Effect on Media Technology on our experience

Question #20:

Pick one media technology, and say how you think it has had an effect on our experience.

I would like to pick the printing press as one media technology, which I think has had a tremendous effect on our experience. Mcluhan said that the printing press was the first mechanization of a complex handicraft; and by creating an analytic sequence of step-by-step processes; it became the blueprint of all mechanization to follow. I will agree with Mcluhan here that prating press has repeatability as one of the important quality. Printing press has actually transformed the world since Gutenberg. Printing press ensure the modernization of industrialism, it shape the production and marketing procedures of all sectors from education to city planning. Printing press removed man from his traditional cultural tribal believe and showed him how be industrialized, modernized, and agglomerated. Through the printing press, man now knows how to read and write, what is happening in other nations. Through printing press, the spread of renaissance of culture after 1450 was accelerated; growing economic prosperity, which was as a result of peace and the decline of famine, which led to the founding of schools and colleges, was made possible by the printing press. The printing press made information readily available to a much larger segment of the population who were eager for information of any variety. Libraries could not store greater quantities of information at much lower cost. The printing press facilitated the dissemination and preservation of knowledge in standardized form. This is one of the significant effects on our experience, as it certainly initiated an information revolution. It did spread new ideas quickly and with greater impact. Printing press stimulated the literacy of lay people and eventually came to have a deep and lasting impact on our private lives. It provided a superior basis for scholarship and prevented further corruption of texts through hand copying. By giving all scholars the same text to work form, it made progress in critical scholarship and science faster and more reliable. In the view of the above, it is absolutely correct to say that the printing press, as one of the medical technology has had an effect on our experience.

Question #21:

Pick one sentence or phrase in the Mcluhan interview that you find interesting or important. Say why you picked it.

In the past, the effects of media were experienced more gradually, allowing the individual and society to absorb and cushion their impact to some degree. I found this sentence interesting and important because the electric media of today constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes which actually generates a great pain and identity loss, which can really be ameliorated through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. Mcluhan is saying here that if we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them, but we continue in self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves. Mcluhan is trying to trace and reveal the impact of media on man, from the beginning of recorded time to the present. The new technology was supposed to aid man in doing things more easily, with less time and labor and with more efficiency, but man has totally depended on the new technology to an extent that we are now slaves to the new technology. People now want technology to think for us. Technology is now controlling us instead of us controlling technology. Mcluhan is saying that societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media with which men communicate than by the content of the communication, and whenever a society develops an extension of itself, all other functions of that society tend to be transmuted to accommodate that new form; once any new technology penetrates a society, it saturates every institution of that society, hence new technology becomes a revolutionizing agent. This is very evident in today’s electric media and it was evidence several thousand years ago with the invention of the phonetic alphabet.