THEORIES OF TECHNOLOGY AS EXTENSION OF HUMAN FACULTIES by Brey.P (2000)

Teaching McLuhan: Understanding Understanding Media

David Bobbitt, Wesleyan College

Understanding media. By Ms Rachel Payne

Marshall McLuhan Speaks. CENTENNIAL 201

Finnegans Web. This HTML version and other electronic versions of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Ulysses are made available via the World Wide Web, FTP and Gopher through the courtesy of Trent University. Both texts are available in HTML and WP 5.1, with most of the graphic and typographic effects included, and in ASCII text without these features.
Tim Szeliga

Technology as a Form of Language: The Folklore of Electronic Man, by Eduardo Marisca. Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Peru.

Comprender a Marshall McLuhan, Eduardo Marisca

McLuhan Walking Tour

McLuhan Walking Tour

Marshall McLuhan speaks. Centennial 2011.

Tetrads: The Four Laws of Media

Tetrads:
The Four Laws of Media

The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool. By Gary Wolf, 1996

The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool. By Gary Wolf, 1996.

TOM WOLFE What if he's right What . . .if. . .he . . .is . . . right W-h-a-t i-f h-e i-s r-i-g-h-t

TOM WOLFE

What if he's right What . . .if. . .he . . .is . . . right
From The New Life Out There by Tom Wolfe (c) 1965 The New York Herald Tribune

Marshall Mcluhan speaks

Marshall Mcluhan speaks.CENTENNIAL 2011.
This is a compilation of video clips of McLuhan
http://www2.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/

The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man, by Marshall Mcluhan

The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man, by Marshall Mcluhan, 1962

Mcluhan & Wikileaks

McLuhan Could Have Predicted Wikileaks, by Gerald Trites

Privacy, wikileaks, McLuhan and the future of communication

Marshall McLuhan with regard to WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks selon McLuhan, Par Luc Chartrand

Marshall McLuhan's 'Global Village', by Benjamin Symes

Mcluhan in Space: A Cultural Geography, By Richard Cavell, 2002

Mcluhan in Space: A Cultural Geography, By Richard Cavell, 2002

The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan

The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Magazine (March 1969 ©)

Some parts of the interview

PLAYBOY: What do you mean by "acoustic space"?

_. MCLUHAN: I mean space that has no center and no margin, unlike strictly visual space, which is an extension and intensification of the eye. Acoustic space is organic and integral, perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses; whereas "rational" or pictorial space is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich resonance of the tribal echoland.

Our own Western time-space concepts derive from the environment created by the discovery of phonetic writing, as does our entire concept of Western civilization. The man of the tribal world led a complex, kaleidoscopic life precisely because the ear, unlike the eye, cannot be focused and is synaesthetic rather than analytical and linear. Speech is an utterance, or more precisely, an outering, of all our senses at once; the auditory field is simultaneous, the visual successive.

The models of life of nonliterate people were implicit, simultaneous and discontinuous, and also far richer than those of literate man. By their dependence on the spoken word for information, people were drawn together into a tribal mesh; and since the spoken word is more emotionally laden than the written--conveying by intonation such rich emotions as anger, joy, sorrow, fear--tribal man was more spontaneous and passionately volatile. Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine and unchallenged, whereas literate or visual man creates an environment that is strongly fragmented, individualistic, explicit, logical, specialized and detached.

(...)

PLAYBOY: But literate societies existed in the ancient world long before the phonetic alphabet. Why weren't they detribalized?

MCLUHAN: The phonetic alphabet did not change or extend man so drastically just because it enabled him to read; as you point out, tribal culture had already coexisted with other written languages for thousands of years.

But the phonetic alphabet was radically different from the older and richer hieroglyphic or ideogrammic cultures. The writings of Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan and Chinese cultures were an extension of the senses in that they gave pictorial expression to reality, and they demanded many signs to cover the wide range of data in their societies--unlike phonetic writing, which uses semantically meaningless letters to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds and is able, with only a handful of letters, to encompass all meanings and all languages.

This achievement demanded the separation of both sights and sounds from their semantic and dramatic meanings in order to render visible the actual sound of speech, thus placing a barrier between men and objects and creating a dualism between sight and sound.

It divorced the visual function from the interplay with the other senses and thus led to the rejection from consciousness of vital areas of our sensory experience and to the resultant atrophy of the unconscious. The balance of the sensorium--or Gestalt interplay of all the senses--and the psychic and social harmony it engendered was disrupted, and the visual function was overdeveloped. This was true of no other writing system.

(...)

._PLAYBOY: Why do you feel that Gutenberg also laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution?

._MCLUHAN: The two go hand in hand. Printing, remember, was the first mechanization of a complex handicraft; by creating an analytic sequence of step-by-step processes, it became the blue-print of all mechanization to follow.

The most important quality of print is its repeatability; it is a visual statement that can be reproduced indefinitely, and repeatability is the root of the mechanical principle that has transformed the world since Gutenberg.

Typography, by producing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, also created Henry Ford, the first assembly line and the first mass production. Movable type was archetype and prototype for all subsequent industrial development. Without phonetic literacy and the printing press, modern industrialism would be impossible. It is necessary to recognize literacy as typographic technology, shaping not only production and marketing procedures but all other areas of life, from education to city planning


._ PLAYBOY: You've discussed that constellation in general terms, but what precisely are the electric media that you contend have supplanted the old mechanical technology?


