Analysis Of Marshall Mcluhan's 'The Medium Is The Massage'
Marshall McLuhan sees that technology is evolutionary and he claims that everything has grown from electricity and he links this to the human nervous system. McLuhan’s core argument is “the medium is the massage”, in which he goes further on explaining the claim that each medium influences the human sensations and perception.
In his text, Raymond Williams explains how the social practices have a dominance over the technological practices in the development of human processes. Williams is a cultural materialist and has criticized McLuhan for supporting technological determinism. The part of the text I have chosen is: “By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions.” [46]. This part shows how McLuhan is a technologically determinist since he explains how any medium is an extension of a human and how humans must embrace technologies. Humans must appreciate what technology has done to the society and
b. I have selected the sentence “The principle of self-amputation as an immediate relief of strain on …show more content…
The first period the footage was used very generally. During the first period, the immigrants were not seen as individuals but as part of a mass, which could be linked to what Edward Said addressed about how the West saw the Orient. That is, in a very general way and the societies were not individualised and the East saw itself as a superior. A part of the text presents this idea well: “Orientalism is never too far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans against all those ‘non¬-Europeans’ , and indeed can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures.”
In his text, Raymond Williams explains how the social practices have a dominance over the technological practices in the development of human processes. Williams is a cultural materialist and has criticized McLuhan for supporting technological determinism. The part of the text I have chosen is: “By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions.” [46]. This part shows how McLuhan is a technologically determinist since he explains how any medium is an extension of a human and how humans must embrace technologies. Humans must appreciate what technology has done to the society and
b. I have selected the sentence “The principle of self-amputation as an immediate relief of strain on …show more content…
The first period the footage was used very generally. During the first period, the immigrants were not seen as individuals but as part of a mass, which could be linked to what Edward Said addressed about how the West saw the Orient. That is, in a very general way and the societies were not individualised and the East saw itself as a superior. A part of the text presents this idea well: “Orientalism is never too far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans against all those ‘non¬-Europeans’ , and indeed can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures.”