McLuhan

Tomorrowland

Great Big Carousel of Progress!

Fuller

McLuhan

"We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish. A pervasive medium is an imperceptible one." - McLuhan

Lascaux

Time-biased? Space-biased?

Time? Space?

Cool? Lukewarm?

Hot

Hottest

Cooler?

Cool?

Cool?

Hot? Cool?

Three Ages of Man:

1. The Preliterate era
2. The Gutenberg Age
3. The Electronic Age

Eden


MD?

CBC

"If life were only like this."

Cronkite

Global Village?

"The cellphone is not a phone any more than a computer is a computer," says Federman. "It's a device that delivers content."
Called a "mobile" by most of the rest of the world, the cellphone can serve as a database of calendars and contacts, social-convener, mate-finder, camera, pager, social-protest organizer, electronic wallet, music machine, fashion statement, and, oh yes, a wireless telephone.
The mobile "allows us to be ubiquitously connected," says Federman, and by extension, "be in pervasive proximity to our tribe, no matter how distantly those members are scattered."
McLuhan's other famous idea, of the global village, of course, is evident to all. Satellite TV images, the Internet, email and the cellphone all shrink our world.

I. John Harvey. "Now the Mobile is the Message" -- The Toronto Star, November 11, 2004.

McLuhan's laws of technology adapted to fit the mobile phone model:

The laws hold that all technology exhibits four effects:
It contains an element of retrieval. It brings back something that already exists. In the mobile's case, the telephone.
It enhances existing technology. Mobiles cut the wires associated with phones.
It renders something obsolete. The mobile eliminates the need to be in a specific place, rendering land phones somewhat obsolete.
It reverses progress to some degree. By overdoing the new, we run out of benefits and slip into what McLuhan called "reversal," which, in this case, might take the form of the intrusion of the mobile into our lives and our inability to escape its siren call.

I. John Harvey. "Now the Mobile is the Message" -- The Toronto Star, November 11, 2004.

Four Laws