McLuhan Reading

The reading was for this week was at best, a heady one. McLuhan has composed an article and idea here that requires a great deal of reflection and pause in order to understand it. The idea that communication and the message contained therein is one that is important to our study of history. These messages (whatever their form) can shape individuals and nations without thought, as they become a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. I find the quoted statement made by General David Sarnoff especially true: “We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them.” Much of the ‘problems’ that people experience today have tended to be directly related to their use of technology within their lives. Too much technology can detract from the individual’s ability to process and learn from the world around them, and processes like watching the news has people focus too much on the obvious (the content of the broadcast) in order to gain information. This however misses the structural changes that are contained within the story that are both subtle and take time to understand. For historians this makes the process of understanding and conveying historically long ideas and processes difficult, and hard to transmit to others.