McLuhan's Ideas on Mass Communication & Culture

McLuhan offers a form of technological determinism as he sees a relationship between the way we live and the way we process information. Cultural change is driven by technological change, says McLuhan, and for McLuhan it is specifically changes in modes of communication that shape human existence. McLuhan saw every new communications development as an extension of some human faculty -- the book is an extension of the eye, the wheel an extension of the foot, clothing an extension of the skin, and so on. Media is defined broadly by McLuhan to be anything that amplifies or intensifies a human faculty and that extends our reach and increases our efficiency.

McLuhan's conception is expressed in the seemingly simple statement, "The medium is the message." He offered different views of what this meant, but it basically relates to the idea of persuasion in that he believed that the medium itself changes people more than the sum of the messages of the medium. How we communicate is as important as what we communicate, if not more important. McLuhan relates the different modes of communication to different human epochs, and the most effective means of persuasion shifts in each epoch according to the

. . .
or break boundaries are brought into being through the interplay of bureaucracy and enterprise and include the point at which individuals are held responsible for their "private actions;" that is the moment of the collapse of tribal collective authority. In the nineteenth century, human attention turned to the associative and the corporate, and as the machine was substituted for human action, a boundary break was passed. THE GADGET LOVER McLuhan uses the story of Narcissus drowning because he is enamored of his own reflection in a pool of water and relates it to the Greek word "narcosis," or numbness, noting that people become fascinated by extensions of themselves in any material other than themselves to the point of numbness. Electric technology has allowed man to extend a model of his central nervous system outside himself, suggesting a form of desperate and suicidal autoamputation. Man uses technology to extent or autoamputate different senses, and this affects the remaining senses quite directly: Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body (45). We embrace any e
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
ENERGY McLuhan, LOVER McLuhan, TRANSLATORS McLuhan, HOT COLD, Bertrand Russell, McLuhan McLuhan, Kenneth Boulding, MEDIUM Sometimes, England America, Marshall McLuhan, hot medium, understanding media, media extensions, media hot, medium message, cool media, meeting media moment, mass communication, media moment, break boundary, hot media, hot cool media, technique suspended judgment, central nervous system,
Approximate Word count = 1717
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

More Essays on McLuhan Ideas on Mass Communication & Culture