Mandatory Blog Post #2 - Marshall McLuhan

"All media work us over completely."

What does this quote mean to us? What did it mean to Marshall McLuhan in 1967 when his prophetical multimodal book, The Medium Is the Massage, welcomed itself onto bookshelves across America? It was a call for understanding, and was a preview into the future of media and the emerging global village. I don't think that McLuhan knew just how big and interconnected this village would become in just a few short decades. If he thought that television, trains, and telephones were bringing us closer together, he had another thing coming.  

Creative Design of the Global Village

The internet as a medium has created infinite possibilities for communication, the sharing of ideas, and the ability for anyone to publish anything. The internet was built upon the ideas and fundamentals that written language, printed media, radio, and television had previously made possible. The written word allowed for the preservation of ideas and printed media allowed for those ideas to be shared with the world in a convenient and portable fashion. Radio and television allowed for fast delivery of news and entertainment never seen before. The world was a much different place afterwords.

That's great and all, but old medias can't hold a finger to what the World Wide Web has to offer. I'm not even going to go into detail with the internet because I don't think I have enough time, bandwidth, and knowledge to unpack all that it can do; plus we all use it and already know the possibilities. The world is a much different place from that other world that was much different from the world before that.

Now let's get back on track.

What really happened when Newton was struck

The quotation above is true. Truer than gravity, string theory, and general relativity: because they are theories and the quote is fact. I am not denouncing millenniums of scientific research and discovery, but stating that McLuhan created a law, not a theory.

Media has worked all of us over more than any mafia has worked over a stubborn 'business partner.' A society cannot help but change when a new medium is developed and introduced to the public. With the invention of handwriting there was opposition, as with all new media. The most popular case is Plato claiming that handwriting would make people less intelligent and dependent, leading to the rotting of their minds. Plato would not appreciate the internet or television or radios or comic books or video games... 

Handwriting led to a society of ideas that could last beyond a lifetime and those ideas were then stored and distributed within printed media. Printed media allowed for events like the Protestant Reformation. Before print, the common person could not read the Bible and was dependent upon corrupt clergymen to share the word of god; this led to lies and manipulation by the church. As a result, Martin Luther's posted his Ninety-Five Theses which led to the bible to being printed in several different languages and paved the way for the reformation. Again, the world became a much different place.

Television and radio allowed for quicker access and distribution then ever before. It was a new place for advertising and marketing as well as a place where the public could watch footage of American soldiers fighting a war halfway across the globe. These mediums are examples from McLuhan's text that helped to create the global village; the village where everyone has the ability to know everything about everyone else. It was a village then and I believe that it has now become a global community center; we now know too much about each other. Websites like Twitter and Facebook can do more than television and radio combined. These sites have now been integrated into our everyday lives and its only going to get better or worse, depending on how you look at it. Our society has changed because of the internet and will change when the next big medium is released.    

Media has worked us over alright, and I hope to never recover from the bruises, scratches, or missing teeth.  

      



  





          

 

Mandatory Blog Post #1

I found The article on new literacy by Clive Thompson to be quite interesting. I was enthralled to see such a positive point of view on the internet and its users. He acknowledged the typical points of view about the negative effects and some of them may be true, but was able to find the ever-growing positives. The typical opinion about internet users is that they don't think when they type or read this 'trivial' garbage. Many fear that it is changing the way humans think and write, and it is, but not in a bad way. People are reading now more than ever because of the internet and are learning about audience, timing, and appeal even before coming to college. They do not know that now, but when they have to use it, they would already of had experience.