Ricardo Godinho - McLuhan Essay

The changes that might happen in the information society in the next ten year are a very difficult prediction to make. While many McLuhan enthusiasts consider the concept of the Global Village to be prescient, especially in terms of "predicting" the Internet, it is ludicrous that McLuhan, leaving us to interpret each phrase in terms of some event or invention, nodding sagely at his brilliance each time we make a connection. Certainly, there are times McLuhan is quite accurate about the wave of the technological future - but there are many others where he clearly misfires. Some examples of what McLuhan prediction that turned out to be right are; Media ecology or the emergence of a new medium leads to change in the other media in a media sphere. After a mutation in media, an older medium (like film after TV) can become art, or global communication which enables emphatic identification and participation in lives that are remote in space and culture or even the fading of the literary, since McLuhan's understanding of the intimate link between print media and "literature" makes his an early diagnostician of the social impossibility of sustaining the traditional values of literacy. Although McLuhan also got some things wrong such as media as a total environment in which media environments are not just containers, but processes that change the content totally or circular return of media history from (oral) tribal to (print) detribalization to (electronic) retribalization or his most famous one the global village in which he states that new electronic media powers an integration and unity, such that differences of nation, language, ethnicity fade in significance. McLuhan culture can be described as a background context for the grand narrative of techno-media's arrival, although I believe McLuhan reduces history to the anecdote. Yet, we must be careful not to give McLuhan too much credit as a visionary and avoid a great fallacy. In an odd sense, specific passages in McLuhan's writing did offer a prediction about how cyberspace, or whatever we will call this new medium, would be constructed, if not what it would look like. First, he wrote of the inevitable uneasiness that exists when a new technology for communication becomes both available and viable; "An age in rapid transition is one which exists on the frontier between two cultures and between conflicting technologies. Every moment of its consciousness is an act of translation of each of these cultures into the other. Today we live on the frontier between five centuries of mechanism and the new electronics." At this moment in history, Western culture exists within the realm of the written word, the tools of writing are so ingrained in our consciousness, says McLuhan, that the way we see, the way we draw, the way we do math, the very way we exist is affected by the linearity imposed on our sub consciousness by our societal literacy. This can be demonstrated by an example on how oriental writing and the way they think is completely different from the western way. The symbols in the Japanese language represent an action, such as a man sleeping under a tree while in the western writing we need to put symbols together to make sense. We look at things by part, separately while the eastern culture looks at them as a whole. Writing has been interiorized by our society. It was not always so; before Gutenberg's press allowed for mass-production of print, the phonetic alphabet itself was a specialized tool available only to manuscripters and clerics. But how do we know when we have moved to this interiorization, have moved from seeing a type of literacy as a tool to existing within it as a realm? McLuhan has claimed that we might accomplish this only with complete hindsight, often the hindsight of many generations. Maybe that's what McLuhan was saying all along, the medium is the message because we are bound by our own expectations and interiorized limitations. If we're looking for exactly what we expect, we might miss what we can do. Therefore I do not intend to predict the future of the Internet, however I will try not to miss what I can do.