M. McLuhan brings Jericho’s Mediatic Walls Down
More Than Ever, The Medium is the M[a]ssage
Spin-Snitching Our Yellow Vests
Yes, you have to be a greenhorn not to see what is happening with the Internet and that Marshall McLuhan actually saw it all even before because the Internet is nothing but the continuation and amplification of television.
Television is not a good democratic medium because it implies, imposes even and requires full all-sensorial agreement of each member of the audience, and each group of simultaneous audience members, to “like” or “not like” what they see from the very first second, and minute (singular) for the cautious ones. It has to please your eyesight with color, forms, and general setting. It has to please your hearing with sexy voices and very radiophonic voices that must feel in full agreement with what the audience sees. It has to please a more difficult to define feeling set of senses that react to the general body movements and body language of the participants strutting on the screen, along with the words associated to these movements. Smiling is the norm and not smiling is not, which makes the latter a great like-not-like criterion. Remember John F. Kennedy all smile and friendly-looking versus Richard M. Nixon all sternness and forbidding seriousness. Who won? Kennedy of course.
That’s what Marshall McLuhan calls “all-sensorial agreement.” The Internet that gives the users, in fact all individual isolated users (who believe they are a community but are not) the illusion that is for them an impression that they are the fully independent and free absolute masters of what they do, feel and say on the Internet, on the social networks that have been flourishing on this medium. “Like” this, and “like” that, and “like” this other thing, and “like” that extra item. You do not have to do your good action of the day every day. You have to like anything and anyone every minute of the day every day.
That turns the users into puppets manipulated by puppet-masters that are only interested in the money this manipulation can generate as for advertising, profit and nothing else but profit. And the higher the monkey climbs in the social network, the more you can see its red ***, that it likes showing.
That was funny as long as these puppet-masters were only dealing with love affairs, friendships, sex too, and other mundane issues like gender. But they found out they can use this influence politically to have the people they like elected or appointed to the jobs that may turn positive for their own interests. And some politicians learned that kind of propaganda from the best advertisers and managed to win a referendum or to be elected with a minority of the popular vote or be appointed by 180,000 voters in a country of more than 67 million people (0.26% of the population). Even the Chinese are doing better than the Brits.
We have entered the era of all-sensorial liking, craving, dependency or plain and simple addiction. At any moment in your life, as soon as your smartphone or computer is on in front of your eyes and under your nose, your fingers, in fact only one finger, the pointer, are ready and burning hot to press the button that says “LIKE” in fiery tones.
I do not say we must burn our computers and smartphones. I do not say we must not have connections with social media. I say we have to reconquer the independent and autonomous power we have lost under this manipulating putsch or coup d’état, переворо́т (perevorót), in Russian to follow the US Congressional latest fad, from Internet providers and social network platforms. It is urgent, and Marshall McLuhan had seen it all. Here below is what I consider can represent this dependence, or dependency, or addiction, or craving. The Internet is absolute sex-appeal and nothing else, as long as we short-circuit our minds, but imagine also what we can do with it when we set our minds back in action. And multiply all that with Artificial Intelligence, provided it remains a tool and not a surrogate mind or even a pro tempore expedient ego-double.
The following chart is Figure 4 because you need four nails to crucify a body and the Internet has become a daily crucifixion for many, a night and day cross to carry to and on our Golgotha.
Quick approach, run after the links, the documents are further on in this document and even some extras, if you have some patience.
MARSHALL McLUHAN
UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, THE EXTENSIONS OF MAN
ROUTLEDGE, LONDON — 1964
Monday, October 14, 2013–9,400 words, 18 pages
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
https://tpti.academia.edu/JacquesCoulardeau
INITIAL STUDY / STARTING POINT REVIEW(S)
MARSHALL McLUHAN, A PROPHET
THE APOCALYPSE OR SPIRITUAL SALVATION?
FOR A GLOBAL APPROACH OF MENTAL POWER AND CONCEPTUALIZATION
Wednesday, January 21, 2015–2,700 words, 5 pages
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
https://tpti.academia.edu/JacquesCoulardeau
POST SCRIPTUM
https://www.academia.edu/10283790/MARSHALL_McLUHAN_A_PROPHET_THE_APOCALYPSE_OR_SPIRITUAL_SALVATION
AVENTURE À SUIVRE / AN ADVENTURE TO FOLLOW
RESEARCH UNDER CONSTRUCTION WITH IVAN EVE
This is the first leg of a longer study that is in the process of being written. After the review and its illustration, I added the 2006 review I posted on Amazon.co.uk, and its comments, for the sake of perspective.
This review is the prolongation of a long study that dealt with, among other topics but essentially, Ray Kurzweil’s “popular-science”-fiction wrapped up as MIT expertise. Marshall McLuhan . . .
[Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), a Canadian philosopher in communication theory and he became one of the cornerstones media theory with practical applications in the advertising and television industries. McLuhan coined phrases like “the medium is the message” and the “global village” and for his prediction of the Internet medium he could not know in his lifetime though the invention of the transportation of data from a computer to another via a telephone line was invented in Fall 1969 between Stanford, California’s military laboratory and Oakland, California’s US Armed Forces Headquarters for the Pacific (and at the time the Vietnam war). I would refer you to the Official Site of the Estate of Marshall McLuhan at http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/ if you want to know more about him. Accessed October 8, 2013.]
… is essential here because he deals with the media and not the machines, or rather with all inventions, mechanical or not, starting with oral language, considered as media all of them extending man’s body, body parts, central nervous system and even “consciousness” as he calls the mind. We will concentrate on his 1964 book Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man.
We have to get some detail on his theory and, to remain in our own logic, consider it in a phylogenic perspective though Marshall McLuhan does not envisage any other human phase before the invention of writing systems (even his short chapter on “The Spoken Word” is entirely oriented towards writing systems).
Hence, he starts considering humanity around 5,000 years ago in a sequential presentation of various inventions one after another in chronological order. What’s more, he centers his interest in what he calls the “electric age” that starts with the “discovery” of electricity and the invention of means to produce, store and transport it.
His electric age is based on the stage of universal (though even today it is still not fully achieved) networked distribution (the electrical grid) of this electricity characterized as continuous and instantaneous, meaning we can use it at any time and in any place we want at the commanding tip of one finger pressing a button on or off.
In other words, his discourse is centered on the last one hundred years when he wrote this essential book in the 1960s and today for us on the last 150 years.
I will consider his approach in both the phylogenic and psychogenetic perspective.
The first thing we have to do to penetrate his meaning is to list the various inventions he considers in the book and try to find out what extensions of man’s body or body parts he refers them to. We will present this list in the form of a table. He considers 26 inventions in 26 separate chapters. We have to keep in mind this conclusion of chapter 21:
“The owners of media always endeavor to give the public what it wants, because they sense that their power is in the medium and not in the message or the program” [Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man, Routledge, London, 1964, p. 216)
MARSHALL McLUHAN, A PROPHET
THE APOCALYPSE OR SPIRITUAL SALVATION?
FOR A GLOBAL APPROACH OF MENTAL POWER AND CONCEPTUALIZATION
https://www.academia.edu/10283790/MARSHALL_McLUHAN_A_PROPHET_THE_APOCALYPSE_OR_SPIRITUAL_SALVATION
ABSTRACT
McLuhan tells us man is inventing because he has that power in himself and he must develop these inventions because he is in utter need to do it in order to survive, and then later to develop. Some say this is going to bring the Singularity of intelligent machines as the next phase of human development. On the one hand, some tell us the machines will destroy humanity. On the other hand, some tell us humans will have to accept to become mechanical hybrids with nanobots everywhere in us to keep some control. Is there a third and middle way, a third hand like in a poker game?
More Info: We will know in twenty years if new post-intelligent-machine humanity is able to be born and to take over the world just like writing-reading did in about 5,000 years
Publication Date: Jan 21, 2015
Publisher: Editions La Dondaine
Location: Olliergues, France
Research Interests: Apocalypse Theory, Singularity Theory, Marshall McLuhan, Alan Turing, Apocalypse, Singularity, Computational Intelligent, Machine Learning, Robotic, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ray Kurzweil, Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man, Matrix (film by the Wachowski brothers), John David Hawkins, Eric Kripke, Supernatural, and Expansion of man beyond his senses
MY PROPHETIC ARTICLE
Marshall McLuhan in his book Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man deals with the mental power of man as a species by studying the inventions this mental power enabled man to put forward in order to survive in a hostile environment and to transform that environment in the process of surviving. We are not talking about intelligence but of mental power because intelligence is only concerned with the processing power of the brain. Here we are talking of the mental power this brain and its central nervous system have constructed in dealing with the sensations it got through the various senses in contact with the outside world.
That mental power is based on one particular capability the Human species has, along with many other species. I call it conceptualization. The great point here is that the human species, I mean Homo Sapiens, is the only animal species that has been able to develop a full three-tiered articulated language and this ability enabled this Homo Sapiens to respond to the need to communicate by building a full discursive situation that built a full discourse with the means the language Homo Sapiens had developed. The LANGUE of this language contains both a lexicon and a syntax. According to the stage of language-phylogeny reached by a human community the syntax of the LANGUE of this language developed by Homo Sapiens through millennia and even tens of millennia is more or less developed and then the discursive situation provides Homo Sapiens with all the means, syntactic or semantic, necessary to build a full discourse.
But Marshall McLuhan incites us to go a lot further, to go beyond language and consider the operation of conceptualization as the basic inventing process. This process is three-tiered too like the articulated language Homo Sapiens invented or devised.
1- Extension of the physical body
Homo Sapiens devised clothing and footwear of some kind for pure protection of the body and the feet. That is the simplest extension you can think of: the extension of the skin and the extension of the feet.
But to do that Homo Sapiens had to conceptualize this skin and these feet, the cold and the heat the body felt and the hardship and pain the feet may have endured in rough conditions. No animal has done that, and few hominid species did it before. Homo Neanderthals did it, or so we may think, but we would be at a loss to assert that Homo Faber, the Hominid species from which the two Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthals were descending, had achieved that level of conceptualization. It is clear clothing was not invented for any type of prudery or modesty, due to some temptation of a snake or an apple or a fig or whatever other dragon at bay to eat us, but only for protection against cold particularly, or heat and sunshine.
