Marshall McLuhan made innumerable attempts to help us understand “media”, spinning metaphors out at high rates through his last decades.
A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas.
Yet, it seems, he was always chasing an awareness that was stubbornly inexplicable, and that most of his readers never quite grasped. Why was that? And are we any more prepared to understand the latest media disruptions in our world today?
And if services such as education and healthcare are in transit to some new realities, are there any tools or methods that are available to help guide us to the new worlds?
A few thoughts:
• Media refers to much more than what we typically think of. It’s not just TV or print journalism, or the advent of written language, and phonetic language, and printing, and telecommunications.
• “Media” might well refer to various underlying foundational and primary means by which our civilizations work, and are structured.
• For example, planes, trains, and automobiles are forms of media. They change, in important ways, our relationships to time and space, and to how we live, and to who we are. They “mediate” our reality, if you will.
• Understandings of what such changes in relationship to physical space and time mean for our civilization, and for our sense of self, seem to remain in the aforementioned McLuhan Media Fog. Which is where we seem to lose our way with metaphors that don’t quite do the job.
• This is partly because new media tends to not replace older media, but instead to put it into a new context, which we then stumble to grasp. The old media is somehow different in the new context, plus we have the new media to understand too. Self-reflexive confusion ensues.
• Our recent experiments with broadly based working from home, learning from home, and healthcare from home, are “incomplete” because the technology is not mature enough to carry the loads placed on it.
• However we can see the early outlines of what it means to our way of life, that physical location is now a subset of universal cloud location, and ”real time” is now a subset of “flexible time”.
• What we can’t see are the full implications of this.
• No doubt there will be intended, as well as unintended consequences as these changes move deeper and deeper into our civilization.
• McLuhan as noted, provides us with an unlimited stockpile of metaphors to help our awareness.
• We will need a lot more of them to avoid falling into Poe’s Maelstrom.
McLuhan_on_Poes_Maelstrom