http://cptv.vo.llnwd.net/o2/ypmwebcontent/Catie/Where%20We%20Live%2009-12-2011.mp3
Marshall McLuhan was the prophet of today’s digital world. This year, he would have turned 100.
Try on, for example, this passage from the beginning of McLuhan’s most widely read work, “The Medium is the Massage.”
Youth instinctively understands the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth. This is the reason for the great alienation between generations. Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new environments created by electric informational media.
Sound at all like what happened with Twitter and the Arab spring? But to be fair, it also described what was already happening in the 1960s when many of his ideas took root - pictures from Vietnam, rock stars on television - a glimpse of counterculture in everyone’s living room.
But if McLuhan was right - the medium itself was the message - not the content. So what’s on the media horizon? What does Marshall McLuhan tell us about how we are today?