At this level then Homo Sapiens was able to conceptualize what we call a tool, that is to say, an extension of the body that was supposed to enable man to achieve a certain action that he could not achieve without that tool but by using his hands to drive that tool. Animals may be able to invent on occasion and opportunistically some tools, like a stick when a monkey cannot reach something it wants. But they don’t seem to keep the knowledge of such opportunistic inventions and they cannot transmit them to anyone. We must also be careful with some purely instinctive “inventions” of tools by some animals. The building of a beehive by wild bees is purely instinctual and not an invention. The cobweb of a spider is purely instinctual and not an invention. We could find some mathematical or geometrical or architectural patterns and dimensions in such a spider cobweb, that would not prove the spiders have mathematical, architectural or geometrical knowledge, and thus are “intelligent.”
The range of the concept of tool is enormous. But at this first level, the invention is really a way to extend our hand, not to replace it. When the “tool” replaces the bodily part, we are reaching the second level of conceptualization.
2- From extension towards expansion
We have to start with one inner bodily network and its metaphorical use to understand what I mean here. The heart and the blood cardiovascular system is the basis of a common metaphor. What is it about?
We capture the function of that system: to enable the blood to circulate in our body, go out of the heart to bring oxygen to the body and come back to the heart to purify itself in a way and go back out: it can only work by the way if other “systems” are taken into account like the urinary system and the kidneys, the pulmonary system and the lungs. This metaphor is fundamental because we can project it onto something outside our body that has no connections with our body at all, no vital connection. We speak of the heart of a city and then the various arteries or veins going out and leading back in. We speak of the heart of a subject and everything then flows out of it and flows back to it to improve it, expand it, regenerate it, etc. All human thinking is seen as such a blood cardiovascular system. All complex network systems built by man are seen as having such a structure. Without a heart, a network is dead and is only a net, just able to catch fish or butterflies.
When we have understood that metaphorical mental function Homo Sapiens developed from his conceptualizing power, we can shift to the next phase of the inventing power of man. In fact, man is going to start mainly considering his limbs and his central nervous system, beginning with the peripheral ends of it, the limbs and the senses.
Man is going to extend his feet by conceptualizing their walking and running function and inventing something that will be able to replace the feet in realizing the effect of their function of running and walking, which is transporting the body and any burden the body can transport thanks to its feet. The first invention is let’s say the wheel, though I am not sure it was the first one and I may consider the use of a floating object on a river to transport human beings was the first. But it does not matter anyway: man invented a tool, a machine even, that could transport his body or his baggage without him having to walk or run.
From there you can develop the means of transportation and the more you develop them, the more you do not extend the human capability anymore but expand that capability. You can even expand it so much that you can invent machines that will enable you to fly in the air like birds and insects or to swim down under into the water like fish.
But man can conceptualize his eyesight and then invent all kinds of tools to improve his eyesight from simple spectacles to more and more complex “seeing” machines that will enable man to see beyond his real capabilities into the super small, into the distance, into the super vast, from microscopic to cosmic reality. Microscopes, sailor’s telescopes, cosmic ray-finding telescopes and other machines in that line are at stake here. But you can expand that vision by being able to see what is not present with cameras for photography and then film and video, and later to see what is not even close to you in space and in time with television. This is no longer an extension but expansion.
Think of the speaking apparatus and you will have megaphones, microphones, and all kinds of machines to amplify your voice. Then all kinds of instruments to use your breath to produces sounds of all sorts with wind instruments among them. That will lead to musical instruments that will be able to extend your hands in many ways like tam-tams, drums, all string instruments, percussions, etc. But this leads to music which is a mechanical extension that leads to the expansion of your sound-producing mouth that can even use your hands to help. But this music is also the extension of your hearing sense. It’s because you can discriminate sounds that you can enjoy natural sounds that could sound like the “music” that does not exist yet. Then you conceptualize these sounds and after conceptualizing your abilities to produce sounds, you can conceptualize rhythm and melody and harmony and that will produce music. You can see the expansion of this simple extension.
And from there we will have to conceptualize sound waves we will be able to devise machines that will really expand your audition: you will be able to hear what is not present with recordings, or something that is not next to you with the telephone, the radio, etc.
You can even start mixing the extensions with those 3D gloves, headphones, goggles, and other equipment that enable you to get into virtual reality, but for that, you need machines of the third level. But with such a glove your hand is doing a lot more than just apprehending or grasping or touching and feeling.
And a mouse, or any other pointing device, is such an extension of the hand that goes a lot farther than what the hand can actually grasp or touch.
3- Expanding the central nervous system
Alan Turing extended our central nervous system by inventing the machine that could extend our intelligence: the very concept of intelligent machines was born.
After him and with, among others, IBM, those intelligent machines have multiplied. They are called computers and they are actually externalizing man’s central nervous system and building a machine aiming at replacing that system, duplicating that system, from the Central Processing Unit to the most peripheral sensors of all sorts: microphones, cameras, various sensors in the mouse, the touchpad, the keyboard, the touch screen, etc. It is supposed to reproduce our own “intelligence”. In fact, it is only a model of it, which means the computer with its own means is achieving the same ends. We can then discuss the ends it can mimic or achieve calculations, operations, etc. Is that machine intelligent? The debate is open, and I will come to that debate in a short while.
In September-October 1969 in California between Stanford University and Oakland US Military Headquarters of the Vietnam war (or the Pacific Ocean which was the same at the time) for the first time two computers situated at a distance of a few tens of miles were able to exchange data via a telephone line with the help of the HTML protocol invented some time before by French Telecoms research laboratories in Lannion, France. The Internet was born for military reasons and with Pentagon money. We know what it has become.
We have thus created a global network of billions of computers constantly connected and exchanging data of all types. We have been able to do that because we endowed these machines with a language, a mechanical language for sure but a language, nevertheless. That language also has a syntax.
The first articulation is only based on two digits, or bits. The second articulation is nothing but the articulation of bytes that are composed of as many bits as can be envisaged and processed with the power of the computer you have (generally though multiples of four or eight bits). It is easy to see the metaphor of this network: it is a society built like human society. This is a metaphor and it would be a mistake to consider it is a real human or even humanoid society. Just the same way as a computer is not a real human being, the Internet network is not a real human society.
But that leads us to a phenomenal apocalyptic conclusion, and maybe a salvaging hypothesis if we just give the machine a human form and turn them into robots.
4- Concluding apocalypse
On one side the absolute apocalypse of the end of humanity by the rebellion of machines who take over the world, consider the human species as obsolete and ineffective, hence useless if not dangerous. I will not name the prophet of that vision. Then that machine world will destroy the human species. It is both Matrix and Terminator in one scenario. But humanity will survive in a way or another because man is not only a rebellious species but a resisting species. As I said to the journalist who interviewed me in Dunn, North Caroline in 1970 about Vietnam having taught me how to resist against any kind of hostile aggression, I should say that Arnold Schwarzenegger, Andy and Lana Wachowski have it right when they believe the human species will resist that machine dictatorship and will win in the end.
The second scenario is just as apocalyptic. To resist that takeover, use the new technology of nanobots and transform yourself into a human-machine with billions of nanobots in your body that will just use the flesh and blood as some kind of vegetative medium. Once again no name for that apocalypse preached by Babylon anyway since everyone is supposed to become willing and submissive subjects of the “whore of Babylon,” of the mechanical permanent rape of being invaded by the nanobots communicating all together all over the world and all managed by one command center, Babylon precisely. But in that line, man will always be an adventurous crazy being and they will come together into bands of fighters and will struggle with such supernatural forces in order to bring the angels out of men and defeat the devils and the monsters that lurk in man. Supernatural and Eric Kripke have it right. Man will never accept to become the slaves of the whore of Babylon.
Then all these marvelous apocalyptic for me absolutely false messiahs are forgetting one thing. And here Marshall McLuhan should be read a little bit more closely. At every stage of his development, Homo Sapiens not only invented tools and machines, but also some new abilities and competencies that multiplied his intelligence by transforming it. The main invention along that line is the invention of the visual representation of man’s inner vision. They painted their caves some 45,000 years ago and not only in Europe, but the paintings are not haphazardly displayed on the rock face or chosen. They are set along some patterns and those patterns, even if we cannot identify them or interpret them, are the conceptualization of some mental vision that cannot be represented with plain pictures but only with the disposition of these pictures in space, in a two-dimensional space. The rock face is the medium and the paintings are the alphabet, the lexicon of the syntax that the disposition of the paintings represents.
The next step was the invention of writing which was the visible representation of the vocal flow of language and that writing brought along reading and reading like writing were a recent invention (some 5,000 years ago maybe a little bit more, one or two thousand years more). And it took humanity all that time, all these 5,000 years or a little bit more, to spread these two abilities to the mass of people and that is not yet finished. But this mass transformation, this mass education has changed humanity as a whole, man as a species.
Some say that intelligent machines are going to be the end of humanity. And what about these intelligent machines becoming the tools of a new phase of human development and intelligence? For McLuhan, it is obvious and undoubtedly inevitable. We will know in twenty years if new post-intelligent-machine humanity is able to be born and to take over the world just like writing-reading did in about 5,000 years and just like the computer-internet did in about 70 years. We have 20 years to prove we can step over the challenge of intelligent machines communicating together in the vast network of universal Internet interconnection. Marshall McLuhan tells us it is possible.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Marshall McLuhan and big data
https://www.academia.edu/17113447/Marshall_McLuhan_and_big_data
Jacques Coulardeau & Ivan Eve
Abstract:
Marshall McLuhan did not know the Internet and our connected society and economy, yet he knew a lot about the effect of modern media on the audience, the public, the users.
He knew everything about the “polarization of the economies of mass” that are speculated upon today. He also knew that modern media were “destructuring our psyche and mind” as is so often alluded to or even pointed out as a crucial change in our relation to the world.
We have to go back to the basics of the relation of the subject-user to the medium of total mass communication that the Internet has become and wonder how this subject-user can produce added value for himself and society in communication and collaboration with other subjects-users and at the same time in competition with them.
