McLuhan

I really enjoyed the couple chapters we had to read. I never realized McLuhan was the one who coined "the medium is the message," but now I know. After doing the reading, I looked up some additional information on him and items to clarify the passage. I went through it a few times and took notes, but a few parts still had me confused. I found this resource quite helpful.

I found a few spots in the text where his words sounded similar to those of Ellul. He says "The restructuring of human work and association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of modern technology." The word fragmentation made me think of Ellul's comments on how technology creates specialized roles for people. The person who created a whole object becomes a person who creates just a special part of it. McLuhan talked about how guilt is harder to assign in an information-rich and specialized world, which is pretty much exactly what Ellul said.

McLuhan also talked about the mental breakdown that occurs when there is an endless flow of new information. I suppose you can guess who I thought of here - Postman. So many more of McLuhan's ideas are related to what we've already read. He talks about technology altering sense perception. He talks about unintended consequences, which was in one of the readings for last week (and we talked about it in class).

I'm fine and dandy with all these readings and I know it's important to study the past as well as present, but I'm wondering if we're ever going to get to more recent texts. I wish we could have read something such as Alone Together, the book by Sherry Turkle (she was in the Frontline episodes) or The Shallows in its entirety.

One thing I noticed is that McLuhan said people participate more with TV than radio and that TV is a cool technology while radio is a cold one. However, most of his reasoning for TV being cool is because it is less high definition. In today's world, most TVs are high definition, so I don't believe this concept is true anymore. Perhaps it might be if you watch cartoons on it, but still.

I'm really curious where the Internet fits in all of this. Is it hot or cool? Perhaps that depends more on the website. People have to interact with the Internet, but high definition pictures and videos can be found on the internet. Hmm. Perhaps I will bring this up tomorrow!