._MCLUHAN: The electric media are the telegraph, radio, films, telephone, computer and television, all of which have not only extended a single sense or function as the old mechanical media did--i.e., the wheel as an extension of the foot, clothing as an extension of the skin, the phonetic alphabet as an extension of the eye--but have enhanced and externalized our entire central nervous systems, thus transforming all aspects of our social and psychic existence.

The use of the electronic media constitutes a break boundary between fragmented Gutenberg man and integral man, just as phonetic literacy was a break boundary between oral-tribal man and visual man.

In fact, today we can look back at 3000 years of differing degrees of visualization, atomization and mechanization and at last recognize the mechanical age as an interlude between two great organic eras of culture.

The age of print, which held sway from approximately 1500 to 1900, had its obituary tapped out by the telegraph, the first of the new electric media, and further obsequies were registered by the perception of "curved space" and non-Euclidean mathematics in the early years of the century, which revived tribal man's discontinuous time-space concepts--and which even Spengler dimly perceived as the death knell of Western literate values.

The development of telephone, radio, film, television and the computer have driven further nails into the coffin. Today, television is the most significant of the electric media because it permeates nearly every home in the country, extending the central nervous system of every viewer as it works over and molds the entire sensorium with the ultimate message. It is television that is primarily responsible for ending the visual supremacy that characterized all mechanical technology, although each of the other electric media have played contributing roles.

._PLAYBOY: A good deal of the perplexity surrounding your theories is related to this postulation of hot and cool media. Could you give us a brief definition of each?

._MCLUHAN: Basically, a hot medium excludes and a cool medium includes; hot media are low in participation, or completion, by the audience and cool media are high in participation.

A hot medium is one that extends a single sense with high definition. High definition means a complete filling in of data by the medium without intense audience participation. A photograph, for example, is high definition or hot; whereas a cartoon is low definition or cool, because the rough outline drawing provides very little visual data and requires the viewer to fill in or complete the image himself.

The telephone, which gives the ear relatively little data, is thus cool, as is speech; both demand considerable filling in by the listener. On the other hand, radio is a hot medium because it sharply and intensely provides great amounts of high-definition auditory information that leaves little or nothing to be filled in by the audience. A lecture, by the same token, is hot, but a seminar is cool; a book is hot, but a conversation or bull session is cool.

In a cool medium, the audience is an active constituent of the viewing or listening experience. A girl wearing open-mesh silk stockings or glasses is inherently cool and sensual because the eye acts as a surrogate hand in filling in the low-definition image thus engendered. Which is why boys make passes at girls who wear glasses. In any case, the overwhelming majority of our technologies and entertainments since the introduction of print technology have been hot, fragmented and exclusive, but in the age of television we see a return to cool values and the inclusive in-depth involvement and participation they engender.

This is, of course, just one more reason why the medium is the message, rather than the content; it is the participatory nature of the TV experience itself that is important, rather than the content of the particular TV image that is being invisibly and indelibly inscribed on our skins.

Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan, by Bob Logan

Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan

Spatial Metaphor in the Work of Marshall McLuhan, by Gordon Gow

Spatial Metaphor in the Work of Marshall McLuhan, by Gordon Gow.
Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 26, No 4 (2001)

"While the laws of media themselves had been formulated over the course of McLuhan's career, the tetrad represents an innovation in his thought, distinct from the laws upon which it is formed. The tetrad is innovative insofar as it was a means of binding together the laws of media to establish a set of figure/ground ratios - ratios that McLuhan claimed characterized all metaphorical operations and the relations among the laws of media. Having made this connection between metaphor and the laws of media through the tetrad, McLuhan (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988) could then articulate what he believed to be a new approach to culture and technology studies"

"In contrast to the static, container-like qualities of visual space, acoustic space comes across as an organic concept, dynamic and contingent in character. With acoustic space there is no empty void to be filled, but rather a space created in the mutual relations between elements as they develop over time. McLuhan explained the idea in a letter to literary critic Harold Rosenberg in 1965 by using an analogy: "Central heating structures the thermal space of a room visually. That is, a centrally heated room has a thermal space that is uniform, discontinuous, and connected. That is visuality as such" (Molinaro, McLuhan, & Toye, 1987, p. 318). McLuhan's analogy suggests that acoustic space might be like that generated by a portable electric space heater. These devices are useful to eliminate drafts largely because they can be used to structure thermal space acoustically: creating [their] own dimensions moment by moment ... [without] fixed boundaries ...[and] indifferent to background. In other words, the portable electric space heater changes the spatial qualities of a room by virtue of its location in the room"

"On this point, McLuhan disputed Innis' claim to the contrary (McLuhan, 1964a) and proclaimed electricity as the force behind a new era of post-Euclidean acoustic space, making obsolete the visual space created by mechanical typographic technology. McLuhan emphasized the effects of the electric revolution in the arts, science, and philosophy of the early twentieth century as this new acoustic mode of awareness seeped into Western culture. For instance, he suggested that the appearance of Cubism was a clear indication of the return of acoustic sensibilities. He tells us in Laws of Media that "Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space." Why is this so? Because, he says, "paralleling [the atonal music of Shoenberg], Cubist painting abandons single fixed points of view along with Euclidean geometry and perspective" (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988, p. 55"

"McLuhan also considered modern data networks as a form of acoustic space, observing that modern telecommunications demonstrate acoustic properties: they have the intrinsic nature of a sphere, simultaneously resonating and structured around multiple and interconnected centres, relatively indifferent to background (McLuhan & Powers, 1981; McLuhan & Powers, 1989, p. 140).