What can any subject-user offer on this new total medium that can bring added value to humanity and be exchanged for what other subjects-users can bring too?
The major question remains: What is the value — hence the price — of intellectual property, be it industrial, artistic, philosophical or even religious? Are politics intellectual property or just plain juggling with commonplace platitudes?
Research Interests: Internet Studies, Mass Communication, Internet & Society, The Internet, Mass media, Mass Communication and New Media, Language and Communication, Mediumship, Language, Communication and Politics, Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man, Strategic Communication and Contentious Politics — Media and Politics — Media and Foreign Policy Analysis — Social Media — Social and Political Movements — Media and Democracy — Political/ International Communication -, Communicational Alienation, and Extension of Man’s Mind
Discussion (Ended on November 11, 2015)
https://www.academia.edu/s/6a773bf83b
These papers and these studies are in full swing in our present research and practice. Concerning our research on maritime container shipping in the Indian Ocean and the hub and spoke model we have to consider security can only be reached by using satellite entirely digitalized surveillance and regulating. It is obvious competition is absurd and cooperation is the only rule and yet innovation has to come from competing ideas, means and actions.
How can the Internet and total mass virtual communication both build innovation on competition and progress for all on collaboration? How can we not oppose vertical and transversal means but knit together vertical hierarchies and transversal cooperation? Can humanity, engulfed in that big data communication, invent “collaborative competition” or “competitive collaboration” and at the same time fully recognize and valuate intellectual property without alienating the intellectual innovator or innovators whose inventions are their intellectual property?
And that is even more so in the field of non-industrial intellectual property. How can big data communication preserve and even enhance the value of this non-industrial intellectual property: arts and literature, music and architecture, philosophy and religion, all sciences, hard ones, and humanities?
McLuhan was a genius, and the future has overtaken him.
MARSHALL McLUHAN — UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, THE EXTENSIONS OF MAN — ROUTLEDGE, LONDON — 1964 — Monday, October 14, 2013, Academia.edu
Published without the pictures as a review on AMAZON.xxx
A turning point in media research
October 14, 2013
This book is essential if we want to understand what is happening in today’s world in the field of media and communication. McLuhan considers the vast history of human communication media from language invented by Homo Sapiens, i.e. us, some at least 300,000 years ago in Africa, to alphabetical writing invented by Homo Sapiens some 5,000 years ago all over the world in a great number of civilizations along with non-alphabetical writing systems. Then he jumps to printing that turns the printed book into a consumer commodity which will enable the development of modern science and the mechanical industry of the first industrial revolution. The next stage is identified by him as the electric age when communication became the transfer of information via some material device that transferred the information in a virtual form: electric impulses (telegraph and telephone); waves of all types (radio, television, and now Internet with the development of computers, smartphones and tablets). The book stops before the Internet (the first “internet” connection was successful only in September 1969 between Stanford and Oakland, both in California.
Let me consider some of the 26 means of communication he studies, targeting in my review those that have to do with what he calls the extensions of the central nervous system.
The spoken word: Extension of all senses but centered on the ear seen as the capturing sense of the sacred universe and the sacred. Plus, connection to the mind, the intellect seen as one way only by McLuhan; the intellect precedes and is non-verbal, which is of course at least debatable.
Language: Extension of intelligence, the intellect within McLuhan’s limited vision of language/mind. Note he never uses the concept “mind”.
The written word: The eye is dominant over the ear. Can the alphabet also be an extension of our teeth as McLuhan suggests with his reference to Cadmus’ sowing dragon’s teeth in the myth of the Phoenician who brought the alphabet to Greece?
Roads: Extension of cities, the extension of housing, extension of the skin. In the form of streets, they are the central nervous system of cities, which makes roads the extension of this urban central nervous system which is the extension of man’s central nervous system within the wall or skin of the city and beyond it.
Housing: Extension of our bodily heat-control mechanisms — a collective skin or garment. Extended to the city, and the city wall becoming an extension of our skin.
Money: He starts with the psychoanalytical identification of money as odorless, dehydrated filth, hence filthy lucre to be attached to our anal eroticism and character. Then comes a long series of identification of money with the total involvement of man in his work, in association with writing and clocks.
Clocks: Visual extension of the experience of duration and social organization, seen as the desacralizing of everything sacred, the capture of the profane in association with the alphabet. He does not explain how Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, and many other religions or spiritual faiths are based on sacred books or canonical writings that most of the time were codified in their canonical forms several centuries after the actual preaching took place. The written word was used to reinforce the oral word.
The Print: Extension of man’s eye creating a uniform, continuous and ‘rational’ space containing all objects, thus all-inclusive.
The printed word: The extension of the eye. It brought to human society continuity, uniformity, and repeatability; the basis of calculus and of marketing (industrial production, entertainment, and science); uniformly priced commodity; portability and accessibility.
The photograph: Automated extension of our vision, of the eye. A statement without syntax. The photograph is a museum without walls.
Press: An extension of the eye and man’s analytical and synthetic competence. Mosaic visual form that requires a high level of critical participation and group-awareness. The mosaic is the mode of the corporate or collective image and commands deep participation. Different from columns that represent points of view, a mosaic brings together unrelated scraps in a field unified by a dateline.
Telegraph: Electricity has externalized the central nervous system itself, including the brain. Electric light is space without walls. It is the extension of the nervous system and the intellect as linguistic messages following the road or railroad systems. It creates the mosaic press with no opinions and requiring the personal implication of the reader. It developed direct communication between one person and another. It started recreating the village at the level of the world. The telegraph translated writing into electrically produced sound.
The telephone: Extension of the sense of hearing but also of all mental faculties, except the visual dimension; Today we have smartphones and webcams. The old telephone was the beginning of the use of personae, extensions, meaning change and variation, of a real personality. Complex participation, total attention, of our senses and faculties through the only auditory and vocal apparatuses. The telephone is speech without walls.
The phonograph: An extension and amplification of the voice. Stereo is sound in depth . . . in inter-relation, not in isolation. Depth means insight, not point of view; and insight is a kind of mental involvement in the process that makes the content of the item seem quite secondary. Tape recorder and LP made a full musical spectrum available to all. The phonograph is a music hall without walls.
Movies: He nearly only considers the movie, the silent film. The wedding of the old mechanical technology and the new electric world. Comparison with a writer but he only sees the writer or filmmaker making the reader or viewer enter the imaginary world they have produced. He never considers the viewer in front of the film technique, not the technology but the storytelling. So de does not consider the ellipse (a form that is difficult in print but is common in the cinema and TV), flashbacks and flash-forwards that are also common in the cinema and have become common today in HD TV: what was not easy in Bonanza’s time, has become commonplace in Lost’s time. He misses the voyeuristic approaches of film and TV — they are not the same — because he is absolutely centered and centering on the sole film-director. He does not even capture the film-editor. “Film is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a collective art form with different individuals directing [My emphasis] color, lighting, sound, acting, speaking.” (292) This is an extremely reduced vision of film making. Let’s keep in mind the cinema is minimally two-fold viewer’s voyeurism applied to minimally four-fold director-cum-cameraman-cum-editor’s voyeurism. The movies are classroom without walls, in which the student is also the teacher, in which the student is the gold digger, the gold nugget, and the mine, all in one and freely projected into a universe of information, emotions, impressions, etc. that he/she freely explores in his/her own haphazard and/or systematic ways. To reduce the electric revolution in the field of the media to wire services (telegraph, telephone, telex, etc.), radio and TV, is at least VERY reductive: he does not consider the cinema as such, only movies. He hardly considers recorded products: a tremendous field of development from vinyl records, tapes of all types, to CDs and DVDs and of course virtual recordings that are not carried by any real material medium though conveyed, transported and circulated by the virtual material medium of the Internet. Most of that was of course still to come in McLuhan’s days.
Radio: He starts with a reference to Paul Lazarsfeld (“The monopolistic effects of radio . . . totalitarian countries. . . The monopolistic effects have probably less social importance than is generally assumed,” 297–98) and a comment: “Professor Lazarsfeld’s helpless unawareness of the nature and effects of radio is not a personal defect, but a universally shared ineptitude.” (298) Radio, its tribal magic. The tribal drum of radio extended man’s central nervous system to create depth involvement for everybody. He shifts radio from an entertainment medium (that he hardly considers) to a kind of nervous information system. Radio affects most people intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. . . a private experience. The subliminal depths of radio. . . the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. . . a single echo chamber. . . Extension of the central nervous system that is matched only by human speech itself. . . First massive experience of electronic implosion. . . The ear is hyperesthetic, compared to the neutral eye. The ear is intolerant, closed, and exclusive, whereas the eye is open, neutral, and associative. . . The commercial entertainment strategy automatically ensures maximum speed and force of impact for any medium. . . Education will become recognized as civil defense against media fallout. . . Radio certainly contracts the world to a village size but it hasn’t the effect of homogenizing the village quarters. . . Radio is not only a mighty awakener of archaic memories, forces, and animosities but a decentralizing, pluralistic force, as is really the case with all-electric power and media. . . The radio is a classroom without walls.
Television: The tactile mosaic mesh of the TV image compels so much active participation on the part of the viewer that he develops a nostalgia for pre-consumer ways and days. That was definitely before 1968, and even so in the USA that was definitely an idealized vision before 1968: television became the first communicational manipulator with Kennedy’s campaign, just the same way the radio became the first communicational manipulator in its days with Roosevelt’s campaigns and Fireside Chats. The extension of the sense of touch or sense interplay that even more intimately involves the entire sensorium. Television is an all-sensorial medium because the viewer can take no distance in the reception of the message. Television is a classroom without walls. It is a cool medium that requires in-depth involvement. It is producer-oriented. The viewer is the screen. The TV image is low in data ceaselessly forming contours of things limned by the scanting finger.
