MCLUHAN ON NEW MEDIA

The project that I have scoped out in this book is not intended as a reinterpretation of McLuhan’s ideas but rather it is an attempt to describe the future of “new media” by looking through the rear-view mirror of McLuhan’s groundbreaking study Understanding Media. In attempting to update UM I am being very bold. But as McLuhan once described his work as resulting from standing on the shoulders of a giant, namely Harold Innis, I will attempt to stand on the shoulders of my mentor Marshall McLuhan with whom I collaborated for six exciting years. In the foreword to the 1972 edition of Harold Innis’ The Bias of Communication, McLuhan wrote.
 
I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing and then of printing. Flattered by the attention that Innis had directed to some work of mine, I turned for the first time to his work. It was my good fortune to begin with Minerva's Owl. How exciting it was to encounter a writer whose every phrase invited prolonged meditation and exploration" (Innis 1972, ix, McLuhan's foreword).

Although this book is in some modest sense a footnote to the original Understanding Media it is actually more accurately an attempt at writing an appendix to it. At this point I am sure the reader must be thinking where did I get the nerve to think that I am capable of doing justice to such a task especially given the wealth of literature that has sprung up on the subject of “new media” as documented in the reference section.

It was reading this literature that actually motivated me to take on this task. Some authors were extremely critical of McLuhan’s approach. Others ignored him for the most part but paid their respects by mentioning him briefly. And a few like Donald Theall, McLuhan’s first student and author of The Virtual McLuhan and my friend Paul Levinson, author of Digital McLuhan did justice to their subject. Both of these two excellent books have raised the bar for my project.

Having worked with McLuhan for six years and having published with him and about him I felt that by using his original UM as a template I could offer something worthwhile to the reading public. You, the reader, will be the judge of that. Given the incredible speed, however, with which science and technology advances this book will be at best a progress report of where things stand at this point in time seven years into the new millennium. As McLuhan used to joke things are changing so fast that every book is obsolete by the time the reader gets their hands on it.  

The term “new media” is a relative term. One hundred years from now the media that we label “new media” will be considered “old media” and others will be wrestling with the new media emerging in their time. For that reason some of the remarks McLuhan made about the “new media” of his day over 40 years ago are useful for understanding our “new media.” The quotes speak for themselves and are presented without comment but as the reader progresses through this book and encounters our discussion of today’s “new media” they will see how prescient these remarks of McLuhan were that were made between 1955 and 1969. [The quotes cited were part of a collection that appeared in The Essential McLuhan edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (1997). The date of each quote and the page where it is cited by E. McLuhan and Zingrone follow each quote.]

"The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature." (1969, p. 272)
"Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression." (1957, p. 272)
"New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought.

Mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had thought and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature." (1960, p. 272)  
"It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame." (1955, p. 273)

"A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them." (1964, p. 278)
"As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of do it yourself (1957, p. 283).”
In the next chapter we explore the methodology McLuhan developed to study media and technology.

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA 

BAPRM III - 42686