The Medium is the Massage (a response)

I found this book incredibly ahead of its time. It has been a very interesting experience to “meet” professor Marshall McLuhan.  As I see him right now, twenty-eight years after his death, is as a visionary.  And I feel free to make such a statement because the entire book is so bizarre and sophisticated. But not just that; I am sure the content itself was not easy to be accepted or understood by the common public when this book was published the first time in 1967.
Professor McLuhan mentions in this book that youth “instinctively understands the present environment (the electric drama.)”  I was very young when he died, and I never saw a computer before I was eleven or twelve years old; that is, about three to four years later.  Yet, McLuhan foresees what until this twenty-first century was not a common thing even in the most technologically advanced countries, such as Japan, Germany, or the United States. This is, the Internet, the lap-top computer, and the cell phone, for example. Not to mention the i-phone, or the i-pod, or the vehicles equipped up with DVD player, LCD or plasma screen, and GPS.
The title of the book can be virtually summarized by this phrase: “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”  This is a very powerful statement, but it makes so much sense when he goes in further detail to describe how human societies lived primarily “in an acoustic space, in the dark[ness]… of the mind” before alphabets were invented. Then it was the print media, which according to McLuhan, it created the public, and later electronic media came to create the mass; a global mass that understands the world in a very similar way due to such media.
Today, thanks to the Internet and the Television, too many people know too much about each other. An excellent example is Facebook and other Internet-based communities, in which automatically you can learn a big deal of things about others just by login into your personal account.  As McLuhan says: “All media have persuasive consequences on people, either personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social.”   This is, in my opinion, inarguably correct, and McLuhan actually goes in further detail when he says: “TV completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing. […] In T.V. you are the screen –images are projected at you—[…] this creates a sort of inwardness.”   And we can see this today as new generations are losing certain skills such as writing, performing basic mathematic equations, and so on, due to their reliance on different electronic devices and computer software. Also, video games support such withdraw from society (and the natural world), as kids spend too many hours per day in front of the screen.
Over all, I enjoyed reading this book and learning about this interesting character, Marshall McLuhan.