The TV image requires at each instant for us to “close” the spaces in the mesh by convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile because tactility is the interplay of the senses rather than the isolated contact of skin and object. Synesthesia, unified sense, and imaginative life. The homogenization brought by printing was blown into pieces by the arrival of the electric age: all technologies based on the use of electricity. Electric age technologies negate space and time, bring an instantaneous and universal flow of news and information, and reversal to aural communication. TV images require the involvement and participation of the viewer because of their low definition. They are centered on the process more than the product, on the reactions of actors to actions with close-up shots of faces and facial expressions. The electric age had so far caused the implosion and contraction of reality inter-personally and inter-nationally leading to the fragmentation of society and the world. The TV image furthered this implosion by developing it intra-personally and intra-sensuously bringing to life all the senses simultaneously inside the viewer.
The TV image is a mosaic of dots bombarding our sensorial screen. This mosaic is NOT uniform, continuous and repetitive, BUT it is discontinuous, skew, non-lineal and tactual (total synesthesia, all senses implied and activated).
ELECTRONIC MAN IN ELECTRIC AGE
“Man, the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his Paleolithic ancestors” (283)
But this nomad walks, runs, stampedes even in an infinite and timeless virtual space at the tips of his own fingers on a keyboard that works linguistically and iconically, or at the tip of both his hand and his fingers on a mouse, touchpad or tactile screen in kinesthetic contact with menus and icons, the food of these menus being information and various processors that can deal with this information to produce new knowledge that can be then brought to the common table of our knowledge society.
“Radio was released from . . . centralist network pressures by TV. TV then took up the burden of centralism, from which it may be released by Telstar. . .” (306)
He obviously missed the future. The Internet-based on computers, smartphones, tablets, etc. is turning the whole world into a global village for sure BUT with the help of personae a person can become a member of global networks that will not cross, if so, the person wants. That person can be a member of social network A as Mr. Wilson, of social network B as Mrs. Adams, of social network C as the teenager Bill or Sarah, of social network D as the famous Brad Pitt, etc., and at the same time he can be himself on a gay network, whether he is gay or not does not matter: on an academic network, whether he is an academic or not is not that important since he can invent an independent academic profile; on a music (which music?) network, as a musician, a music lover, a composer or whatever he is, craves to become or simply whatever he likes as for music; on a political network of his choice and he does not matter he agrees or not with the ideas of this network. Only the networks on which he has the same identity may eventually cross, but not necessarily, and that identity might only be a persona. The practice of pen names, pseudonyms, avatars, etc. makes it at times difficult to know who is who.
In other words, McLuhan had the right idea, but he did not know how it was going to be done. As for what he says about the political use of the radio by people like Hitler, he missed an essential point: what changed the whole 1930s was not only the radio but the invention and development of the microphone and of amplification with loudspeakers in the 1920s without which there is no radio. That enabled mass meetings and all political forces used this new possibility, though those who used it best got the upper hand: the Nazis and the fascists, the Stalinists and the communists, at least for a while. In the USA Roosevelt was the great beneficiary of that new technology with his “Fireside Chats.”
But McLuhan missed another point: in those days collective listening to the radio was essential, up to a TV that took over that function in the family. But radios in bars, cafés, restaurants, and other public places were an essential tool for music and it made jazz, for one example, into popular music, and not only entertainment. Radio is still a media that often identifies itself by the music they broadcast. And that has become global with Internet radios.
He also missed the complete failure of radio as a pedagogical tool in schools, just like TV later on. But that has changed or is in the process of changing with the Internet which meets with great success within schools, around schools, outside schools, and on this virtual medium, radios and TV stations have become extremely important for education. I am thinking of UCTV (University of California TV) and that is only one example.
In fact, he has a point but did not know yet: radio, TV, and Internet are perfect for education but personal, individualized, self-education, for a school/university project or not. Didactic virtual products are more and more commercially profitable. Amazon is buying businesses in that field to diversity its offer because there is a demand. The main point he could not know is that such pedagogical tools are effective and attractive if there is a follow-up possibility by some “teacher” for the students. But one thing is absolutely sure today: the computer necessarily with the Internet and all its potential is here to stay and develop within the class, around the class, and outside the class. Teaching at any level without that tool is just unimaginable. The village has become even smaller today, but he was wrong education is not civil defense against the media fallout. Education has become a direct and intense field of media application. Only reactionary dull minds can today dream of education without a computer-cum-Internet.
Meditate the following public release concerning that very point.
SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Oct. 10, 2013– Amazon.com, Inc. today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire TenMarks, a company that is helping teachers and parents deliver innovative mathematics curriculum to students across the country.
“Amazon and TenMarks share the same passion for student learning. TenMarks’s award-winning math programs have been used by tens of thousands of schools and Amazon engages with millions of students around the world through our Kindle ecosystem,” said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “Together, Amazon and TenMarks intend to develop rich educational content and applications, across multiple platforms, that we think teachers, parents, and students will love.”
“Amazon and TenMarks share a commitment to developing easy-to-implement solutions for schools and families,” said Rohit Agarwal, TenMarks co-founder. “We currently offer teachers, students, and parents, access to effective resources to foster the vision of the Common Core curriculum in math, including scalable professional development and tools for connecting with parents. We back this belief with our business model, where teachers can register and access our product for free while being able to opt-in for premium features if needed. Going forward, we believe Amazon and TenMarks will create significant innovations in the K-12 arena.”
“I’ve used TenMarks for the past two years at Grand View with fourth and fifth grade students to help a diverse group of students achieve in math and take ownership of their own learning,” said Sujata Bhatt, founder of the Incubator School and a National Board Certified teacher who spent 11 years at Grand View Boulevard Elementary in Los Angeles Unified School District. “As we launch the Incubator School this year, we focus on technology that truly activates learning and self-starting. TenMarks’s products are designed to enable both students and teachers to be in the driver’s seat by seeing where they’re successful and where they need to revisit. TenMarks is an important part of our math plan this year.”
TenMarks offers personalized online math instruction and practice in a clear, manageable format for K-12 students complete with helpful hints, video lessons, and real-time results. TenMarks’s products are designed to help students be individually motivated, engaged and nurtured.
We can see that McLuhan is right about Professor Paul Lazarsfeld’s misunderstanding of the radio, but he is not right when he does not see that TV and what he calls “Telstar” and will be the Internet twenty years later are NOT a danger, tribal or not, but an essential tool for the development of education and individual responsibility and initiative in that field with a multiplication of networked references and allegiances for everyone who wants, and how can anyone refuse that new existence that makes all “archaic memories, forces and animosities” obsolete. All electronic media bring to the world the first chance it has to manage its problems without the use of warfare. But there is no diplomacy if the differences between the participants are not recognized and accepted. Electronic media are thus not doomed to homogenize the world into violence (radio) or anesthesia (television) but are making the world finally tolerant and not nonchalant, and the road is still long ahead of us to come close to a full realization of this objective. Marshall McLuhan did not live long enough to know that the Cold War was to end.
“The TV child cannot see ahead because he wants involvement and he cannot accept a fragmentary and merely visualized goal or destiny in learning or in life.” (335)
At this moment we know the book was written before the next stage of the electric age, the Internet today reaching the 4G smartphone and tablet stage. Space and time have not been destroyed and TV images today are closer and closer to cinema images in definition. The DVD revolution and the Internet are enabling all films to be watched on a TV screen and plasma screens can reach High Definition while Bluray discs go the same way, on screens that are bigger and bigger with always better sound coming close to the cinema under the pompous name of Home Cinema. We will have to question the future and see if the sense of passing time, hence past and future have really disappeared from the minds of new generations. Have we returned to a simple feeling of duration? But why are young people always checking the time on their smartphones?
But the main shortcoming is very clear here. He does not wonder what human needs and mental development brought this electric age and within this electric age these particular inventions. They could not be avoided. The discovery and mastery of electricity brought a completely new energy that could be produced, stored, transported and distributed artificially and not recuperated from the universe, though it all started like that with Benjamin Franklin. Actually this electricity can be produced with all kinds of “fuel” via turbines that can be activated by water (hydraulic power), or the wind (windmills) or steam (produced from heat), or via some chemical electric or nuclear reaction that produces heat to generate steam and electricity with a turbine, or photovoltaic electricity.
McLuhan thus does not answer the phylogenic question about what produced these inventions, where this human inventiveness comes from, what the meaning of this need to invent is, and many other questions of that sort. That is why the resistance of teachers and schools against the radio, television, then computers and calculators, and now the Internet and smartphones or tablets, is vain: these inventions satisfy a deep need in humanity as a whole and each human individual in particular. If we want to educate the new generations we have to wonder how we can make them literate as users of these inventions with the objective of training them into collecting knowledge that is useful for them, as fast as possible and as sustainably (which include durability) as possible, knowledge that would make them responsible members of the knowledge society and economy that are emerging from our present.
Just as we taught people how to read and reckon we have today to teach people how to navigate on the Internet, search for, collect and process knowledge in order to share it with others with the purpose of producing added-value that could bring some wealth to our society endowed with fully recognized and guaranteed diversity.
“For caste and class are techniques of social slow-down that tend to create the stasis of tribal societies. Today we appear to be poised between two ages — one of detribalization and one of retribalization.” (344)
He seems to reduce these social-historical categories that caste and class are to a single reading that becomes mechanical. Caste was and is also a way to promote a certain social productivity and welfare just the same way slavery was also that in the Roman empire or in Greece, even if it was barbaric in many ways, but Julius Caesar’s main advisor was a slave. The point is these castes, like slavery, at one point in history, get in contradiction with the economic and historical development of human society. Then it becomes a slow-down obstacle. Class is in a way the same kind of social-historical element that enabled society to slowly evolve and progress after slavery, under feudalism and then industrialism. In fact, these classes have gotten today in contradiction with the economic and historical development of society and it will be replaced by a different hierarchy that will reflect and enable human and social progress, till that new social hierarchy becomes obsolete and blocking and has to be replaced by another. There cannot be any social, human, cultural progress if there is not a dynamic that comes from such a hierarchy. Marshall McLuhan here represents the way progressive intellectuals thought during the Cold War, when mythical ends of history were still pregnant, like the Marxist vision of a classless society, the Christian vision of a messianic Jerusalem, and still to come, though more sophisticated because after the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama’s vision of the end of history in the finally achieved liberation of all individuals in a society based on the Rule of Law, and of course the Singularity popular-science-fiction of Ray Kurzweil, a sort of robotized messianic Jerusalem.
“Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before, informed as never before, free from fragmentary specialism as never before — but also involved in the total social process as never before, since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly, interrelating every human experience.” (358)
He only misses one element to reach knowledge society and the knowledge economy: the virtuality of this knowledge gathering that has to be both giving and receiving, that has to be an exchange and cooperation, collaboration, sharing. That’s where his approach falters: the future will have to be built on both individualistic knowledge gathering and personal progress on one hand, and collective sharing and cooperation both locally and globally on the other hand, which means the absolute necessity to search for and bring together the widest diversity possible on any issue, in any place and at any time. It is that knowledge society that will enable everyone to progress and history to go on along lines of contradictions and even conflicts that will no longer be at the social or economic level of castes, classes and other categories of that type, but more and more different approaches of different knowledge that will have to be brought together in some kind of collaboration and exchange. Not to speak of possible conflicts within the conquest of space or with other intelligent civilizations that we have not met yet.
To conclude we could say that Marshall McLuhan has to be studied in depth because all other schools that have approached the media, particularly today’s mass media, have only considered the direct effects of the content of the media on the minds of people particularly in the form of political campaigning, and its effectiveness, and propaganda, naturally condemned as anti-democratic.
McLuhan considers the media itself first, not the message, may shape and format our minds and thoughts and he has an important point there.
But we have to consider this field of research from a phylogenic point of view because if we do not understand the phylogeny of communication and today’s mass communication, we cannot in any way have the slightest influence on the psychogenesis of the same in the individual from his/her conception to his/her death. There is a lot to do in that perspective. How can we make our younger generations literate with our virtual mass-communications and how can we make our older generations catch up and alleviate their handicap?
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
AMAZON.xxx
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
FIRST REVIEW
How can intelligence survive or be revived?
October 4, 2001
Marshall McLuhan introduces us to the world of the media through history and how these media have dominated our life for centuries, from the very beginning of humanity. It explains how the invention of the phonetic alphabet has completely linearly structured our western mind, a structuring that was then amplified by the invention of the printing press.
But then he jumps to THE invention that changed all that: electricity, that is still changing all that by making the old principle of linearity obsolete since electricity is founded on the principle of simultaneity. He demonstrates how today controlling the flow of information is the only way to control the world.
This is both illuminating and frightening.
We may wonder if the Internet is not introducing a new principle: the come-back of intelligence, of intelligent analysis of data by the human brain because we finally can bring together and confront several sources and several analytical tools at the same time. The book was written before the Internet. If this is true, then there is hope. But it explains why a society, why so many people resist any new medium: it endangers their fragile equilibrium by expanding one or several of their senses, by disturbing their sense ratios, hence by giving them a feeling of amputation against which they protect themselves by rejecting the novelty.
Only artists and creative minds are able to assume the new medium and even see beyond it and capture its potentialities.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
SECOND REVIEW
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU, after teaching the subject at Université de Perpignan at Mende, France and starting to teach it at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not simple to remain critical at times,
18 May 2006
This book is the Bible of the mediatic electric age, and it has to be read as such, that is to say with a grain of salt from time to time. Marshall McLuhan shows first of all that all inventions, all activities of man are extensions of something in his body: the hand, the arm, the foot, the eye, the nose, the ear, and of course the skin and the central nervous system. He then moves to showing that the mechanical age started with the wheel as the extension of man’s feet and legs, when this wheel was plugged onto some mechanical source of energy, be it natural like stream-water, or be it man-made and artificial like the steam-engine or the internal-combustion-engine.
But this very mechanical revolution produces the next stage since stream-water or steam are used to make a turbine turn, like a wheel, but this time to produce electricity. And we enter the electrical age, a revolution based on the virtualization of this energy that is no longer attached to a particular action or place: it can be used in hundreds of different tasks and everywhere due to its transportation.
This leads to the next revolution: the birth of communication media, hot or cool, but all of them being the message itself. Radio, cinema, TV, camera, sound recorder, etc…, and McLuhan could not know in 1964 the Internet revolution and virtual reality, the virtualization of all human activities. However, he feels and predicts the changes that were to come. Information can be transformed and transported by machines and the possession and use of knowledge become the real working power of a man. It means clearly that social projects are no longer collective but based on individual potential, competence, and activity.
We thus can shift from collective nationalism (the explosion of humanity into opposed and distinct fundamentally irrational though logical-looking groups corresponding to the mechanical revolution) to universal globalization that makes all human beings equal, necessary, useful in the knowledge they possess and can move or use. This vision of globalization has little to do with Marx’s dream of communism and Marshall McLuhan is perfectly aware that this globalization is a process containing — and finding its inner energy from — contradictions, such as the two trends towards detribalization and retribalization.
But Marshall McLuhan is best-known for his approach of radio-cinema-TV. He sees very well the differences between them. Radio, the hot extension of one sense, hearing. Cinema, the hot extension of two senses, hearing and sight. TV, the cool extension of all senses (synesthesia) that requires total and tactile contact. But here he is led astray by his natural optimism. He considers TV leads to participation, which is true, but he does not qualify it properly because he does not see the participation of radio and cinema require.
With TV the individual projects himself into the medium with which he merges in total osmosis. It is purely sensual or sensuous, hence entirely passive mentally. With radio and cinema the projection is that of the show onto the mental black and blank screen of the mind for this mind to compensate all the missing elements (all but sound with radio, quite a lot with cinema, and in both cases the necessary mind as the Buddhist sixth sense to provide all the connections necessary for full understanding).
Here the participation is first of all mental and even intellectual. A hot medium thus mobilizes the mind. A cool media mobilizes the sensual and sensuous senses, if not only sensations. This leads to the unanswered question about the Internet and Virtual Reality. A new synesthetic medium that is hot because it requires the user to take in his own hands all the parameters including his own definition: and sure enough he can assume one chosen persona or several chosen personae, just as much as he may have to pare off or negotiate the persona or personae that the personae he may meet there may project onto him.
That’s the hot medium of today already and tomorrow. The next stage is still pure science-fiction.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Comments
Sort: Oldest first | Newest first
Showing 1–10 of 10 posts in this discussion
Initial post: 14 Feb 2011 23:07:15 GMT
Mr. J. Kelly says:
hmm… one would wonder the next stage, a heightened collective consciousness, for all who choose to be aware of such state, or a state of no state, open yourself as the whole, in to a world if you so choose, and of course the choice is yours, to decide for chaos and confusion, transcendence of all, of our thinking, our fairy tales, our definition. The possibility of a new hot media a guise of a veil as now they keep truth well-hidden deep, down in the cellar, dusting, the doors smile, save us our TV’s, send us into virtual realities, (dust away). as repetition, this negative talk, another hot media to guise to hide the heightened consciousness or whatever may be the second summer of love, a second, o’ to my fantasy(of one) and none, what a waste, ever a collection, a mistaken correction’s relief. there was more but have not the words for my thoughts, and shame, ever explanation(s). heightened consciousness I mean can be substitute for many things, of course there are many theories for the next stage I just use that among many other things that would like to be said. a timid attempt to transcribe a few thoughts not very well to my shame if they are not very well ha. I liked the lines from ‘Information’ to ‘contradictions, such as the two trends towards detribalization and retribalization’ ever explanation I apologize if my words are like manure from a track to be tossed aside the road, for clearing a path.
You replied with a later post
Your post, in reply to an earlier post on 15 Feb 2011 08:25:09 GMT
Jacques COULARDEAU says:
In my mountains, manure is what makes a field rich and our present thoughts are nothing but the manure of tomorrow’s world.
The next stage, the one McLuhan had not thought about, is social networks and that new medium, in fact, a compact merger of all other media, is producing tomorrow’s world for sure. Can you imagine the upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, and some other countries still to come without these social networks?
That’s what McLuhan probably meant when he spoke of the “global village” that did not imply uniformity because a village is an assemblage of all types of people. It takes all types to build a village. Detribalization from the old feudal world and retribalization to the new global world that counts as many tribes as the leopard counts dots as the South Africans would say.
The world of tomorrow is emerging today and the upheavals I was speaking of do not mean a certain type of society is going to emerge automatically: feudalism can resist and produce a new form of exploitation, just like capitalism came out of feudalism.
One thing is sure the time of socialist revolutions is finished.
We have to enter a time of expanding free yet regulated markets, expanding yet sustainable economy and fully free yet responsible communication, even if social network communication is based on personae more than on real people.
You can kiss people on a social network as much as you like it won’t give you herpes.
In reply to your post on 15 Feb 2011 22:51:51 GMT
Mr. J. Kelly says:
I replied to this post many many many many wordsssss, but I clicked post and it all disappeared you can imagine my frustrationnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn and now it is never, and what do I do now, is it retrievable?
You replied with a later post
In reply to your post on 15 Feb 2011 23:02:43 GMT
Mr. J. Kelly says:
oh my profane and obscenities thrown at this contractual mechanistic evil rampant vile-istic catchesticistic machines, what can I suffice my frustration with type of words, yes will words and machine suffice my frustration … at them intentionally what words I had for them… the double bind I came to write of them critically (in slight abuse of them in parts) and now I come to use them as my vice (stupidly, of course) strenuous truth to replenish of a haggard word, ooh. o’ what an unnecessary shame an inconvenience at my interest to reply to your post, I promise you I had a many perhaps debauched words but tooth to let fruit to and of ideas, o what a shame. I apologize for no replacement just a lament, I apologize.
You replied with a later post
Your post, in reply to an earlier post on 16 Feb 2011 08:14:09 GMT
Jacques COULARDEAU says:
That’s the secret of Amazon. Sometimes, for no really visible reason the post is censored. I have experienced two cases. Either there is a word they have banned from their pages and the post is deleted before publication (like the word N****r in the title of Agatha Christie’s novel Ten Little N****rs, translated in American into Ten Little Indians). Or there is a technical problem that did not permit the post to be posted, please start again later. I defy you to find out what that technical problem is: a coffee pause at the wrong moment probably.
