McLuhan Revisited

McLuhan Revisited

Derrick de KerckhoveMcLuhan Program, Faculty of

Information StudiesUniversity of Toronto

Classical Pursuits

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Alors, McLuhan, toujours mort?

McLuhan in Winnipeg1933 B.A. (U of M gold medal in arts

and sciences1934 M.A. (U of M)

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The next medium, whatever it is- it may be the extension of conciousness- will include television as it's content, not as it's environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individuals encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind (1962).

The three ages of mankind

Connecting in the global village

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the

Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time

as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when

the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media



Technology and generations

“Every kid knows that within three years, everything will have changed - including

himself and the goal”

The radio kid

The TV kid (hippie)

1981The hyperkid

Negotiating meaning with the screen

Externalizing the mind to the screen and more…

Digital Natives and hyperkids

Source : Mark Prensky / www.marcprensky.com

> 10 000 hrs of video games > 250 000 emails and text messages > 10 000 hrs of cellular phone > 20 000 hrs of television > 500 000 commercials

< 5 000 hrs reading books

These kids are fed up with jobs and goals, and are determined to forget their own roles and involvement in society. They want nothing to do with our fragmented and specialist consumer society. Living in the transitional identity vacuum between two great antithetical cultures, they are desperately

trying to discover themselves and fashion a mode of existence attuned

to their new values; thus the stress on developing an "alternate life style." We can see the results of this retribalization process whenever we look at any of our

youth--not just at hippies (1969).

In the same way that industry now makes the consumer the

producer by means of motivation research, educators now recognize the education problems to be motivation rather than consumption of packaged information (1959)

This kind of environment that we have, an information environment, electrically programmed, turns the

entire planet into a teaching machine, and it’s a man-made teaching machine. One of the results of the man-made environment becoming a

teaching machine is that the audience becomes workforce (McLuhan, 1966).

Our children from early infancy are

engaged in extraordinarily hard work, and that work

is mainly just growing, growing up

because to grow up in a modern electronic environment is a

fantastically complex job. One of the

peculiarities of an electronic

environment is that people become so

profoundly involved with each other that they lose the sense of private identity

(1966).



FaceBook

The more they know about

you, the less you exist

(Marshall McLuhan)

The critic of television

• Television involves millions in the problems and emotions of people both near and far. An involvement that goes with our instant technologies transforms the most 'socially-conscious‘ people into conservatives.

• But even more, movie and TV have the almost uncontrollable power of inflating the most casually selected persons into million-horsepowered entities.

video sharing site youtube.com goes online

•At the peak of the morning rush hour in London, bombs explode in three crowded subway trains and aboard a bus.

•At least 52 people die, along with the four bombers, and 700 are injured -- the deadliest attack in Britain since World War II.

A commuter snaps this image with his mobile phone as passengers exit an underground train tunnel near King's Cross station.

Timeline

20052005

Everybody a broadcaster

In the electric age, all space is HERE and all time is NOW (1973)

The Era of the tag

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The Medium is the Tag

• ca. 1990-96 - Internet, e-mail, web (diffusion)

• ca. 1997 - Video giocchi (images)• ca. 1998 - Media conglomerates, streaming media, electronic commerce ( the economy)

• ca. 2000 - Telefonia mobile, SMS, broadband, (third phase of electricity)

• ca. 2002 - blogs, peer-to-peer file sharing (connected intelligence)

• ca. 2004 - Social software, GMail, del.icio.us, Flickr, tagging e folksonomies (the era of the tag)

• ca. 2006 YouTube, Innocentive, Second Life, Wikinomics (the “objective imaginary”)

fieldstrees

cloud

sky

climatelakewater

+ locality, sensations, type of photography…

The era of the tag

On the Internet every message is divided in small packets. A “packet” is a short sequence of data, with a protocol that contains an address and some administration to find its

way via routers and switchers to its destination. Thus any message can finds its

way as well as the order of its reconstitution thanks to a tag.



The tag is the soul of the Internet

fieldstrees

cloudsky

climatelakewater

+ locality, sensations, type of photography…

So realistically, in the beginning was the tag, the unique address of the digital packet to make it available for the construction of images and

the building of meaning from anywhere to anywhere for any given purpose. The tag is what allows to break down all the traditional categories and

classifications and rebuild connections according to need, context and circumstances instead of forced environments of knowledge and design.

From the hierarchy of categories

Clay Shirky

To links

Clay Shirky

To interlinks

Clay Shirky

To the disappearing of categories

Clay Shirky

A humble barcode

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Tim Berners-Lee Semantic Web



The semantic web and tags…

(fonte: Shirky, 2005)

…are projections of the division of labour between the two hemispheres

of the brain

Division of labour in cognitive processing

• Each eye is split vertically into a left and a right visual field

• The vision of both left visual fields is processed in the back of the right hemisphere

• The vision of both right visual fields is processed in the back of the left hemisphere

• There is a clear division of labor between hemispheres

• The right hemisphere holds the vision while the left analyzes it

“The next wave of technologies might ultimately blend pared-down Semantic Web tools with Web 2.0’s capacity for dynamic user-generated connections” (John Borland)



In any problem whatever, one in a million would see no problem. The real problem is how do you reach this person who has the

answer (1974)



In the old industrial process you could only produce single items in large

quantities, with the computer it will be possible to produce any number in any

shape (1963)



After having extended our limbs and our senses in our electronic nervous system, it is but a short step to also export

our consciousness (1963)



We will be able to record and to keep every instant of our life and play it back for study and entertainment (1973)



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In the electric age, we wear all mankind as our

skin

The personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is

introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology

The new electronic independence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

Information and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the

babble of a village or tavern gossip session.

GlobalImplosiveAll times are NOWUbiquitousVolatile

The overhauling of our traditional political system is only one manifestation of the retribalizing process wrought by the electric

media, which is turning the planet into a global village.

Acceleration +Implosion +Globalization += Loss of ground= Loss of identity= Loss of local talent= Loss of public space= Reaction: fundamentalism= Electronic Maelstrom, hijacking population

Implosion

“Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time”

(1959)

“No passengers, all are crew on spaceship Earth”

• As the speed of information increases, the tendency is for politics to move away from representation and delegation of constituents toward immediate involvement of the entire community in the central acts of decision" (Forecast for New Media and Democracy in Retrospect, 1964).

• In the ‘80s, representative government will cease. Instead the public will take over. Just as Nielsen ratings have given us not ‘what the public wants’ but the public itself, so detached and distant representative government will be replaced by direct experience of the public via home-computer feedback (1979).

• The user is the content• With Buckminster Fuller in 1976

Canada, the borderline caseCanada, the borderline case

Physics of population distribution

Centre-margin relationship

A critical distance

Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity

In Canada, many are cold, but few are frozen (1973)

McLuhan Revisited

Education

hrs of television

information environment

workforce mcluhan

manmade environment

kind of environment

manmade teaching machine

kerckhove mcluhan program

mcluhan revisited derrick