Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Jacques Coulardeau at Academia.edu (20)
MARSHALL
McLUHAN
UNDERSTANDINGMEDIA, THE EXTENSIONS OF MAN
ROUTLEDGE,
LONDON
Monday
October 14, 2013 – 9,400 words, 18 pages
Dr Jacques
COULARDEAU
INITIAL STUDY / STARTING
POINT REVIEW(S)
MARSHALL
McLUHAN, A PROPHET
THE APOCALYPSE OR SPIRITUAL SALVATION?
FOR A GLOBAL
APPROACH OF MENTAL POWER AND CONCEPTUALIZATION
Wednesday January 21, 2015 – 2,700 words, 5 pages
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
POST SCRIPTUM
AVENTURE À SUIVRE / AN ADVENTURE TO FOLLOW
RESEARCH UNDER CONSTRUCTION WITH IVAN EVE
This is the
first leg of a longer study that is in the process of being written.After the
review and its illustration I added the 2006 review I posted onAmazon.co.uk,
and its comments, for the sake of perspective.
This review is
the prolongation of a long study that dealt with, among other topics but essentially,
Ray Kurzweil’s “popular-science”-fiction wrapped up as MIT expertise. Marshall
McLuhan ...
[Herbert Marshall McLuhan
(1911–1980), a Canadian philosopher in communication theory and he became one
of the cornerstones media theory with practical applications in the advertising
and television industries. McLuhan coined phrases like “the medium is the message”
and the “global village” and for his prediction of the Internet medium he could
not know in his life time though the invention of the transportation of data
from a computer to another via a telephone line was invented in the Fall 1969
between Stanford, California’s military laboratory and Oakland, California’s US
Armed Forces Headquarters for the Pacific (and at the time the Vietnam war). I
would refer you to the Official Site of the
Estate of Marshall McLuhan at http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/ if you want to know more about him. Accessed October 8, 2013.]
… is
essential here because he deals with the media and not the machines, or rather
with all inventions, mechanical or not, starting with oral language, considered
as media all of them extending man’s body, body parts, central nervous system
and even “consciousness” as he calls the mind. We will concentrate on his 1964
book Understanding Media, The extensions
of Man.
We have to get
some detail on his theory and, to remain in our own logic, consider it in a
phylogenic perspective though Marshall McLuhan does not envisage any other
human phase before the invention of writing systems (even his short chapter on
“The Spoken Word” is entirely oriented towards writing systems).
Hence he starts
considering humanity around 5,000 years ago in a sequential presentation of various
inventions one after another in chronological order. What’s more he centers his
interest on what he calls the “electric age” that starts with the “discovery”
of electricity and the invention of means to produce, store and transport it.
His electric
age is based on the stage of universal (though even today it is still not fully
achieved)
networked distribution (the electrical grid) of this electricity characterized
as continuous and instantaneous, meaning we
can use it at any time and in any place we want at the commanding tip of one
finger pressing a button on or off.
In other words
his discourse is centered on the last one hundred years when he wrote this
essential book in the 1960s and today for us on the last 150 years.
I will consider
his approach in both phylogenic and psychogenetic perspective.
The first thing
we have to do to penetrate his meaning is to list the various inventions he considers
in the book and try to find out what extensions of man’s body or body parts he
refers them to. We will present this list in the form of a table. He considers
26 inventions in 26 separate chapters. We have to keep in mind this conclusion
of chapter 21:
“The owners of
media always endeavor to give the public what it wants, because they sense that
their power is in the medium and not in the message or the program” [Marshall
McLuhan, Understanding Media, The extensions of Man , Routledge, London, 1964,
p. 216)
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:11 PM 
