By SHIRIMA KENNEDY

Temptation to remain focused on McLuhan

He was right. Perhaps the biggest temptation to dwell on McLuhan is that McLuhan was correct about things that others at the time were not able to perceive or understand. More clearly than most other social observers, McLuhan was able to see past the surface content of television and radio programs, films and books in order to analyze the nature underlying medium, what was special about it, and how it was different from other media.

While others focused of imitation and on counting acts of violence, sexuality or sexism, McLuhan ( 1964/1994) in his most famous pun, attacked this focus on message by declaring, ‘’the medium is the message, emphasis use reshapes people and culture, I’ve called this approach ‘ medium theory- following McLuhan in the singular ‘’ medium as the key message- rather than media ecology or media theory in general, because medium theory focuses on the unusual characteristics that distinguish one medium, or one type of media, from other media( Meyrowitz, 1985)

Even more impressive, McLuhan was able to see past the specific of radio and television to some underlying characteristics that set electronic media (what he called electric media) apart from print media. While others saw general continuity (or simply cultural decline) he saw fundamental difference and transformation.

As Paul Levinson ( 1999) has documented in impressive detail in his book digital McLuhan, McLuhan’s theory are even a better match for the current digital age they were for the communication technologies that existed when McLuhan was writing .indeed, McLuhan spoke about the global village’’ long before there was even a CNN, let alone a world wide web. When McLuhan wrote about electric, media making all of us present to each other across the globe, he did a rather good job of describing a world of email and instant messaging that was beyond the imagination of his contemporaries

As even critics of McLuhan would now have to acknowledge his understanding media gave us the current conceptions about and awareness of media and the information age, it’s difficult to believe today, yet when McLuhan wrote his earliest draft of understanding media in 1959 as high school media curriculum for the  us. National association of educational broadcaster, generally enthusiastic reviewer cautioned that the term media was not in the average teachers vocabulary and would need to be explained clearly ( Gordon, 1997) simply, some early critics’ of McLuhan put the word media in quotes to distance themselves from what they saw as McLuhan odds usage( Burke, 1968 Mroszak)

McLuhan was wrong in some of his predictions, His claims that the end was in sight for baseball, cities, and the automobile seem pretty far off mark. But he was usually right. In understanding media (1964/1994) McLuhan correctly saw that advances in technologies would lead executives to do work once done by servants and secretaries, that it was becoming impossible to isolate minorities and youth from the larger culture.