Media Education

     Let me preface this by saying that this is not my first experience with the idea that the type of media and the media itself are part of the message that is conveyed.  When I first read the Medium is the Message in 2003, I was a bit too young and consequently not serious about the meanings of his work.  I felt as if he were speaking of us living in some dystopian society, but I didn't see my world as such.  Even though I thought he was a bit too abstract and extreme, I realized that there was some truth in what he was saying.  As I go back to what McLuhan has said and the messages that he conveyed, especially in the world today, I am even more interested in the way that as he was describing the media he saw in his day, how applicable it is the to media today.  The more I realize, the more I see that the predictions he made were not just loosely grabbing at the ideas of evolving technology he saw but he has a solid foundation of the ideals of networked media and all they have come to mean.  I can see how technology has a meaning and why an email is so much different from a tweet, how the limits of 140 characters assigns a different meaning to a message that can be pages long, how a Snap chat message and its temporality has so much more meaning than a regular picture taken and saved on a phone.  By this same rationale, I can see how print images, and their freeze of a moment in time is much more different than a commercial.  By this logic, we need to educate our youth so that they fully understand the media around them and how it can be manipulative in its message.      

     I have really become enamored by his notion of the Global Village, and all the connections that he makes in regard to it.  The "globality" of our culture is amazing and I do not think that people realize how connected we really are and how that has shifted to what it was before.  Even the advent of amazing sources of transportation can not even remotely compare to the immediacy that technology allocates to us.  "Push a button and the world is yours" is such a groundbreaking statement, even at this time, because we ultimately have a whole world's worth of resources at our finger tips.  He says, "everywhere is your neighborhood" and the "world is more familiar" now.  Also, as brought out by Olivia Kruger, in her book Gaia, God, and the Internet: The History of Evolution and the Utopia of Community in Media Society, McLuhan likens his metaphorical comparison to a village as oppose to a town because in a village, interpersonal relationship are closer and that is level of closeness that we are with the advent of new technology(p. 154).     

     He also discusses the transition that we went through as a civilization and how books, an old medium/gadget, was as closed a medium aw we could get.  The people that were "with it" understood books.  The reader would sit alone, scan a line, and the ideas are conveyed one at a time.  This activity was private.  In the advent of broadcast television, the world has become more tribal and has moved away from the individual man, and man has lost his private identity.  This loss of identity has made us move toward being part of the conglomerate and tribalizing as a single entity as oppose to everyone being their own single entity.  "We are moving toward a collective, without any individual consciousness," McLuhan states on his interview about the Global Village, and he surmised that there is "no harmony, we are concerned with everyone else's business."  It is for this reason that advertising has become so invasive and effective in our world today.  It is obvious that as we move toward togetherness and what we deem equality, we would seek to keep that equality and advertising manipulates that feeling that we would need to "keep up with the Jones".  

     While McLuhan has been very accurate with the underlying descriptions of media meaning, I would like to ask him some questions and see his responses.  A question that I had, in terms of today's media is what he thinks of how it is steadily dissolving from a top down structure to a bottom up structure where the singularity of message is no longer what it once was.  How instead of corporations having complete control of "broadcast" media, the people are beginning to have that control as content producers instead of mere consumers.  I think that it is possible that he thinks that in a subversive manner those higher ups still have control, but I guess the optimist in me sees a slightly less dystopian society in our future, one where control will live in those who deserve it.  I see us moving out of the Global village, where even though we still have communication over far distances, we begin to close ourselves to more like minded people and make small communities over our networked public.

Marshall Mcluhan Speaks – Centennial 2011, Global Village (1968), Retrieved from http://marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/sayings/1968-global-village.php

Marshall Mcluhan Speaks – Centennial 2011, Global Village (1977), Retrieved from 

from http://marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/sayings/1977-global-village.php

Olivia Krueger, Gaia, God, and the Internet: The History of Evolution and the Utopia of Community in Media Society http://www.jstor.org/stable/27643256