Sunday, 21 July 2019

“All words, in every language, are metaphors.”

Marshall McLuhan | His Impact

McLuhan’s name and fame could be gloriously summed up to rest on just a few of his highly impactful, note-worthy coinages of sorts.


Well, he is credited with having coined the famed expression, ‘the medium is the message’, the term ‘global village!,’ the term, ‘surfing’, etc. Famously dubbed the ‘media guru’, McLuhan is also said to have predicted the arrival of the World Wide Web even three decades before it could possibly become a reality.

On his influences, McLuhan has acknowledged many a time to the influence of the Prince of Paradox – Chesterton, on his life and his works as well!


On the prophetic feel there is, to his words, McLuhan proved a phenomenal seer, even as early as the 1960s, when he envisioned a new social organization that would be entirely based on ‘electronic interdependence’, which according to him would replace the print culture, and help in the creation of a global village!

Reading through the impactful pages of The Gutenberg Galaxy proves something akin to reading through the prophecies of Nostradamus! You feel the trigger especially when you see many of the things that he’s predicted having taken shape in such quick succession just over a matter of five decades.
Some excerpts from the book for y’all –

We can now live, not just amphibiously in divided and distinguished worlds, but pluralistically in many worlds and cultures simultaneously. We are no more committed to one culture—to a single ratio among the human senses—any more than to one book or to one language or to one technology.

Our need today is, culturally, the same as the scientist's who seeks to become aware of the bias of the instruments of research in order to correct that bias.

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside.

Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition.

Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism will also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But," someone says, ‘we didn't know it would happen.’

Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality.

The print reader is subjected to a black and white flicker that is regular and even. Print presents arrested moments of mental posture. This alternating flicker is also the very mode of projection of subjective doubt and peripheral groping.

Soviet concern with media results is natural to any oral society where interdependence is the result of instant interplay of cause and effect in the total structure. Such is the character of a village, or, since electric media, such is also the character of global village. And it is the advertising and PR community that is most aware of this basic new dimension of global interdependence.

Like the Soviet Union, they are concerned about access to the media and about results. They have no concern whatever about self-expression and would be shocked by any attempt to take over, say, a public advertisement for oil or coke as a vehicle of private opinion or personal feeling.

How true his words prove! To sum it up, it could be said in his own aphoristic dictum, ‘First we build the tools, then they build us.’

To be continued…

images: quotefancydotcom, amazondotca, statusminddotcom

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