I’ve been expounding an updated interpretation of McLuhan for a few years now. Here’s a bit... Retrieved for our guests.
@QatzelOk
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=174834The rate of change of the velocity of an object in the noosphere directly affects the structure of society. McLuhan departs from the media theory of Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium "overheats", or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme. The medium we call capitalism is an organizational concept that resides in the mind and bleeds through reality. All media produce field effects, which ripple throughout our milieu.
I know you're a linear or sequential thinker because you've been culturally trained to think in such a way (after-all, it's a quantitative and qualitative function of the communication process or language as it's encoded and decoded), hence why you focus on "stages" rather than the vortex or matrices of change. This way of modeling the rate of change of any concept is completely outdated. The evolutionary extensions of a medium or in this case capitalism, are present in its inception. Alfred Wallace said: Modification of form is admitted to be a matter of time. Socialism, Communism, etc; are extensions of capitalism. Ideas and physical tools are the same thing, but one has been given a material form in reality. And just like ideas, physical tools contain evolutionary extensions. The telegraph and the smartphone are contained in the same conceptual framework. It wasn't a groundbreaking notion to suggest that capitalism leads to socialism or communism. Marx understood Aristotelian thought (Four Causes) and Hegel, and he applied dialectics to the interplay of a material and efficient cause.
The vector and mechanism of acceleration is technology.
Changes in the environment (ground) automatically reshape or influence the people (figures). This is a field effect.
The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the "grammar and syntax" of the "language" of media.
1. What does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes?
Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. For example, radio amplifies news and music via sound.
Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the prominence of print and the visual.
Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.
Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.
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@ckaihatsu McLuhan was called a technological determinist by his critics and contemporaries. But look where we are today.
@Unthinking Majority I recommend “Unbridled Progress” for more commentary.
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