Marshall McLuhans Understanding Media Essay -- McLuhan Understanding

marshall McLuhans Understanding MediaIn his groundbreaking work, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan posits that technologies in the electric car be on rendered it impossible for the individual to remain removed anymore . Over the course of the late 19th to early twentieth centuries, while an increasing presence of electric machines in daily intent irrefutably signaled our nations arrival into the electric age, confederations of import nervous system was technologically extended to involve each individual in the undivided of mankind, McLuhan states (20). Previously disconnected, isolated individuals and groups suddenly became compressed, involved in each others lives, and incorporate into a network. As opposed to the preceding mechanical age, this was an age that seek wholeness-- an aspiration that McLuhan refers to as a rude(a) adjunct of electric engineering (21). McLuhan believes that great progress was made in the electric age that wholeness was sought and worked tow ards eagerly. However, at the eddy of the century, three individualsthe philosopher, historian, and writer atomic number 1 Adams, the author Henry James, and the escape artist Harry Houdiniseemed to believe society was falling short of the goals that McLuhan claims it held. To these artists, the dreams of making everything seem attainable and everyone reachable were unrealistic complete global unification, involvement, and wholeness served as a foil for disintegrating interpersonal relations. These American artists saw technology not so much as a device that brings individuals together, but rather as a sum of escaping each other, individual social lives, as well as the constraints of the natural world. The Autobiography of Henry Adams, first printed privately in 19... ... not exit wholeness, grant individual freedom, and give Americans the infinite mobility they dream of. On the contrary, technology may cause separation, destruction, and confinement. The question of whether fut ure technologies will unite individuals peacefully or destroy civilizations ruthlessly is just as relevant, if not in fact more pressing today, at the turn of the twenty-first century, with a global presence of weapons of mass destruction haunting America, than it was at the turn of the 20th century. Based on his law of acceleration and increased danger, Adams superpower be surprised that America withstood two world wars and even entered the 21st century. But since we have, there is reason to hope that individuals and fellow nations may gallop to defy Adams fears that we may continue to jump headfirst into the future, and in doing so, eventually make progress.