User:Max/rwm/theinformationunderstandingmedia

Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media

The Book

Written 1964, consists of two parts. In Part One Marshall McLuhan describes his theory, in Part Two he describes a few media that are common in that time. The core of McLuhan’s theory is his definition of media as extensions of ourselves. So with this understanding of the word media anything that extends us is media (glasses extend our eyes, clothing extends our tactual sense, a car extends our legs, a computer extends our brain…). He writes "all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed". And I think he uses the word media often as a synonym with the word technology. In Part One - chapter two he differentiates media in cold and hot. I looked at this chapter a little closer:

James Gleick: The Information

Chapter 2: The Persistence of the World

Walter J. Ong: speech is not a technology / writing is. Speech is more a truer sense of our internal feelings. Writing organizes thought in a technological (non-natural) way. Quotes Platon's Socrates: the invention of writing will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it because they will not practice their memory. -> writing = appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom. -> writing does allow the dead to speak to the living and the living to the unborn. -> writing is a "twisting journey from things to words, from words to categories, from categories to metaphor and logic."

Chapter 3: Wordbooks

"like the printing press, the telegraph and the telephone before it, the internet is transforming the language simply by transmitting information differently. What makes cyberspace different from all previous information technologies is its intermixing of scales from the largest to the smallest without prejudice, broadcasting to the millions, narrowcasting to groups, instant messaging to one"