Eser Torun's Wake!
What changes do you expect in the information society in the next ten years? Write a essay what you expect to happen, and why - using a critical review of McLuhan's theories (i.e. basing it on his thinking, or basing it on a cirtique on his thinking).
Eser Torun's Wake:
This would be a critic of McLuhan and his efforts for putting technology into the role of supreme and sole cause of historical change and crediting it with eventually making man superfluous. In his opinion, automation and cybernation (or computerization) would turn man into an unnecessary organism without any essential purpose, a circus animal the world keeps around for laughs. I would definitely disagree with his way of interpreting human being as the object of technology's mysterious powers, scorn his ideas as gibberish and claim that he completely undervalued humanity's resilience. However the appropriately titled movie I watched last week- McLuhan’s Wake- changed both my way of thinking and the content of this essay. The movie examines the changes in technology and media and our interactions with them since Marshall McLuhan's death in 1980. No matter how critical you are about McLuhan, the film is very successful to make the viewer look at today's world through his lens. It is making good use of the art delve into McLuhan's four questions to ask of any technology: What will this thing enhance? When will it obsolesce? What will it retrieve from what we have lost? and How will it reverse on you when pushed to its outer limit?
I think McLuhan’s intent has been to shake us out of passivity in order to understand how technology shapes our environment and how we can transcend its determining power. Therefore McLuhan should be credited with helping us deconstruct the communications phenomena and their social aspects. The significant change in my opinion after watching the movie was my first step to start understanding McLuhan’s media theory. He was right that new media creates new environments.
McLuhan opens up a world of inquiry if you are willing to think deeply. Then it is possible to understand that technology and media shaping our society today can be built on his prescient insights. McLuhan saw the new direction in which society was headed: we shape technology and electronic technology shapes us in return, and the type of technology we use has more impact on our thinking than does the information it carries.
The current Internet revolution, still in its nascence, is already exerting an enormous impact on culture, society and the way we live, just as the telegraph or telephone did in the previous communications revolutions. Therefore, in current internet age, McLuhan’s theories seems more applicable than ever.
But the most difficult task in writing about McLuhan is explaining, aside from his opinions, what he actually thought. Since a McLuhan sentence is very comprehensive and interconnected, quoting him at any length can have the unfortunate effect of misguiding the reader or being misunderstood. It is also a fact that McLuhan has such an impenetrable style that when I try to explain any sentence of him, I feel that the sentence loses its purpose along with its edge.
Although describing McLuhan's opus has left me in a bind, below I tried to describe future of information society by applying McLuhan's pioneering concepts, such as "ratio of senses," "the medium is the message," "global village," "media as extensions of man" that were developed in the black-and-white-TV era of the 1950s and '60s.
Ratio of the senses:
It was McLuhan's contention that man's nature is divisible. He argued a new understanding of the senses. He came to believe that the balance of man's five senses had been disrupted--first by the phonetic alphabet in the 6th century B.C. “Print gave tribal man an eye for an ear" he once wrote. Books had made the visual sense paramount, leading, he believed, to an unhealthy specialization; to an atomism of people and cultures exemplified by such phenomena as the nation-state, bureaucracy, and the rise of the specialized expert. The obvious contrast here is with tribal cultures, wherein one's sense of self and community is established through hearing. Visually these communities make for a small world, but hearing, or rather listening, connects the present with the past and each member of the tribe with the whole tribe. This is what TV brought to our lives. A person reading a book forms mental images but with television a viewer immediately feels the images on the screen. TV is able to rub its meaning under our skin, and it has created a mass culture. This also gives an idea about the future of Internet, which is Semantic Web!
When we look at the initial stage of personal computers, we can conclude that we had a negative impact on our sensibilities until the advent of networks. The crucial breakthrough has been the ability of networks to help communicate with one another. Currently, computer networks are creating collective minds that will better solve our problems. That capacity enhances a balanced use of senses that will lead to the next stage in the electronic evolution of McLuhan- a phase that has already begun with the dramatic growth of the Internet.
In the evolving information society, power structures seems to reverse. They will crumble and the concept of power to the people will become a reality. The dream of Karl Marx to give the means of production to the hands of the workers is becoming reality in the world of future media and communications. As more and more people acquire computers, connect global network and are able to publish information, control of the economy is expected to shift. It is true that there are still obstacles and complications in front of bright information society. For many people, computers are still out of financial reach. However it is important to understand that in this new society, everything will be in our own hands.
