or the environment, and the content is just 'a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind'.
In similarity to my previous reading, Carr argues in The Shallows that the internet has changed our brain's structure due to its malleability. We're now more prone to skimming and multi-tasking so that we're on the brink of losing the ability to think deeply too. In How to Stay Sane, Shafak argues that the social media's echo chamber has led us to be more apathetic towards each other, and we're slowly losing the sense of democracy. For McLuhan, watching television changed the way we looked at the world and created an interconnected global village. It became the extension of our mind and senses. "It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media."
Now that we know what the media does to us, regardless of their contents, we should be more critical to which extent these extensions of our senses will benefit us. "There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening." I think we can balance both the technophile & the luddite within ourselves when using media or technologies. They do help us, undoubtedly more so now that we're striving in the middle of the pandemic. Yet, it doesn't hurt to step back and ponder how we use the technology not to be controlled by it instead.
This work consists of much more than text. Published in black-and-white, it portrays a series of images that move the reader through the contention that media – particularly electronic media – “massages” messages to us. McLuhan squarely places the focus on the nature of the media.
He looks to history to see how Gutenberg transformed the world through the advent of print media. He contends that television, movies, and other pictorial media begun the transform the world in the 1950s and 1960s. It made the world a smaller place, a global village, where people in far-flung places of the world borrow and learn from each other.
To him, electronic media are non-linear, unlike books. Rather, they unite thought and action in a way that books do not. This allows fields like psychology to flourish as instant reactions become more important. In its production, each page is adorned with images that reinforce McLuhan’s message. While such things are commonplace over fifty years later, this type of presentation was pioneered in these works. We can now observe through studying contemporary discourse that this work was spot-on in its predictions.
For me, as a software developer and student of culture, this work simply reinforces what I see around me. I spend a lot of my time on the computer and Internet. I see first-hand that McLuhan’s theses worked out. Still, I found this image-oriented book very stimulating. All of the poignant pictures tired out my eyes. It reminded me of the electronic media that are now standard, like the electronic news or even Facebook and Instagram.
This work continues to inform the intellectual class and students of culture. Those interested in the history of ideas will be particularly attracted to this work. Those, like me, who are concerned with the role of computers in society will find this work compelling. As commonly said, we live in the Information Age, and this book sketched the outlines, fifty-plus years ago, of what that would look like. Many say that it is the most mature expression of McLuhan’s thought. For that reason, it’s worth attending to his perspective today.
This edition is wonderful and beautifully produced, from the Shepard Fairey cover (probably the most apt choice), to the self-referential New Yorker cartoon on the last page. It is both a (brief) history of media, and a harbinger of the future. Quentin Fiore's contributions are stunning, particularly in retrospect, and seem far less counter-culture now than they did in the 1960s. The use of visual images, creative typesetting, and lack of regular pagination help drive home McLuhan's point in this "inventory of effects." We get pulled into the "electrically-configured whirl" no less now than we did then, even if the medium has changed. One wonders if we aren't still "march[ing] backwards into the future." Media continue to be "extensions of some human faculty"--and in that, we see both the frailty and fecundity of our ideas.
Links
Marshall McLuhan Official Site (English)
Wikipedia (English)
IMDb (English)
wikidata (English)
DNB McLuhan, Marshall (German)
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