![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() One way to understand McLuhan’s understanding of media in this celebrated 1964 book that made the Canadian literary scholar one of his age’s gurus is to substitute the word “technology” for “media.” His real topic is every inorganic “extension of man,” from the wheel that extends the foot to the printing press that extends the eye to the electronic and cybernetic networks that extend the entire nervous system. Like later and perhaps related theories that organic life exists to propagate the gene and consciousness to propagate the meme, McLuhan at times implies that humanity is merely the biological substrate of technological development, albeit a stratum that can offer informative feedback to the mechanism riding it. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. I recently saw a distinguished academic Tweet, over a picture of a robot police dog, “We don’t have to accept this.” For Marshall McCluhan, on the other hand, ![]()
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