Your post, in reply to an earlier post on 16 Feb 2011 08:14:40 GMT
Last edited by you on 16 Feb 2011 08:26:23 GMT
Jacques COULARDEAU says:
A lament builds a Wall of Lamentations and there is only one in the world and it must not be duplicated.
Not to lament too much it is wise to select the whole post before posting and to copy it so that you can paste it later on and it is not lost. But concentrate on the event as a sign of fate, fate telling you, you have to re-write or re-think all over again.
It is like in the crime series on TV when the police officer or the special agent of the FBI makes you repeat the whole story all over again. It is not to pester you nor to save time on his schedule to do less work in his standard hours and maybe get extra hour payment. It is to whittle your discourse down and distillate it to some details in the wording that uncover the truth.
Fate is a big conjurer and manipulator. Think of C.S. Lewis writing the prequel of his Narnia Chronicles in 1955, five years after the “first” volume which is no longer the first in the chronology of the story. It is all a tale of revelation and when it becomes a book then we can expect an apocalypse.
Have a good day and do not grieve too much. Words come, Words go, but Words are fliers.
Jacques
In reply to your post on 16 Feb 2011 22:54:53 GMT
Mr. J. Kelly says:
well, thank you. I will add a quote “…the story of the universe is that information, which I call novelty, is struggling to free itself from habit, which I call entropy… and that this process… is accelerating… It seems as if… the whole cosmos wants to change into information… All points want to become connected… The path of complexity to its goals is through connecting things together… You can imagine that there is an ultimate end-state of that process-it’s the moment when every point in the universe is connected to every other point in the universe.” do you support this I mean more could be said by words by me to transcribe any and all
(I mean regard to the ‘global village’ not that I would wish for although it is certainly happening now, but historically it seems that not without chaos can new ways, changes can happen, you know we as the beginners if so (I mean are) not going to settle easily into it, a virtual reality a social network communication, taking our real our ‘real’ reality away from us I mean they already have to some degree, of phenomenon, natural or deliberate, herding the sheep, herding us toward.. make it shiny, new things we MUST have a fashion a trend, that we have to have… but I mean if used responsibly and sensibly utilize all our tools in our toolbox effectively responsibly sensibly, rummaging around finding lost ones that got buried at the bottom, or forgotten, and utilizing in a good way. creating newer higher ones etc. etc… I may conjecture here but as Gandhi says as his or some of his last words “we are not ready” (and was proven by the separation Pakistan, violence). I would like for truth to confront us wholly we cannot hide from it, it is there it is this choice, if we so choose, I mean we can take a step up or a step down on the stair case, I mean aren’t we trying to solve other than what actually is.. e.g. the fishbowl reality we look at a fishbowl and the curved reflection of the proposition at that moment we are in there is the reality of us standing there observing the fishbowl and all around, and then the curved reflection reality, and this curved reflection is what we are living in now…! I mean we recognize as we are living as other than what we are we are trying to solve all the problems as other than what they are, and is the result only necessary as to where we are now, have been leading for the last 100 years and of course thousands of years, and exampled to chaos (of what I was saying of chaos and entering new paradigms, the ‘global village’ the riots that are happening now in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and more, and more who knows what we don’t know. we need to get back to symbiosis of what we are and more and more. but yes: “We have to enter a time of expanding free yet regulated markets, expanding yet sustainable economy and fully free yet responsible communication, even if social network communication is based on personae more than on real people.” would you say we have to be or are going to be pushed in to this, or forced in a good way, of course. I agree with that would be a responsible and sensible way forward so to say and especially social networking communication, we have to be careful. and obviously there is more to this (I laugh) all other areas, subjects, and domains, this is not just the sole reaper to the diagnosed prism, the eight shades, (an adequate metaphor, barely satisfactory, but will do for that creation as time) a car, for instance, has many parts, an engine, a steering wheel, brakes, a boot, etc. we are just looking at one of the wheels, you know what I mean there was no need for many of these. a new form of communication. Higher. language has created our domain our whirly (airy)extension, our spiral sublimates. we need not this regression, would you say that wholly has been? I mean I mean ever more and explanation, but how I regress but I will write more. McLuhan the messiah trying to make people aware, making the truth to us. to become aware, our choice. and are we the beginners of this new way (to say) our choice to become aware, the light or be ignorant (be weak as choice) and why so many prefer this latter, and I find utterly manically distressing, to say the least, why do we (to steal terms that are only fresh in my memory) prefer S hit from Shinola, so for truth to confront us no holds barred to say and just our choice, I mean would we all not want the truth, the light extension I tire from these words only these save for many many more, and I will write more.
well, I ready on the copy…
Let’s not loot our future’
You replied with a later post
Your post, in reply to an earlier post on 17 Feb 2011 08:55:04 GMT
Jacques COULARDEAU says:
Time is a human invention. Duration is cosmic, hence natural. We can’t even measure the year properly with our time units. We have to correct it every four years and every century.
Space is not better. There is only distance in the cosmos and these distances create some kind of fragile equilibrium between the planets and stars, and when we start measuring distances we run into the problem that as soon as we get on the way to any place duration is cut off from distance and we can travel millions of kilometers in space and age only one week.
History is a human vision imposed onto the cosmos. In nature, there is only change and change and change. These changes are cyclical and the end of something is the beginning of something else. There is no permanence in nature or the cosmos, only impermanence, as the Buddhists would say. It is the human mind, that invented time and space, that also invented history, the memory of the past and the vision of the future, the past itself and the future at the same time. In nature there is no past and no future, there are only cyclical processes that develop in distance and duration.
No one controls that cosmic change and transformation. Human history is only a little piece in this jigsaw puzzle and it only exists because we decided to invent it. We are one particular species cast in distance and duration and our minds decided to conceptualize what other species just enjoy and accept. We are not making history. We pretend we are.
The upheaval in Tunisia or Egypt, no one thought of it before it happened. Why did it happen? Is it the result of the decisions of some opposition leaders who were in exile or in prison? Of course not. It is the result of a myriad of elements (the price of bread for one among thousands of others) that we cannot even control.
The price of wheat is the result of the weather and the greed of some wheat producers and dealers but who can control these things? The weather? No one of course. The greed of some wheat producers and dealers? Ah Ah Ah!!! A Dell computer is produced in China at the Chinese price of 150 dollars and sold by Dell in Europe 600 dollars or 500 euros. Greedy Dell.
We are losing the African market because of that greed. The Chinese are selling these goods there at Chinese price and with a reasonable profit. We are trying to sell the same goods at European prices. In two weeks’ time, I will be teaching in a private institution in the suburbs of Paris. Each student will have a computer on their desks and the Internet, and the computers are Lenovo, the Chinese brand or make that bought IBM PC department some ten years ago. Even in Europe Lenovo is bought at a very competitive price though with a super huge profit margin for the Chinese.
History is not our doing. It is just the precarious balanced result at every single moment of the duration we are soaking in of millions of parameters, most of them out of our control like the activity at the surface of the sun.
What can we do? Meditate on that and follow that cosmic trend. No one is forcing us to do it. The cosmos is taking us along into doing it, like it or not, willy-nilly.
I don’t drive and do not enjoy the “enslaving freedom” of a car: there is no obligation to have a car in many situations. Why use a car from one city to the next when there is a fast train that is going to take us there in three times less time and at a cost that will be, wear and tear included, lower than the car we would otherwise use. And we must not forget that when we drive, we cannot do anything else, not even think, whereas in a fast train we can do myriads of things.
We are the masters of our minds even if we are not the masters of anything else. So, let’s use our minds not against the world but to control as much life in us that we can in the surrounding conditions in which we cannot even dream of not living.
Jacques
In reply to your post on 17 Feb 2011 20:07:39 GMT
Mr. J. Kelly says:
hmm… well, China has put itself more or less into a position of spiritually, philosophically, of course realistically, controlling the economy I mean they have silently taken over the world, as it appears.
they have not made a declaration of war, not sent their army to many nations (what of china and Israel), or cultures, to destroy life that does not obey it i.e. well I’m sure you can think of examples. economically taken over the world, they have power it’s to them and (I’m sure could write more words but you very well already know and more most certainly) to save for words: (Tolstoy) “vengeance is mine and I will repay”
the snake eating its own tail.
yes, if we just pull out of this, what we have created for ourselves, re-connect to Nature, symbiosis of the plants but I mean it is such a mess we have, it is not going to be easy, we have to tread carefully, be aware to make the right choice, it is easy to regress in this spiral or loop, now is a good a time as any to pull out of it but let’s not go flaming out of it, let’s not put our minds before our awareness. snake eating its own tail.
But what you say “We have to enter a time of expanding free yet regulated markets, expanding yet sustainable economy and fully free yet responsible communication” and to your last sentence, eloquent, that is only now, hmm… we do not need to struggle the opposite way of the current or hold on to the bottom of the bed, let go and ride with it.
but of the next stage… Shakespeare… to the next stage…? shows and shows
our reality must get to a distance or a duration, where science is no longer adequate enough, we have surpassed shifts, duration, distances too much for science do you not think, there will come that time soon, when our reality is confronted with more than what science as the leader of reason can deal with, handle or deny. I mean are we not, dividing just about everything that is one, are we not? is philosophy more logical than science in relation to the cosmos, as well as our thinking of our relation to the cosmos? hail to something that we have to enter a nothing else, or something else. but for good/bad, beyond good and evil. forgive my amusements I will o’er write a good word!
You replied with a later post
Your post, in reply to an earlier post on 18 Feb 2011 05:42:30 GMT
Jacques COULARDEAU says:
We are only one little animal species in the cosmos and if the cosmos decides to crush us we will be crushed and we won’t be able to escape.
We have to get rid of the old complex that considers that anyway, the end of the world is close and that we must be afraid of it. If it is close, we will not be able to stop it anyway. So why not accept our fate.
Happen what may, we have to keep control of our minds and clean up the mess with have in our own house and not in the cosmos.
So, I do think both we have to follow the trend the way it comes and at the same time keep our head on our shoulders, both literally and metaphorically. We must never consider beyond what we can grasp. He who embraces too many tasks will not perform any of these properly.
