As has been noted, Marshall McLuhan worked on developing curricula for HS students to enable “understanding media”. At that time, the big media transformation ongoing was that of from print and radio to TV. He noted that teachers born before the transition were in a difficult place when it came to understanding what was going on with their students, and for figuring out the appropriate teaching MO now that “things had changed” so dramatically.
Personally, I was in the group of children that were the first to be exposed to TV as a notable part of our young lives, although this took place at home and not in schools. IMO, there’s a noticeable difference in the world view, and susceptibility to the counterculture POV, when comparing the kids in the baby boom born starting around 1947-48 to those born earlier. TV began to penetrate homes in mass numbers in the early 50s, and those years of either being exposed to TV, or not exposed, made a huge difference in formative experiences.
Which is what McLuhan was trying to alert us to. Media is the message, and media matters greatly to a whole aggregation of perceptual practices and modes.
And, needless to say, here we are today, with a similar comprehensive transformation in media from the original centralized broadcasting of TV by a few sources…all the way to ubiquitous and immersive mobile internet and cloud connectivity to new forms of perception. We see that the new forms are containers for the old media of “video”, and that they also create everyone as a source or creator of media.
And we want to know how this is affecting the generation born into this new place, and how it affects the educational and learning needs that our society/ civilization hopes to provide.
But this awareness is very hard to come by. We can see the generation growing up with this “new place” is different, but can we understand how and why and the “what” for that difference? Not so fast says McLuhan, whose ideas have yet to really be incorporated into our educational theories, and which remain elusive and hard to grasp.
Why is it so hard?
Yes, there’s the problem of self reflexivity where it’s nearly impossible to be both aware of our world, and at the same time be aware of the perceptive and mental processes that are creating our experience of that world.
But there’s also the problem that the world isn’t really just a one thing at a time place…McLuhan would suggest that’s merely one of the illusions of the print media, where we “read” our world one letter at a time. So we tend to be at a near complete loss to describe media that apprehends the world in a holistic way. Yet we experience it all the time.
Where in the world to begin, and how do we form a successfully “opened up” but still “literate” POV?
McLuhan says a lot of things, but the way he says them is grounded in a “totality all at once” perspective, and so we don’t get a clear rational outline, we get a poetic allusive sensibility. IOW, we get a “feel” for what’s going on, and it can be revelatory, and lead to other additional connections and insights, and themes to explore…but still remains somewhat out of focus, and hard to pin down.
Reading McLuhan isn’t to really get McLuhan, who is more of an aural stream of consciousness entity, where one topic gets connected to another in a circular and spiral string that doesn’t have a discernible pattern; it just “happens”.
Yet for all that, paying attention to McLuhan’s ideas does begin to open vistas for our understanding of media, and creates vague but useful ways of “getting up to speed” on how media is affecting us, how differences in media affect us, how we can adapt and move forward based on some insights as to how media affect us.
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Perhaps an analogy might be how we can see certain things in the environment, if we avoid using our point and focus eye system, and instead try to be sort of unfocused and “wide open”…trying to take in the whole of our “eyesight” including the peripheral portions. Magician’s illusions often depend on our habit of NOT doing that. But sometimes using an eyes wide open approach, we can perceive things we otherwise couldn’t. It’s that sort of approach to McLuhan’s “sayings”…that can unlock his awareness of media effects on us.
Or something like that. Pre literary man living in a jungle, would need to be able to point and focus their eyes at times, narrowing their focus somewhat. (not long enough to need glasses though). But much of the time, they had to be able to sense their environment as a whole, to survive, and thrive, in a rich sensory input environment.
Perhaps we can make progress understanding today’s media determined transformations, and thus gain awareness of how to arrange education and learning actions for today’s generation(s) through study of McLuhan. But getting all the way “down” to his core insights from which all is then revealed…is quite a challenge.