Issues of Connectivity

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Issues of Connectivity

• How our culture gets in touch

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• The medium, or process, of our time electric
  technology is reshaping and restructuring
  patterns of social interdependence and every
  aspect of our personal life.
• It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate
  practically every thought, every action, and
  every institution formerly taken for granted.
• Everything is changing you, your family, your
  neighbourhood, your education, your job, your
  government, your relation to the others. And
  theyre changing dramatically.
• The Medium is the Massage

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(Very Short) History of Languages and
Communication
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• Control over change would seem to consist in
  moving not with it but ahead of it.
• Anticipation gives the power to deflect and
  control force.
• Understanding Media, p. 199

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• Writing on paper ? Roads
• Roads and paper ? End of city walls

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• Manuscript meant memorization
• Lore at the tip of the tongue

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• Moveable type print ? silent reading

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• The Bible Religion without walls

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• Print ? Information overflow
• Obsolesced existing educational procedures

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• Obsolesced Latin
• Accelerated the vernacular
• Enhanced national borders

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• Obsolesced the minstrel and the troubadour
• Accelerated classical (form) music and private
  poetry
• Culture (and tyranny) of the Book
• Walls between literature and art
• Walls between art and life

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• Motor-car ? Home without walls
• Home away from home

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• Press ? molding public opinion
• New basis for politics

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• Telegraph ? Writing into Sound

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• Telephone ? Speech without walls

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• Phonograph ? Music hall without walls

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• Photograph ? Museum without walls

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• Movie and television ? Classroom without walls

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• Television (and Internet) ? Information overflow
• Obsolesced existing educational procedures

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Understanding Media, Abridged

• Computers and networks ?
• Obsolesce national borders and physical bodies
• Extends our identity to data banks and our
  consciousness to the world
• Retrieves Roads and Paper
• Reverses into loss of identity and identity theft

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The McLuhan Equation

• The Medium is the Message

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Telegraph The Social Hormone

• Electricity is organic in nature and confirms
  the organic social bond by its use in telegraph
  and telephone, radio and other forms.(UM 248)

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Telephone Sounding Brass or Tinkling Symbol?

• In an electric structure there are, as far as
  time and space of this planet are concerned, no
  margins. There can be dialogue only among centres
  and among equals. (UM 273)

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Radio The Tribal Drum

• The power of radio is to retribalize mankind,
  its almost instant reversal of individualism into
  collectivism (UM 304)

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Television The Timid Giant (1960s)

• TV can illustrate the interplay of process and
  the growth of forms of all kinds as nothing else
  can. (UM 332)
• It is the total involvement in all-inclusive
  nowness that occurs in young lives via TVs
  mosaic image. (UM 335)

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Automation More than Learning a Living

• With electricity and automation, the technology
  of fragmented processes suddenly fused with the
  human dialogue and the need for over-all
  consideration of human unity. Men are suddenly
  nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never
  before, informed as never before, free from
  fragmentary specialism as never before but also
  involved in the total social process as never
  before since with electricity we extend our
  central nervous system globally, instantly
  interrelating every human experience. (UM 358)

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The End of the Beginning

• As artists began a century ago to construct
  their works backward, starting with the effect,
  so now with industry and planning. In general,
  electric speed-up requires complete knowledge of
  ultimate effects. (UM 355)