We are challenged today to learn about this new place we live in, during the ongoing communications revolution. PSA will publish here a series of posts that look for “big ideas” to help us understand who we are, and who we might become. We begin with an attempt to “find our way in” to the world of communication as Marshall McLuhan saw it, and told us about. As has been noted, he explicated his ideas through a horizontal perspective, a sort of stream of consciousness approach, where he rarely shows us a hierarchically structured table of contents.
In the 1960s, McLuhan made frequent appearances on national TV and late night shows, as well as making guest lectures in Universities and for groups and associations. He left many mystified by his “way” of expressing his ideas. He gave us many insights into how media and the extensions of man form and change us. But people expected some sort of overall context for his ideas, to sort of “get our bearings” in his idea flow, which pretty much never arrived.
It’s more or less impossible to “summarize” his ideas, because they are designed to do the opposite, to trigger more horizontal connections. He was a James Joyce scholar among other things, and of course Joyce was the master of the allusive prose phrase or word, where multiple meanings are packaged and the reader is challenged to open the package and find all the meanings within, and to pursue the many connections suggested without. McLuhan’s books are a similar exercise in meaning expanding outwards and sideways, which in itself is a sort of hallmark of our world today, and of learning today.
Bottom line is despite hopes for a step by step and progressively numbered journey outlining McLuhan’s ideas, the following “A New Place” posts, are not that, but rather, a series of attempts to come at “the problem” from a new starting point over and over again. Maybe a bit like “Groundhog Day”. and other “time confused” narratives.
Which has a way of finding connections that one might never have noticed. Which is a type of learning called connectivism*, and oddly and allusively also includes connectionism**…. that is very apropos today, but that’s a subject unto itself. Perhaps as an homage to McLuhan, we’ll take our journey selecting a post randomly, from what is approximately 30 numbered posts.
Does that work? I’ll spin the wheel, and publish one every few days.
McLuhan is not the only POV we have to understand our present world. He was very prescient, and much of what he talks about sounds as if he was alive today talking about our world.. Yet as we enter the age of VR and AR and real-time melding with AI and data farms and algorithms not “in our brain”, McLuhan is sort of like Moses, if you will, He gets us to the promised land, where we begin to understand our own formative perceptive processes as a “thing”, that unlocks awareness of so much of what we are. And now it’s up to us, to find and use thinkers of the present, as a bridge across the river of ignorance, into the promised land of understanding our new place.
*Connectivism is a theory of learning in a digital age that emphasizes the role of social and cultural context in how and where learning occurs. Learning does not simply happen within an individual, but within and across the networks.
**Connectionism is an artificial intelligence approach to cognition in which multiple connections between nodes (equivalent to brain cells) form a massive interactive network in which many processes take place simultaneously. Certain processes in this network, operating in parallel, are grouped together in hierarchies that bring about results such as thought or action. Also called parallel distributed processing.