Technological Determinism & McLuhan’s Ideas: Are his ideas strong or misleading?
Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian media scholar who had ideas related to technological determinism. According to Audiopedia, technological determinism is “a reductionist theory that presumes that a society’s technology drives the development of its social structure and cultural values.”
McLuhan’s ideas were brought to light with the growth of media and technology throughout the 1900s.The central focal point for all of McLuhan’s ideas was “a society dominated by an electronic media will differ from a print-dominated one because people relate to the world around them according to which senses they use to learn about it” (p. 135). This idea is valid in our world today because with our world dominated with technologies, we are able to gain information much faster than receiving it via print. For example, we are able to see information at our fingertips with the use of social media and do not have to wait to watch the news or for newspapers to be delivered. However, while we do have this digital world that is slowly dominating over our lives, there is a limitation to McLuhan’s idea, which is privacy. With print media, there is no way to determine what we are doing on a daily basis, but with digital media, companies that own the media analyze every move we make, whether it is scrolling on social media or shopping online.
Another one of McLuhan’s ideas is how electronic media can create a “global village” (p.136). This idea has two strong points which are that we are able to connect with people around the world and learn about other cultures. For example, because of social media platforms like Facebook, people are able to contact their family or friends that they may not see a lot as well as have online groups for people to interact in. However, a limitation with this idea is not everyone may have the most up to date technology or access to the Internet to be a part of the global village.
McLuhan’s ideas do have some useful, yet also misleading points. One of his ideas is known as the “extensions of man”, which is when the media is considered an additional tool for people to use (p. 135). I believe that this is one of the most pragmatic points because this is what the media should be for people: an additional tool for assisting with getting things accomplished instead of taking over our lives. However, a point of McLuhan’s that is misleading to me is his most well-known idea of “the media is the message”, where he “believed that the nature of the medium that was being used to share a message was more important than the actual content of the message being shared”, states Mission.org. I found this idea of his misleading since it should be the content that matters more than how the content is being distributed. Today there are so many issues of misleading information and false news being shared that it is trickier to know which medium is providing accurate information. For example, if the same information that is being shared was going to Facebook and Twitter, it would be more difficult to share through Twitter since there is a character limit unlike Facebook where there is a larger character limit. With this limitation, people who find that news on Twitter can be learning false information based on how the content is being presented.