Have a good day
Jacques
THIRD REVIEW
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU, After five years of teaching this approach at Université Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne, France
A turning point in media research
October 14, 2013
This book is essential if we want to understand what is happening in today’s world in the field of media and communication. McLuhan considers the vast history of human communication media from language invented by Homo Sapiens, i.e. us, some at least 300,000 years ago in Africa, to alphabetical writing invented by Homo Sapiens some 5,000 years ago all over the world in a great number of civilizations along with non-alphabetical writing systems. Then he jumps to printing that turns the printed book into a consumer commodity which will enable the development of modern science and the mechanical industry of the first industrial revolution. The next stage is identified by him as the electric age when communication became the transfer of information via some material device that transferred the information in a virtual form: electric impulses (telegraph and telephone); waves of all types (radio, television, and now Internet with the development of computers, smartphones and tablets). The book stops before the Internet (the first “internet” connection was successful only in September 1969 between Stanford and Oakland, both in California.
Let me consider some of the 26 means of communication he studies, targeting in my review those that have to do with what he calls the extensions of the central nervous system.
The spoken word: Extension of all senses but centered on the ear seen as the capturing sense of the sacred universe and the sacred. Plus, connection to the mind, the intellect seen as one way only by McLuhan; the intellect precedes and is non-verbal, which is of course at least debatable.
Language: Extension of intelligence, the intellect within McLuhan’s limited vision of language/mind. Note he never uses the concept “mind”.
The written word: The eye is dominant over the ear. Can the alphabet also be an extension of our teeth as McLuhan suggests with his reference to Cadmus’ sowing dragon’s teeth in the myth of the Phoenician who brought the alphabet to Greece?
Roads: Extension of cities, extension of housing, extension of the skin. In the form of streets, they are the central nervous system of cities, which makes roads the extension of this urban central nervous system which is the extension of man’s central nervous system within the wall or skin of the city and beyond it.
Housing: Extension of our bodily heat-control mechanisms — a collective skin or garment. Extended to the city, and the city wall becoming an extension of our skin.
Money: He starts with the psychoanalytical identification of money as odorless, dehydrated filth, hence filthy lucre to be attached to our anal eroticism and character. Then comes a long series of identification of money with the total involvement of man in his work, in association with writing and clocks.
Clocks: Visual extension of the experience of duration and social organization, seen as the desacralizing of everything sacred, the capture of the profane in association with the alphabet. He does not explain how Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, and many other religions or spiritual faiths are based on sacred books or canonical writings that most of the time were codified in their canonical forms several centuries after the actual preaching took place. The written word was used to reinforce the oral word.
The Print: Extension of man’s eye creating a uniform, continuous and `rational’ space containing all objects, thus all-inclusive.
The printed word: The extension of the eye. It brought to human society continuity, uniformity, and repeatability; the basis of calculus and of marketing (industrial production, entertainment, and science); uniformly priced commodity; portability and accessibility.
The photograph: Automated extension of our vision, of the eye. A statement without syntax. The photograph is a museum without walls.
Press: An extension of the eye and man’s analytical and synthetic competence. Mosaic visual form that requires a high level of critical participation and group-awareness. The mosaic is the mode of the corporate or collective image and commands deep participation. Different from columns that represent points of view, a mosaic brings together unrelated scraps in a field unified by a dateline.
Telegraph: Electricity has externalized the central nervous system itself, including the brain. Electric light is space without walls. It is the extension of the nervous system and the intellect as linguistic messages following the road or railroad systems. It creates the mosaic press with no opinions and requiring the personal implication of the reader. It developed direct communication between one person and another. It started recreating the village at the level of the world. The telegraph translated writing into electrically produced sound.
The telephone: Extension of the sense of hearing but also of all mental faculties, except the visual dimension; Today we have smartphones and webcams. The old telephone was the beginning of the use of personae, extensions, meaning change and variation, of a real personality. Complex participation, total attention, of our senses and faculties through the only auditory and vocal apparatuses. The telephone is speech without walls.
The phonograph: An extension and amplification of the voice. Stereo is sound in depth . . . in inter-relation, not in isolation. Depth means insight, not point of view; and insight is a kind of mental involvement in a process that makes the content of the item seem quite secondary. Tape recorder and LP made a full musical spectrum available to all. The phonograph is a music hall without walls.
Movies: He nearly only considers the movie, the silent film. The wedding of the old mechanical technology and the new electric world. Comparison with a writer but he only sees the writer or filmmaker making the reader or viewer enter the imaginary world they have produced. He never considers the viewer in front of the film technique, not the technology but the storytelling. So de does not consider the ellipse (a form that is difficult in print but is common in the cinema and TV), flashbacks and flash-forwards that are also common in the cinema and have become common today in HD TV: what was not easy in Bonanza’s time, has become commonplace in Lost’s time. He misses the voyeuristic approaches of film and TV — they are not the same — because he is absolutely centered and centering on the sole film-director. He does not even capture the film-editor. “Film is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a collective art form with different individuals directing [My emphasis] color, lighting, sound, acting, speaking.” (292) This is an extremely reduced vision of film making. Let’s keep in mind the cinema is minimally two-fold viewer’s voyeurism applied to minimally four-fold director-cum-cameraman-cum-editor’s voyeurism. The movies are classroom without walls, in which the student is also the teacher, in which the student is the gold digger, the gold nugget, and the mine, all in one and freely projected into a universe of information, emotions, impressions, etc. that he/she freely explores in his/her own haphazard and/or systematic ways. To reduce the electric revolution in the field of the media to wire services (telegraph, telephone, telex, etc.), radio and TV, is at least VERY reductive: he does not consider the cinema as such, only movies. He hardly considers recorded products: a tremendous field of development from vinyl records, tapes of all types, to CDs and DVDs and of course virtual recordings that are not carried by any real material medium though conveyed, transported and circulated by the virtual material medium of the Internet. Most of that was of course still to come in McLuhan’s days.
Radio: He starts with a reference to Paul Lazarsfeld (“The monopolistic effects of radio . . . totalitarian countries. . . The monopolistic effects have probably less social importance than is generally assumed,” 297–98) and a comment: “Professor Lazarsfeld’s helpless unawareness of the nature and effects of radio is not a personal defect, but a universally shared ineptitude.” (298) Radio, its tribal magic. The tribal drum of radio extended man’s central nervous system to create depth involvement for everybody. He shifts radio from an entertainment medium (that he hardly considers) to a kind of nervous information system. Radio affects most people intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. . . a private experience. The subliminal depths of radio. . . the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. . . a single echo chamber. . . Extension of the central nervous system that is matched only by human speech itself. . . First massive experience of electronic implosion. . . The ear is hyperesthetic, compared to the neutral eye. The ear is intolerant, closed, and exclusive, whereas the eye is open, neutral, and associative. . . The commercial entertainment strategy automatically ensures maximum speed and force of impact for any medium. . . Education will become recognized as civil defense against media fallout. . . Radio certainly contracts the world to a village size but it hasn’t the effect of homogenizing the village quarters. . . Radio is not only a mighty awakener of archaic memories, forces, and animosities but a decentralizing, pluralistic force, as is really the case with all-electric power and media. . . The radio is a classroom without walls.
Television: The tactile mosaic mesh of the TV image compels so much active participation on the part of the viewer that he develops a nostalgia for pre-consumer ways and days. That was definitely before 1968, and even so in the USA that was definitely an idealized vision before 1968: television became the first communicational manipulator with Kennedy’s campaign, just the same way the radio became the first communicational manipulator in its days with Roosevelt’s campaigns and Fireside Chats. The extension of the sense of touch or sense interplay that even more intimately involves the entire sensorium. Television is an all-sensorial medium because the viewer can take no distance in the reception of the message. Television is a classroom without walls. It is a cool medium that requires in-depth involvement. It is producer-oriented. The viewer is the screen. The TV image is low in data ceaselessly forming contours of things limned by the scanting finger.
The TV image requires at each instant for us to “close” the spaces in the mesh by convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile because tactility is the interplay of the senses rather than the isolated contact of skin and object. Synesthesia, unified sense, and imaginative life. The homogenization brought by printing was blown into pieces by the arrival of the electric age: all technologies based on the use of electricity. Electric age technologies negate space and time, bring an instantaneous and universal flow of news and information, and reversal to aural communication. TV images require the involvement and participation of the viewer because of their low definition. They are centered on the process more than the product, on the reactions of actors to actions with close-up shots of faces and facial expressions. The electric age had so far caused the implosion and contraction of reality inter-personally and inter-nationally leading to the fragmentation of society and the world. The TV image furthered this implosion by developing it intra-personally and intra-sensuously bringing to life all the senses simultaneously inside the viewer.
The TV image is a mosaic of dots bombarding our sensorial screen. This mosaic is NOT uniform, continuous and repetitive, BUT it is discontinuous, skew, non-lineal and tactual (total synesthesia, all senses implied and activated).
ELECTRONIC MAN IN ELECTRIC AGE
“Man, the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his Paleolithic ancestors” (283)
But this nomad walks, runs, stampedes even in an infinite and timeless virtual space at the tips of his own fingers on a keyboard that works linguistically and iconically, or at the tip of both his hand and his fingers on a mouse, touchpad or tactile screen in kinesthetic contact with menus and icons, the food of these menus being information and various processors that can deal with this information to produce new knowledge that can be then brought to the common table of our knowledge society.
“Radio was released from . . . centralist network pressures by TV. The TV then took up the burden of centralism, from which it may be released by Telstar. . .” (306)
He obviously missed the future. The Internet-based on computers, smartphones, tablets, etc. is turning the whole world into a global village for sure BUT with the help of personae a person can become a member of global networks that will not cross, if so, the person wants. That person can be a member of social network A as Mr. Wilson, of social network B as Mrs. Adams, of social network C as the teenager Bill or Sarah, of social network D as the famous Brad Pitt, etc., and at the same time he can be himself on a gay network, whether he is gay or not does not matter: on an academic network, whether he is an academic or not is not that important since he can invent an independent academic profile; on a music (which music?) network, as a musician, a music lover, a composer or whatever he is, craves to become or simply whatever he likes as for music; on a political network of his choice and he does not matter he agrees or not with the ideas of this network. Only the networks on which he has the same identity may eventually cross, but not necessarily, and that identity might only be a persona. The practice of pen names, pseudonyms, avatars, etc. makes it at times difficult to know who is who.
