First of all, let me just say I’m grateful we read our previous authors before McLuhan. Their concepts and arguments helped me a lot in reading McLuhan. In case you hadn’t noticed, he doesn’t necessarily define the words he uses, so our previous authors' theories sort of gave me a context in which to read his essays. For example, his distinction between content and medium mirrors Shannon and Weaver’s distinction between information and meaning, and McLuhan’s discussion of the phonetic alphabet and the meaning it has the potential to convey when compared to symbols such as the American flag (82) was comprehensible to me only because of Shannon and Weaver’s logarithm explanation which, while almost completely lost on me, managed to explain that the medium, or type of transmitter, I guess, determines what you can convey in that it limits your choices of meaning to the combinations of information which the medium makes available to you . Similarly, his discussion of how media have unintended results, like the airplane’s effects on cities and economics (8), reminded me of Wiener’s warning against technology’s unforeseen consequences, and his emphasis on form over content as an effective way to influence people’s behavior reminded me of Benjamin’s argument for new, proletariat-friendly forms of communication. Without this existing information, McLuhan might have been completely incomprehensible to me, with his tangents about light bulbs and the temperature of television.
McLuhan’s theory that new media forces people to process information in new ways (all at once instead of in a linear fashion) of course made me question my own thought processes. At first, I thought I was a pretty linear learner. I don’t multitask very much, and I remember things that are written much better than things that are thrown at me in a thousand different ways. But, just look at that paragraph up there! ^ I couldn’t even read McLuhan on his own terms! I had to simultaneously compare his concepts to every other thing I’d ever read on the subject. Instead of reading Wiener, for example, and then adding McLuhan’s information on top of that, I was in a mental state that strongly resembled surfing the internet with multiple tabs open. All the concepts were jumbled in my head, with no beginning middle end structure to them at all. So basically, I want to know what you guys think on the subject. Are we ‘everything at once’ learners because of new media, or is that just the way the human mind works, and technology is finally catching up?
Hmm...I totally agree with your comparisons with Benjamin, Shannon and Weaver and finally Weiner. After today's class, it is difficult to see whether technology has made us horizontal learners or if we have always been multi-taskers and technology has finally caught up. I think it is a mixture of the two. Great, now I do look like I am going for the gray area but in this case I think that moveable type was revolutionary but more so when people starting wanting their ideas heard not just among a select few intellectuals, but for at least the literate masses, printing presses were the next logical step to making this happen. I am not too familiar with the Guttenberg era and if in fact there were people who thought it was important to share their thoughts with more people but, I do know that for now ideas like facebook were thought up precisely because Mark Zuckenberg wanted to create a social media site that could do many things like connect people at first only in Harvard but then eventually golabally. People can chat, send messages (like email), play games, take quizzes,look at friends' links, etc...I would like to think that people and technology have developed with sometimes, people reacting to the technology and other times the technology being tailored to what people want at the time. I hope my stream of consciousness makes sense! :)
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