McLuhan

Full article coming soon. Below is a short overview that will be replaced.

The medium is the message

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), a Canadian media theorist, argued in Understanding Media (1964) that the form of a medium shapes society more than the content it carries. A new medium changes the scale and pace of human affairs whatever is said through it.

Media as extensions

McLuhan treated media as extensions of the human body and senses. The book extends the eye, the wheel extends the foot, and electric media extend the nervous system.

The global village

In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) he described how electronic media pull people into a shared, tightly connected space, which he called the global village.

Hot and cool media

He separated hot media, which deliver high-definition information and ask little of the audience, from cool media, which leave gaps the audience has to fill in.

Connection to Vygotsky

Vygotsky and McLuhan both start from the idea that tools shape thinking. Vygotsky looked at how a child takes in the signs of a culture. McLuhan looked at how a society’s dominant media reshape perception. The Vygotsky article covers the first.