Monday, June 27, 2016
Jacques Coulardeau at Academia.edu (20)
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 on Amazon.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 @ 2:06 PM 
