McLuhan’s
rear view mirror reflects that we come to understand every new technology by the ones that precede it. The car was first a horseless carriage, TV initially radio with talking heads attached to those voices, film apprpoached as time-shifted theatre.
We are initially numb to the newness of any new media, seeing it through the goggles of the old. But as we begin to create the terms that help us understand any new technology in its own right, we start to see the world around us through these new terms as well.
In the 14th century, with clock-making a dominant technology, the Universe was understood to run very much like the gears of those clocks. Now we speak of
weather as a feedback loop , and anaylse the
networks and variables that control the laws of physics.
These new terms may not describe our world as it truly functions, but the new metaphors helps us examine the working of the Universe through new perspectives. So a side-effect of new technology, outside of the actual technological ramifications, is the new vocabularly we create to understand it, and then, our world.
But McLuhan takes this a step further than i had ever considered, bringing the role of understanding new technology to an even higher plateau of importance, stating that new technology changes our relationship with our world. The new metaphors and terms not only allow us to understand our world in new ways, but to intervene in it in new ways.
‘When literacy arrived, the relationship between man and environment was changed by the new medium. Writing emphasised the visual rather than the oral and acoustic: “A goose quill put an end to talk, abolished mystery, gave us enclosed space and towns, brought roads and armies and bureaucracies.” It enabled us to lay out our thoughts in linear order and to conquer space by transporting them on paper.’
- Christopher Horrock, Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality
Onward and upward from there: