Marshal McLuhan

Professor, literary critic, educator, scholar, philospher, and communication theorist. There are several words and to describe McLuhan bit what remains the same is the fact that he was a pioneer in therorizing the media world in which we live in. During McLuhan's  lifetime he has raised controversial concepts and ideas about the increase and advancement of technology. His work was primarily the study of the mediums  of the media and it's affect on society. 

McLuhan is a great person to study in this class because there has not been anyone who has been able to study this subject matter so thoroughly and make such impactful and controversial observations as a result. There are theorist today who have followed in McLuhan's footsteps and have studied the media and it's affects on our society, but the fact remains that McLuhan is the pioneer in thouroughly dissecting and the media technologies that have sky rocketed into what it is today and what it is advancing into tomorrow.

McLuhan's writings have been intriguing and it has given me further understanding of the core of media technologies. In one of his earlier writings, "The Gutenberg Galaxy" (1962), he writes about technologies making a shift from the print culture to electronic media. According to McLuhan, the print culture has a predominace of the visual over the oral and pushes auditary and other senses to the background. The print culture is individualism and fragmentation to a "tribal base" or collective identity. McLuhan has stated that the electronic media is replacing the visual culture with the oral culture as this shift from print to electronic occurs.

"The world has become a computer, an electric brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction." - Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan has taken a kind of extremist standpoint with this statement and concept. He believes that if we do not watch the effects  of the media's influence, the "global village" will become ruled by totalitarism and terror. He also believes that the modification of print to electronic means a modification of individualism. With this idea, I have to disagree wholeheartedly because technology today has advanced our creative thinking and self expression. The media and information that we obtain through new technologies and media medium has changed, but what has also changed is that now we are more apart of the media. People in society are not just the one's absorbing information through the media, we can participate through primarily the internet and even with TV through reality TV shows and live audiences for talk shows. Since we can now speak out and be apart of this technological movement, we don't necessarily have to go to the streets and protest when we don't agree with something political. The media is a powerful device and the people are using it just as much as the media sources through creating digital identities and blogging, networking, and uploading video to speak our minds through this ungoverned and uncharted territory. In a way we are more individualistic now than when society relied solely on the print culture.