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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