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Susie Wild is a poet, writer, journalist, critic, lecturer, festival organiser and editor with 25 years of editorial experience. She is the author of poetry collections 'Windfalls' (2021) and 'Better Houses' (2017). Her debut short story collection 'The Art of Contraception' was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2011. Her ebook novella 'Arrivals' was released in 2011. She edited the illustrated short story anthology 'Rarebit' for Parthian's 21st birthday. (All available via Parthian Books). She lives by a mountain in South Wales @Soozerama

Saturday 23 July 2011

Marshall McLuhan's ideas about media seem more insightful than ever


"I never really understood McLuhan's views about television, preferring the perspective of one of his disciples, Neil Postman, who argued that the essential thing about the medium was that it had an infantilising effect, a view neatly encapsulated in the title of his wonderful book about the medium, Amusing Ourselves to Death. But McLuhan's insight into the significance of dominant media, expressed in another aphorism – "We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us" – always seemed profound and came to seem more and more so as television gave way to the internet and the networked world that we now inhabit.
"The past few years, for example, have seen a series of angry and sometimes anguished debates about what a comprehensively networked ecosystem is doing to our children, our politics, our economies and even our brains. We wonder whether social networking might be fuelling political revolution, for example. And we ask if Google is making us stupid – or at any rate whether networked technology is reducing attention spans, devaluing memory and blurring the line between making online connections and forming real relationships. Over all of these contemporary debates looms the shadow of McLuhan, who now seems more insightful than ever."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/24/marshall-mcluhan-media-john-naughton

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