The medium is the message:
Rather than concentrate on the rivalry between form and content, McLuhan was mainly concerned with more common categories of media: newspapers, magazines, movies, radio, television. What these media share is that none of them is crucial to survival, yet we consume their products as if they were food, clothing, and shelter.
Take newspapers. Their content is news. Newspapers as a general matter don't carry much, except advertisements. They reflect and confirm the societies from which they spring. They can bring to their readers only what is already within the readership's experience. Thus the content of a newspaper is already decided. The medium dominates, or even is, the message.
And as a matter of experience, newspapers reduce events to the articles that are measured in inches and column size. Newspapers categorizes events by the placement of the articles: local versus national, human interest versus business etc. The very environment of a newspaper suggests relationships between events that are imaginary. This is why McLuhan said, "A man does not read a newspaper so much as bathe in it."
If we look at computer age from the same perspective, It can be concluded that educators should stop trying to define computer literacy and begin to focus on using computers to attain educational goals. Therefore it can be argued that the computer medium has largely determined how computer literacy has been and will be defined. Ultimately, educators will have to focus not on how to use computers but on how to apply computers to educational goals. In his axiom "the Medium is the Message" , McLuhan identified the tremendous impact that a specific medium or method of communication has on the nature of the message that is being communicated. Messages through the medium of the radio, for example, have induced a private experience in the listener and reversed the society into a single echo chamber. Another medium, television, has changed the nature of communication and retrieved a sort of global village in to our living rooms. A similar analogy can be drawn for computers, computer literacy and the future of information society. The growth and sophistication of computer hardware, software and internet (the medium) is largely determining and enhancing how computer literacy can be defined (the message).
Global village:
Modern communications technology (from the telegraph and the newspaper and the telephone to radio and television) has connected people. Technology connects individuals and societies. Information can be transmitted instantaneously. Like a village in which little that is important remains private, the lives of individuals and societies are made known to other nations by way of enhanced communications. Modern man and the modern nation-state are connected to other men and other nation-states like the residents of a small town. For McLuhan, print, as an experience, tended to be individual and often thought-provoking; electronic media were tribal and visceral, relating more to the feelings. He understood that television was radically new. It was instant and created global village. In current internet age, the global village theory is much more visible. The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space. No longer can any place or any person be isolated.
The increasing globalization of information has of course some bad consequences for the future of the society. Violence is being enhanced and transformed through the global village. The Internet is becoming a very violent place. The technology is driven by thrill-kill games of ever greater sophistication, and the pornography is becoming readily available and crucial element of advertisements. As a person who strongly opposed to the unholy unity of advertising and sexual desire, I think McLuhan would be very upset to see the facts of current information society shaped by his theories. Probably he would feel even worse, if he had known that some international MBA’s are using pornography web pages to explain his theories. McLuhan Essay - Daniel Hall
It is also a fact that the evolving electronic media are making the body obsolete, as McLuhan said. The masses are being socialized by images rather than by fellow human beings. By investing so much time in electronic images, individuals are losing patience with real people. I think this notion intriguing, and it is not hard to find the confirmation for it in our current life.
Media as extensions of man:
For McLuhan, the relationship of media to man's senses isn't just a matter of emphasis but of mental response that is resulting social consequences. The primary media, print and speech literally extend the senses to which they correspond respectively, eyes and ears, and the world is recreated in their image. Therefore McLuhan argues that print gave tribal man an eye for an ear and turned man into an individualist wit abstract commitments. However, he believes, electronic media returned man to sensorial balance. The man was not an individualist any more, and he started to enjoy a feeling of connectedness to the rest of his world. The internet made McLuhan theories much more applicable and meaningful. ‘Village’ concept is retrieved in current internet age. Because we are again living in a village, physically unremoved, within touching distance, and the self is inseparable from the world. As a result, we are moving to sensorial balance. Sensorial balance started with the telegraph and was enhanced by television. Television, McLuhan argued, closed the gap that print had opened up between man and the tribe. For McLuhan, everything is the meeting of technology and the senses, so is the web. In this regard, Internet is expected to further enhance sensorial balance.
Through radio, telegraph, TV, and the web, we have been entering a global theater in which the entire world is becoming a living organism. The space and time are overcome by jets and the internet--a simultaneous 'all-at-once' world in which everything resonates with everything else as in a total electronic communication field. This is a world in which energy is generated not by the traditional connections but by the over-all awareness of a mosaic world.
Eser Torun