Marshall McLuhan was a visionary that didn’t provide absolute clarity about what “using media” did to our human condition. But he pointed us in a very appropriate direction when he said we need to try to understand how the extensions we use affect us.
It’s probably true that no one really understands “Understanding Media” because we are still inside the process of coming to terms with our extensions, and we have more all the time to deal with. It’s an ongoing challenge, and while aspects of VR are already in widespread use, the coming availability at the mass level of VR hardware will again send us to whatever sources we can find to explain what it’s doing to us, when we do it.
In that light, here’s yet another attempt to explain McLuhan, by David Bobbit of Wesleyan College.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Teaching-McLuhan-Understanding-Understanding-Media-Enculturation.pdf”]