1. For a long time, we have treated media as a thing. As a result, we do not understand it in its fullness. We only see it as a means of exploitation. Look at the criticisms about social media and smart phones. They are treated as objects for criticism and disgust. What is missing is the realization that these forms of media are environments that we live in. The experience has real effects that cannot be objectified. People are changed. Society is changed by the creation of these digital environments. This change goes beyond the material confines of the objects that constitute media. It represents a reversal of historic proportions.
2. In many respects, the reversal we are witnessing is the throwing over of Enlightenment rationalism for something whole and embodied. The reductive nature of objectifying every aspect of human existence ends up turning us into objects as well. However, as I am seeing in my interactions with people, they are rejecting the the cold, hardness of language as a thing. Instead, they are looking for something more, something whole. The best illustration that I have of this is music. The score is the medium of thought. The performance is the medium of living. I've discovered this as I joined the choir at my church. This Sunday we are singing a Mendelsohn cantata. It is so hard to move from the words and notes on the page to the wholeness of the performance. It is transformative. It has helped me see the interplay of the two mediums that Marshall and you describe.
Iain McGilchrist has addressed this in his description of the asymmetical hemispheric relationship between the left and right brain. The right brain of intuition and experience sees a world that is whole. The left brain sees a world as a collection of things, objects. The Enlightenment process objectifies things. Everything is a thing. As a result, we are detached from the experience of the thing. The reversal that I see here is the growing importance of experience as a source of knowledge. The medium of human experience is the medium of life. Your grandfather and father gave us the metaphors for seeing this. Thank you for bringing this to us in a form that we can access and make sense of.
Thanks for this very enjoyable post. One of the key points I think is this: "Marshall McLuhan tended to speak of media in two ways: as instruments or artefacts (things), and as environments."
And along with that another key point: McLuhan pointed out that media environments are always invisible.
Indeed, he often referred to the saying: "We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't a fish."
Our tendency to see media as instruments or tools prevents us from recognizing their pervasive (and invasive) environmental effects.
You convey this idea well when you write: "we’re just preoccupied with what the new medium can do for us rather than what it will do to us."
And of course, Marshall wrote about the numbing effects of these environments in his Understanding Media chapter entitled: "The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis" (pp. 63-70 in the Gingko edition).
In his 1984 book, "Technology and the Canadian Mind," Arthur Kroker writes:
"McLuhan's project was to break the spell cast upon the human mind by electronic technologies --- radio, television, computers, video games --- which operate in the language of seduction and power...He was therapist to a population mesmerized, and thus, paralyzed, by the charisma of technology."
What I think we need at this point is a tetrad-type discussion about what the digital environment is doing. We are now onto full AI; are there any scenes of reversal? The environment is definitely overheated. But how hot can it get? We seem to be headed for superheating with full virtual.
Perhaps the following observation is, genuinely, such a scene of reversal. When I read "AI" in your comment, I had the cliché experience- "whenever I hear someone say ‘AI’ anymore I just want to throw up" lol. This observation was inspired by Eric's alcohol metaphor mentioned in the newsletter above.
When it was new to me, I used the term ‘AI’ at my convenience. Now that it’s inconvenient, “just the thought of another drink makes me sick”.
I find the proposal of a “tetrad-type discussion” inspiring. But, in need of a more immediate solution, I think I’ll start mentally backronyming it to “Artificial Integration”. It's a first step toward the ecological process of describing its function accurately, i.e., at a (mechanics) level that is relevant outside of our immediate culture.
Technology enhances the user, obsolesces (his) society. Reversal has always been difficult to grasp. The automobile enhanced to its maximum limit 'retrieves' bicycles and pedestrian paths, while the new technology embeds itself into these old forms. Question: Does the Global Village mean we will all be living in grass huts? (Economic question). The answer might be: Yes, but we will have a GPS to tell us where the Lion is. Milos Forman (film director) wrote a letter to the people of Czechoslovakia, after the fall of Communism. You need to ask yourselves, he said, do you want to live in a jungle (capitalism and libertarian principles), or in a zoo, (socialism and a safety net). The zoo is warm and safe, and you have plenty to eat, but the jungle offers freedom, and the danger you might be eaten. I think the process of reversal removes that dichotomy. You can have both, and the lion (environment) hasn't fundamentally changed. The question is what happens next?
I humbly think I did Marshall McLuhan justice in my MA (2002) and touched upon it again in my PhD (2011) as I could see no other means to tackle my questions without understanding media. The only reasonable explanation for any teacher, educator, or researcher, especially those in the arts, literature, journalism, and especially in the social sciences, to skip over, dismiss, or joke about the medium is that (1) they have not studied McLuhan’s works in any depth and (2) they have not made the invisible visible for themselves. Is it perhaps willful ignorance or simply because they have not been curious enough to study much further back in time to Descartes (or even Plato) and asked themselves the question « what is a medium? » Whether an idea, or thought, or extension of humans as defined and understood by Spinoza or Kant, surely such matters would have been more important ? McLuhan stands on the shoulders of giants and I tip my hat off to him for bringing such profound thinking into the late 20th Century!
Two thoughts.
1. For a long time, we have treated media as a thing. As a result, we do not understand it in its fullness. We only see it as a means of exploitation. Look at the criticisms about social media and smart phones. They are treated as objects for criticism and disgust. What is missing is the realization that these forms of media are environments that we live in. The experience has real effects that cannot be objectified. People are changed. Society is changed by the creation of these digital environments. This change goes beyond the material confines of the objects that constitute media. It represents a reversal of historic proportions.
2. In many respects, the reversal we are witnessing is the throwing over of Enlightenment rationalism for something whole and embodied. The reductive nature of objectifying every aspect of human existence ends up turning us into objects as well. However, as I am seeing in my interactions with people, they are rejecting the the cold, hardness of language as a thing. Instead, they are looking for something more, something whole. The best illustration that I have of this is music. The score is the medium of thought. The performance is the medium of living. I've discovered this as I joined the choir at my church. This Sunday we are singing a Mendelsohn cantata. It is so hard to move from the words and notes on the page to the wholeness of the performance. It is transformative. It has helped me see the interplay of the two mediums that Marshall and you describe.
Iain McGilchrist has addressed this in his description of the asymmetical hemispheric relationship between the left and right brain. The right brain of intuition and experience sees a world that is whole. The left brain sees a world as a collection of things, objects. The Enlightenment process objectifies things. Everything is a thing. As a result, we are detached from the experience of the thing. The reversal that I see here is the growing importance of experience as a source of knowledge. The medium of human experience is the medium of life. Your grandfather and father gave us the metaphors for seeing this. Thank you for bringing this to us in a form that we can access and make sense of.
Thanks for this very enjoyable post. One of the key points I think is this: "Marshall McLuhan tended to speak of media in two ways: as instruments or artefacts (things), and as environments."
And along with that another key point: McLuhan pointed out that media environments are always invisible.
Indeed, he often referred to the saying: "We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't a fish."
Our tendency to see media as instruments or tools prevents us from recognizing their pervasive (and invasive) environmental effects.
You convey this idea well when you write: "we’re just preoccupied with what the new medium can do for us rather than what it will do to us."
And of course, Marshall wrote about the numbing effects of these environments in his Understanding Media chapter entitled: "The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis" (pp. 63-70 in the Gingko edition).
In his 1984 book, "Technology and the Canadian Mind," Arthur Kroker writes:
"McLuhan's project was to break the spell cast upon the human mind by electronic technologies --- radio, television, computers, video games --- which operate in the language of seduction and power...He was therapist to a population mesmerized, and thus, paralyzed, by the charisma of technology."
What I think we need at this point is a tetrad-type discussion about what the digital environment is doing. We are now onto full AI; are there any scenes of reversal? The environment is definitely overheated. But how hot can it get? We seem to be headed for superheating with full virtual.
Perhaps the following observation is, genuinely, such a scene of reversal. When I read "AI" in your comment, I had the cliché experience- "whenever I hear someone say ‘AI’ anymore I just want to throw up" lol. This observation was inspired by Eric's alcohol metaphor mentioned in the newsletter above.
When it was new to me, I used the term ‘AI’ at my convenience. Now that it’s inconvenient, “just the thought of another drink makes me sick”.
I find the proposal of a “tetrad-type discussion” inspiring. But, in need of a more immediate solution, I think I’ll start mentally backronyming it to “Artificial Integration”. It's a first step toward the ecological process of describing its function accurately, i.e., at a (mechanics) level that is relevant outside of our immediate culture.
Technology enhances the user, obsolesces (his) society. Reversal has always been difficult to grasp. The automobile enhanced to its maximum limit 'retrieves' bicycles and pedestrian paths, while the new technology embeds itself into these old forms. Question: Does the Global Village mean we will all be living in grass huts? (Economic question). The answer might be: Yes, but we will have a GPS to tell us where the Lion is. Milos Forman (film director) wrote a letter to the people of Czechoslovakia, after the fall of Communism. You need to ask yourselves, he said, do you want to live in a jungle (capitalism and libertarian principles), or in a zoo, (socialism and a safety net). The zoo is warm and safe, and you have plenty to eat, but the jungle offers freedom, and the danger you might be eaten. I think the process of reversal removes that dichotomy. You can have both, and the lion (environment) hasn't fundamentally changed. The question is what happens next?
I humbly think I did Marshall McLuhan justice in my MA (2002) and touched upon it again in my PhD (2011) as I could see no other means to tackle my questions without understanding media. The only reasonable explanation for any teacher, educator, or researcher, especially those in the arts, literature, journalism, and especially in the social sciences, to skip over, dismiss, or joke about the medium is that (1) they have not studied McLuhan’s works in any depth and (2) they have not made the invisible visible for themselves. Is it perhaps willful ignorance or simply because they have not been curious enough to study much further back in time to Descartes (or even Plato) and asked themselves the question « what is a medium? » Whether an idea, or thought, or extension of humans as defined and understood by Spinoza or Kant, surely such matters would have been more important ? McLuhan stands on the shoulders of giants and I tip my hat off to him for bringing such profound thinking into the late 20th Century!