MEDIA - part two

Understanding "medium" in a broad sense.
McLuhan identified the light bulb as a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the message”.
A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect;
that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness.
Describing the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence"

Likewise, the message of a newscast about a heinous crime may be less about the individual news story itself — the content —
and more about the change in public attitude towards crime that the newscast engenders by the fact that such crimes are in effect
being brought into the home to watch over dinner [ think about it ? ]

The main concept of McLuhan's argument is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"),
which in turn affects social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook").

He believed that to fully grasp the effect of a new technology, one must examine figure (medium) and ground (context) together, since neither is completely intelligible without the other. We must study media in their historical context, particularly in relation to the technologies that preceded them. The present environment, itself made up of the effects of previous technologies, gives rise to new technologies, which, in their turn, further affect society and individuals.

...if a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world,
then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture...


McLuhan nije docekao eru interneta iako ju je uspjesno opisao i objasnio. What's next ?