Understanding Media Part II

Media is explained, as Marshall McLuhan saw it, as a staple in the same way that corn or oil is a commodity. For every new staple, there’s an adjustment in the society at large. There’s an adjustment taking place in society with the way we process media. The instantaneous nature of information leaves us numb to the ad wars that used to rivet the chattering classes and the pollsters. People are affected by their own version of news, be it conservative or liberal or moderate. We can adjust the thermostat, the temperature controls to hot, medium or low as we like it. That means that politicians and advertisers must figure out new ways to reach the customer.

Emails and embedded messages, the subliminal acceptance is always important. Repetition and branding, the idea that we watch an ad without really knowing what product is even being sold is vital in the new medium. As McLuhan saw it, the content can’t offer clues to the “magic behind the media”. Or to the subliminal changes that occur in society. Those changes are occurring now. Trump just stepped on the gas and pushed the pedal down in a slowly accepting public ensconced in a fast-moving media environment.

 A world where anything is possible

What was possible then? After the invention of the Gutenberg Printing Press, what followed? In order to explain the society and to understand our age of Mass Media as we assimilate into the Internet Age, we need to look at the master of media, Marshall McLuhan. Mcluhan wrote about media over fifty years ago, and the things he wrote about are just as relevant in today’s world.

 After Gutenberg, came the Medieval Guilds and individual enterprise, where before the printing press, individual business guilds couldn’t have existed under the feudal system. Trade monopolies emerged with the guilds. A sense of Nationalism triggered the rise of the first superpowers in Europe. The British Royal Navy, the Spanish Armada and on and on. The Revolutionary War with the printed words from Thomas Paine and his Common Sense pamphlets and the newspapers of Benjamin Franklin were made possible with the printing press. The splintering of the Christian religion from Catholic domination to Protestantism, after Martin Luther was able to post his Theses on the door of the church,  was only possible after Gutenberg. The American Civil War erupted from the roots of the writings of abolitionists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe with her best-seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin. None of these events would have been possible without Gutenberg and the Printing Press. Knowledge and information flowed ever more freely, and the masses became enlightened.

Now we look at the Internet. Already we are seeing such phenomena as the Arab Spring uprising, the rise of ISIS (not all things are necessarily good discoveries!), online dating, Facebook, Twitter and Social Media, Gaming, Drones, privacy issues and Big Brother, smartphones and cell phone tech, the rise of the Independent voters and the Utopian Dreamers who are all caught up in the constantly evolving Matrix that is only possible with the coming of the World Wide Web-the Internet.

 So many things we couldn’t have imagined without the Internet and the Computer Age. We are still in the early days of a great cultural shift. Where does this road lead?

(Stay tuned for the next installment...Where are we going with this?)

 

Notes from a Native: Know the Territory!

 

·        Some thoughts on the horrifically horrible week that just ended in Orlando. First the death of the young singer from "The Voice". Next, the worst mass shooting in US History. Now, an alligator kills a two year old at Walt Disney Resorts.

It's a sobering thought as we think of Orlando as a fun-filled resort town. Orlando's governing body have just had to find spaces to bury up to forty plus young people in their cemeteries...

   One thing that people who live in Florida know is that Disney was built on top of a swamp. And if you have small dogs and children, you don’t let them go to the edge of a lake alone.    Dogs are constantly being pulled under by gators. My cousin fought one off in Immokalee, Florida and she won! The gator let go of Dixie, her Golden Retriever. Sara Lee is petite, and her Golden was fairly large, but she was able to fend off the gator.

Scores of people have told me of gator attacks on dogs. And when some old gators are killed, they have been known to find many collars from hunting dogs that disappeared in the bowels of the Florida lakes.

Someone should let the people who come to Florida know the truth. Florida was not just this white sandy beach that popped up with pristine and manicured lawns. The Disney World land was carved out of a swampy area in Central Florida.

Florida is known as the Land of Flowers and beaches. But there is more to it than that. There are orange groves and sugar cane fields, there’s marshes and lakes and swamps and gators. All of these things are native to Florida. It’s not exactly the dark side, but it’s the side known only to Florida natives, and Florida Crackers.

Know the territory, as they said in “The Music Man”. You have to educate people about the history of a region, even if you are going to bill it as “the happiest place on Earth”. You should know that there’s another side to the land of Disney. Welcome to Florida, the Sunshine State, complete with Gators and mosquitos, with oranges and semi-automatic weapons and over-crowded highways. Know the Territory and Welcome to Florida!

A Return to Understanding Media

 

 To understand the phenomena that is Donald Trump, I went straight to the source. The source in terms of understanding media is Marshall McLuhan.  McLuhan wrote Understanding Media over 50 years ago, and I wanted to find out if the ideas that were revolutionary then might still apply in the Computer Age.

 

Sure enough, some of the controversies and media hype surrounding this campaign season were things that could be plugged in to the ideas McLuhan wrote about in the sixties. For example, the idea of subliminal acceptance was one that McLuhan equated to be like a prison without walls. “If you cannot see where you are going, how can you be free?”, he asks. In that sense, the type of mindless pabulum that we, as viewers and consumers of mass media, have been subjected to, not only in the political campaigns, but through television and electronic devices and mass media at large come into question.

 

We have become numb and disbelieve practically everything we hear or read! That’s one of the take-aways from this election season. It’s no wonder that the Pied Piper in the form of Donald Trump has mesmerized people by telling them to wake up. He is figuratively slapping people in the face and telling them to stop the subliminal acceptance that is around us. Bernie Sanders has done the same.

 It’s thinking outside the box that people profess to admire. And it’s akin to one of my favorite films. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy lives in a black and white world until she opens the door to Oz and discovers this beautiful new world surrounded by bright flowers and little people wearing gorgeously colored clothes. That is the figurative reasoning for the 21^st Century acceptance of the Trump phenomenon.