In other words, McLuhan had the right idea, but he did not know how it was going to be done. As for what he says about the political use of the radio by people like Hitler, he missed an essential point: what changed the whole 1930s was not only the radio but the invention and development of the microphone and of amplification with loudspeakers in the 1920s without which there is no radio. That enabled mass meetings and all political forces used this new possibility, though those who used it best got the upper hand: the Nazis and the fascists, the Stalinists and the communists, at least for a while. In the USA Roosevelt was the great beneficiary of that new technology with his “Fireside Chats.”
But McLuhan missed another point: in those days collective listening to the radio was essential, up to Television that took over that function in the family. But radios in bars, cafés, restaurants, and other public places were an essential tool for music and it made jazz, for one example, into popular music, and not only entertainment. Radio is still a media that often identifies itself by the music they broadcast. And that has become global with Internet radios.
He also missed the complete failure of radio as a pedagogical tool in schools, just like TV later on. But that has changed or is in the process of changing with the Internet which meets with great success within schools, around schools, outside schools, and on this virtual medium, radios and TV stations have become extremely important for education. I am thinking of UCTV (University of California TV) and that is only one example. And imagine what it becomes with smartphones and already ready for tomorrow 5G Artificial Intelligence.
In fact, he has a point but did not know yet: radio, TV, and Internet are perfect for education but personal, individualized, self-education, for a school/university project or not. Didactic virtual products are more and more commercially profitable. Amazon is buying businesses in that field to diversity its offer because there is a demand. The main point he could not know is that such pedagogical tools are effective and attractive if there is a follow-up possibility by some “teacher” for the students. But one thing is absolutely sure today: the computer necessarily with the Internet and all its potential is here to stay and develop within the class, around the class, and outside the class. Teaching at any level without that tool is just unimaginable. The village has become even smaller today, but he was wrong education is not civil defense against the media fallout. Education has become a direct and intense field of media application. Only reactionary dull minds can today dream of education without a computer-cum-Internet.
Meditate the following public release concerning that very point.
SEATTLE-(BUSINESS WIRE)-Oct. 10, 2013- Amazon.com, Inc. today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire TenMarks, a company that is helping teachers and parents deliver innovative mathematics curriculum to students across the country.
“Amazon and TenMarks share the same passion for student learning. TenMarks’s award-winning math programs have been used by tens of thousands of schools and Amazon engages with millions of students around the world through our Kindle ecosystem,” said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “Together, Amazon and TenMarks intend to develop rich educational content and applications, across multiple platforms, that we think teachers, parents, and students will love.”
“Amazon and TenMarks share a commitment to developing easy-to-implement solutions for schools and families,” said Rohit Agarwal, TenMarks co-founder. “We currently offer teachers, students, and parents, access to effective resources to foster the vision of the Common Core curriculum in math, including scalable professional development and tools for connecting with parents. We back this belief with our business model, where teachers can register and access our product for free while being able to opt-in for premium features if needed. Going forward, we believe Amazon and TenMarks will create significant innovations in the K-12 arena.”
“I’ve used TenMarks for the past two years at Grand View with fourth and fifth grade students to help a diverse group of students achieve in math and take ownership of their own learning,” said Sujata Bhatt, founder of the Incubator School and a National Board Certified teacher who spent 11 years at Grand View Boulevard Elementary in Los Angeles Unified School District. “As we launch the Incubator School this year, we focus on technology that truly activates learning and self-starting. TenMarks’s products are designed to enable both students and teachers to be in the driver’s seat by seeing where they’re successful and where they need to revisit. TenMarks is an important part of our math plan this year.”
TenMarks offers personalized online math instruction and practice in a clear, manageable format for K-12 students complete with helpful hints, video lessons, and real-time results. TenMarks’s products are designed to help students be individually motivated, engaged and nurtured.
We can see that McLuhan is right about Professor Paul Lazarsfeld’s misunderstanding of the radio, but he is not right when he does not see that TV and what he calls “Telstar” and what will be the Internet twenty years later are NOT a danger, tribal or not, but an essential tool for the development of education and individual responsibility and initiative in that field with a multiplication of networked references and allegiances for everyone who wants, and how can anyone refuse that new existence that makes all “archaic memories, forces and animosities” obsolete. All electronic media bring to the world the first chance it has to manage its problems without the use of warfare. But there is no diplomacy if the differences between the participants are not recognized and accepted. Electronic media are thus not doomed to homogenize the world into violence (radio) or anesthesia (television) but are making the world finally tolerant and not nonchalant, and the road is still long ahead of us to come close to a full realization of this objective. Marshall McLuhan did not live long enough to know that the Cold War was to end.
“The TV child cannot see ahead because he wants involvement and he cannot accept a fragmentary and merely visualized goal or destiny in learning or in life.” (335)
At this moment we know the book was written before the next stage of the electric age, the Internet today reaching the 4G smartphone and tablet stage. Space and time have not been destroyed and TV images today are closer and closer to cinema images in definition. The DVD revolution and the Internet are enabling all films to be watched on a TV screen and plasma screens can reach High Definition while Bluray discs go the same way, on screens that are bigger and bigger with always better sound coming close to the cinema under the pompous name of Home Cinema. We will have to question the future and see if the sense of passing time, hence past and future have really disappeared from the minds of new generations. Have we returned to a simple feeling of duration? But why are young people always checking the time on their smartphones?
But the main shortcoming is very clear here. He does not wonder what human needs and mental development brought this electric age and within this electric age these particular inventions. They could not be avoided. The discovery and mastery of electricity brought a completely new energy that could be produced, stored, transported and distributed artificially and not recuperated from the universe, though it all started like that with Benjamin Franklin. Actually this electricity can be produced with all kinds of “fuel” via turbines that can be activated by water (hydraulic power), or the wind (windmills) or steam (produced from heat), or via some chemical electric or nuclear reaction that produces heat to generate steam and electricity with a turbine, or photovoltaic electricity.
McLuhan thus does not answer the phylogenic question about what produced these inventions, where this human inventiveness comes from, what the meaning of this need to invent is, and many other questions of that sort. That is why the resistance of teachers and schools against the radio, television, then computers and calculators, and now the Internet and smartphones or tablets, is vain: these inventions satisfy a deep need in humanity as a whole and each human individual in particular. If we want to educate the new generations we have to wonder how we can make them literate as users of these inventions with the objective of training them into collecting knowledge that is useful for them, as fast as possible and as sustainably (which include durability) as possible, knowledge that would make them responsible members of the knowledge society and economy that are emerging from our present.
Just as we taught people how to read and reckon we have today to teach people how to navigate on the Internet, search for, collect and process knowledge in order to share it with others with the purpose of producing added-value that could bring some wealth to our society endowed with fully recognized and guaranteed diversity.
“For caste and class are techniques of social slow-down that tend to create the stasis of tribal societies. Today we appear to be poised between two ages — one of detribalization and one of retribalization.” (344)
He seems to reduce these social-historical categories that caste and class are to a single reading that becomes mechanical. Caste was and is also a way to promote a certain social productivity and welfare just the same way slavery was also that in the Roman empire or in Greece, even if it was barbaric in many ways, but Julius Caesar’s main advisor was a slave. The point is these castes, like slavery, at one point in history, get in contradiction with the economic and historical development of human society. Then it becomes a slow-down obstacle. Class is in a way the same kind of social-historical element that enabled society to slowly evolve and progress after slavery, under feudalism and then industrialism. In fact, these classes have gotten today in contradiction with the economic and historical development of society and it will be replaced by a different hierarchy that will reflect and enable human and social progress, till that new social hierarchy becomes obsolete and blocking and has to be replaced by another. There cannot be any social, human, cultural progress if there is not a dynamic that comes from such a hierarchy. Marshall McLuhan here represents the way progressive intellectuals thought during the Cold War, when mythical ends of history were still pregnant, like the Marxist vision of a classless society, the Christian vision of a messianic Jerusalem, and still to come, though more sophisticated because after the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama’s vision of the end of history in the finally achieved liberation of all individuals in a society based on the Rule of Law, and of course the Singularity popular-science-fiction of Ray Kurzweil, a sort of robotized messianic Jerusalem.
“Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before, informed as never before, free from fragmentary specialism as never before — but also involved in the total social process as never before, since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly, interrelating every human experience.” (358)
He only misses one element to reach knowledge society and the knowledge economy: the virtuality of this knowledge gathering that has to be both giving and receiving, that has to be an exchange and cooperation, collaboration, sharing. That’s where his approach falters: the future will have to be built on both individualistic knowledge gathering and personal progress on one hand, and collective sharing and cooperation both locally and globally on the other hand, which means the absolute necessity to search for and bring together the widest diversity possible on any issue, in any place and at any time. It is that knowledge society that will enable everyone to progress and history to go on along lines of contradictions and even conflicts that will no longer be at the social or economic level of castes, classes and other categories of that type, but more and more different approaches of different knowledge that will have to be brought together in some kind of collaboration and exchange. Not to speak of possible conflicts within the conquest of space or with other intelligent civilizations that we have not met yet.
To conclude we could say that Marshall McLuhan has to be studied in depth because all other schools that have approached the media, particularly today’s mass media, have only considered the direct effects of the content of the media on the minds of people particularly in the form of political campaigning, and its effectiveness, and propaganda, naturally condemned as anti-democratic.
McLuhan considers the media itself first, not the message, may shape and format our minds and thoughts and he has an important point there.
But we have to consider this field of research from a phylogenic point of view because if we do not understand the phylogeny of communication and today’s mass communication, we cannot in any way have the slightest influence on the psychogenesis of the same in the individual from his/her conception to his/her death. There is a lot to do in that perspective. How can we make our younger generations literate with our virtual mass-communications and how can we make our older generations catch up and alleviate their handicap?
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
