Day 4 - 202 -- Media Theory and Philosophy

The Google doodle today celebrates the 106th anniversary of the birth of Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian media theorist. During the 1960s and 1970s, he proposed several ideas that were controversial at the time. In many ways, they were visionary, predicting the change in communication via electronic devices. He did this at a time when computers filled entire rooms and where paper punch cards were used  to input data and basic mathematical equations. Electric media were present in the form of televisions, radios and component stereos, but electronic devices were not present. Even cell phones the size of a brick were not found. McLuhan may not have fully described the electronic media found everywhere today, but he understood how they would change the way humans surfed that 'electronic skim.'

McLuhan is known for many sayings, but the most commonly recognized is likely "the medium is the message." While pondering the many changes in communication devices that have occurred since his theories were first posited, I was struck by how well the current technology fits his theories. Even in the past 20 years, communication media have undergone major convergence -- something predicted long before it actually occurred. A telephone became a camera, that became a way to surf Web 1.0 and then devices to interact with the 'global village' through the social media of Web 2.0 (or 3.0 depending on your viewpoint). This convergence seemed far-fetched when we spoke of it in the 1990s. Yet, here it is and it did indeed give evidence to the way the medium affected humans rather than only the message it carried.

While walking home and admiring the many shades of day lilies and the excessively tall clouds that may become thunder clouds, I was still thinking of McLuhan. My doctoral work dealt with his theories and those of the post-McLuhan  or neo-McLuhan era. One can get lost in his ideas. It came to me about half-way home. The Google doodle is a fantastic representation of McLuhan's ideas of the medium affecting everyone globally. Discussions, such as this blog post, occur online where they are available to readers across the world. As McLuhan stated, "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." Information becomes available to everyone instantly, with comments and questions keeping the conversation moving. How we communicate has changed our individual and collective experiences -- how we interact and associate with each other. Cool. <smile>

There are two links I want to share today. One is a very short summary of one of McLuhan's key theories. The second one is a song about the man and his messages. The latter is by a Canadian surrealist comedy group. The video is fun and uses stop-motion animation. Each of these videos demonstrates the quirkiness of McLuhan's mind. Enjoy!


Digital Prophecies: The Medium is the Message -- Daniel Savage (director) and Alex Chow (narrator)

The Ballad of Marshal McLuhan -- The Vestibules