An Intellectual Thug & His Media Ideas
What do the 1960s, pop culture, and the phrase “the medium is the message” have in common? The answer: Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan. In mass communication theory, he too is associated with the “interpretive or alternative paradigm” (Rosenberry & Vicker, 2017).
McLuhan’s technological determinism is founded on the belief that “as communication technology and methods have changed over the course of human history, social organization has changed accordingly” (Rosenberry & Vicker, 2017). Essentially, his central idea was that mediums influence eras.
Three strengths of McLuhan’s ideas are:
The media are the extensions of the man: “By this he meant that, as a tool for communication, the media, like other tools, extend human capacities” (Rosenberry & Vicker, 2017). “In a similar way, media extend the senses by creating an ability to see and hear things at a distance and to experience them at times other than when they were created” (Rosenberry & Vicker, 2017). For McLuhan, “this “extension” of the senses changes the way people relate to their environment and to each other, altering the social structure in the process” (Rosenberry & Vicker, 2017).
The medium is the message: Through one of his well-known sayings, he wished to communicate that “what really matters is not whether or how people are changed by the content of the messages they receive … but rather how society is changed by the dominant way in which messages are communicated” (Rosenberry & Vicker, 2017).
Global village: What did this mean for McLuhan? “That a new worldwide social order could emerge as the electronic media linked up the world” (Rosenberry & Vicker, 2017).
The notion of a global village is within McLuhan’s useful ideas. I truly appreciate his interpretation of electronic media and that “technology allowed people to see and hear things from around the world as easily as those nearby” (Rosenberry & Vicker, 2017). Write a response and tell me what you think about “the global village!”
By contrast, three limitations of McLuhan’s ideas are:
The connection between the tribal paradigm and the electronic era. I don’t love that McLuhan links a time before printing with the “world’s first live global broadcast” (Rosenberry & Vicker, 2017). To me, it’s not coherent.
I’m also not a fan of this association — “communication in this electronic era also uses multiple senses … which gives it something in common with the tribal paradigm” (Rosenberry & Vicker, 2017). I don’t understand the relationship McLuhan saw between the “old” and the “new.”
Something about “the only way for someone to experience a message [before printing] was as it happened … and the experiences had to happen in the order in which a person lived his life” (Rosenberry & Vicker, 2017) doesn’t add up. The thought is too rigid. I believe people could have experienced messages even if they were “out of order.”
Additionally, some of McLuhan’s ideas may be misleading too. Among them is his opinion that “the effect on the individual and the social system came from the way the message was mediated, not from the content” (Rosenberry & Vicker, 2017). I disagree, as in both academic and professional settings, as well as in my personal life, I’ve seen how content impacts messaging. Do you agree with his view or my argument?
“McLuhan faced stinging criticism from fellow academics, not only for his radical ideas but also because he took his views about media into the popular arena, and became a celebrity of sorts by giving interviews and appearing on entertainment programs … As many of the concepts he predicted came to pass, his ideas earned more respect” (Rosenberry & Vicker, 2017).
