The Medium Is the Message, 50 Years Later
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Re: The Medium Is the Message, 50 Years Later
#2Disturbingly that article doesn't mention the word 'massage' anywhere. Which is kind of important.
Re: The Medium Is the Message, 50 Years Later
#3Disturbingly that article doesn't mention the word 'massage' anywhere. Which is kind of important.
According to
http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/common-questions/
Now there are four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: “Message” and “Mess Age,” “Massage” and “Mass Age.”
Re: The Medium Is the Message, 50 Years Later
#4Disturbingly that article doesn't mention the word 'massage' anywhere. Which is kind of important.
According to http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/common-questions/ Now there are four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: “Message” and “Mess Age,” “Massage” and “Mass Age.”
Yup. Matches the wikipedia telling of the story. Nonetheless, the history is kind of important given the popularity of this quote. Bit like the (mis-)paraphrasing of 'Life wasn't meant to be easy' popularised in my part of the world (Australia).
Re: The Medium Is the Message, 50 Years Later
#5Harold Innis and his work such as "Empire of Communication" was the foundation for McLuhan's more punk-rock interpretation of communication theory. Pink Floyd vs The Clash.
Innis I found insightful for his view of how technology changes cultures because the dominant means of communication changes what it means to be human.
Re: The Medium Is the Message, 50 Years Later
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/common-questions/ Now there are four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: “Message” and “Mess Age,” “Massage” and “Mass Age.”
Yup. Matches the wikipedia telling of the story. Nonetheless, the history is kind of important given the popularity of this quote. Bit like the (mis-)paraphrasing of 'Life wasn't meant to be easy' popularised in my part of the world (Australia).
[deleted]
Re: The Medium Is the Message, 50 Years Later
#7McLuhan: "As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible."
So, we're still a century or so away from this with regard to smart phones etc. TV barely reached this point before it went into decline (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/business/media/03televisio...). Newspapers did, quite likely, as did radio.
So long as people complain about how devices are changing us, they are not invisible, so anyone engaged in critical commentary (at least in the popular press) is proof that we are nowhere near this boundary.
Wearables may change the timeline for ubiquitous computing, but again: so long as there is hand-wringing about how the technology is changing us, this transformation is not complete.
Re: The Medium Is the Message, 50 Years Later
#8There are very few books I've read that I can honestly say changed the entire direction of my life.
McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is one of them.
Re: The Medium Is the Message, 50 Years Later
#9In 1999 I named my consulting company "Electric Speed" (http://electricspeed.com) after reading McLuhan's book...
At no period in human culture have men understood the
psychic mechanisms involved in invention and technology.
Today it is the instant speed of electric information
that, for the first time, permits easy recognition of the
patterns and the formal contours of change and
development. The entire world, past and present, now
reveals itself to us like a growing plant in an enormously
accelerated movie. Electric speed is synonymous with light
and with the understanding of causes.
— Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)