Media professor/expert Paul Levinson on new media influence
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@TheTTBT what?! talk about over complicating a sentence...
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McLuhan embraced becoming a different/new intellectual, rooted in the old syntax of classical intellectualism and its accompanying privacy. This explains the feeling of newness in his conjecture regarding media patterns as well as the acoustic "re-cognition" of his epiphany via the Thunder portmanteau's of James Joyce in his great work "Finnegan's Wake".
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@smileykermit What do you think McLuhan meant when he said "I don't explain - I explore." His explorations or "probes" were intended to alert people, to prod them about the significance of media. He left the conclusions - the explanations - to others. To be clear: what McLuhan thought was naive is that technology has no effect. But he insisted that his purpose was not judge the nature of the effect.
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@PLev20062006 In all fairness, McLuhan said and wrote a lot of things. It's in his interviews & letters that he expresses dismay about the end of the Gutenberg era, the death of the individual & the onset of the tribal. He did say many times that the "neither good nor bad" syndrome is naive. Every media has it's effect and for every "innovation" there is an amputation. For instance, air conditioning & television have virtually destroyed neighborhoods. Life is not found indoors in isolation...
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@smileykermit What McLuhan warned about is people who ignore the influence of media. He expressly said, many tines, that he viewed media neither as inherently dangerous or helpful - what was dangerous was failing to appreciate that the influence of media was profound.
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I think McLuhan would have been more repulsed than overjoyed by today's media saturation. Although these gents have turned out a great "product" it seems that Levinson doesn't understand the simple statement:" the Medium is the Message" and how it dictates how we react to what we are exposed to. McLuhan warned against those who say exactly what Levinson claims when he compares all mediums to a knife... it's how you use it... It's right there in Understanding Media...
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thanks
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Terrific, thought-provoking video.
@webins ... actually, i'm on the side of humanity ... :)
PLev20062006 4 years ago 12
great conversation b/tn these two
laureenmac78 4 years ago 10