McLuhan Essay -- Art

McLuhanAuthor and companionable theorist Tom Wolfe once commented on Canadian professor muster up McLuhans mantra, the mean(a) is the message saying The new technologiesradically substitute the entire way people use their five senses, the way they defend to things, and therefore, their entire lives and the entire society. It doesnt matter what the content of a mediocre like t.v. is 20 hours a day of sadistic cowboys caving in peoples odontiasis or Pablo Casals droning away on his cello. How is it that violence and the arts atomic number 18 effective in the same manner? Wouldnt the content be the most important factor in analyzing a television political platform? To understand Marshall McLuhans theories the reader must not be concerned with the symbolic content of what is being said or the nonfunctional interpretation of the actual show but rather, look deeper into the whole al-Qaida of the medium itself. McLuhan was pr unitary to thinking up clever analogies and plays on speech and describing the content of a medium was no diametrical. He described it as the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the guard dog of the mind. We argon the content of our media because the way we live life is largely a function of the way we process information. That information is presented and made available by way of a certain medium. In turn, each medium delivers a new message and a new form of human being, whose qualities be suited to it. The same words spoken face to face, printed on paper, or presented on television provide three different messages simply because of the different senses used to perceive it. McLuhan thought primary channels of communication channelise the way we look at the world around us. The dominant medium of any age governs people and reconnects modes of relationships with the world based on which centripetal motor apparatus is being activated. Dominant epochs spring from the ph 1tic alphabet, printing press, and the teleg raph, which were turning points in society because they changed the way people thought some themselves. To understand how and why people are affected by television, one must first become familiar with McLuhans idea of the electronic age. With the advent of television, the power of the printed word is decreased significantly. Books become made-for-t.v. movies and newspapers come vivacious with twenty-four hour a day headlines. Marshall McLuh... ...ert themselves into the story. Perhaps this is one piece of an elaborate mosaic of cultural activity that works toward a unified ideological end, whether intentional or not. With cameras and televisions enhancing our eyes, satellite dishes increasing the aesthesia of our ears, and computers and the Internet augmenting the power of our brains, the human body has finally become in full extended through communication technology. In these respects, McLuhan was on to something. Unfortunately, one could not overlook McLuhans often abandonmen t of the linearity and order that he claimed were the legacy of print technology. His truths were enigmatic and seldom woven into a general system at times he implied that chosen words are irrelevant while other times he declared the signification of the symbols were a matter of degree. His leaps of faith were a major hindrance to pickings him seriously. Near the end, he was accused of selling out by Stuart Hall, baby buster media theorist. But, as Kenneth Boulding in McLuhan Hot and Cold stated, It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head. Maybe we should give Marshal McLuhan another swing.