An overlooked, constantly repeated understanding McLuhan has is that moral judgement (for better or worse) of an individual using media is very difficult, because of the psychic effects media have on society and their users. Moreover, media and technology, for McLuhan, are not necessarily inherently “good” or “bad” but bring about great change in a society’s way of life. Awareness of the changes are what McLuhan seemed to consider most important, so that, in his estimation, the only sure disaster would be a society not perceiving a technology’s effects on their world, especially the chasms and tensions between generations. <wikipedia>
McLuhan argues that media are languages, with their own structures and systems of grammar, and that they can be studied as such. He believed that media have effects in that they continually shape and re-shape the ways in which individuals, societies, and cultures perceive and understand the world. In his view, the purpose of media studies is to make visible what is invisible: the effects of media technologies themselves, rather than simply the messages they convey. Media studies therefore, ideally, seeks to identify patterns within a medium and in its interactions with other media. Based on his studies in New Criticism, McLuhan argued that technologies are to words as the surrounding culture is to a poem: the former derive their meaning from the context formed by the latter. Like Harold Innis, McLuhan looked to the broader culture and society within which a medium conveys its messages to identify patterns of the medium’s effects. <wikipedia>
In the book ‘Understanding Media’ by MaLuhan, yeats wrote for this reversal, “The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream.”
He illustrated the electric light in his book, “totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized… it eliminates time and space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone, and TV, creating involvement in depth.”
Is the remote work culture worth it?
Remote work culture is defined as the digital culture and working alone at home. We did not expect the world has become a remote work culture. It means we could not separate places to work and life. We are always exposed to computers without realizing it. When the electricity first went out in Ames, I felt I couldn’t do anything. They seem to have become workers who cannot do anything without electricity, computers, and smartphones.
Am I fat?
Social media changes the value of our lives. For example, one of the serious social problems in Korea is the wrong internet culture. There has been a problem with young and beautiful celebrities committing suicide on social media due to malicious comments written by anonymous people. Occasionally, we live with the illusion that we are the real country when crazy about social media. We believe that if people who don’t know us say that we are fat, we tell ourselves that I am fat and live that way.
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