Grand Finale

It is interesting that we complete our term with the reading of McLuhan. As McLuhan describes the new media as a tool he explains that the tools become extensions of ourselves. “Extensions involve mediation. Accordingly, it is not the extension, medium, ‘or machine’ but what one does with the machine that is ‘its meaning or message’” (McLuhan 7). We have spent a semester studying the tools that are forging or future of media. Whether it is Google, Wikipedia, Facebook or Twitter , our future of information gathering is changing: as it always does. Evolution is inevitable. It began when we went from oral traditions to written ones. The use of the type writer to the word processor has changed the way be perceive the way we create new information. The tools or extensions of ourselves are changing and they are changing us with them. The newspapers are dying out and the internet and all of its multimedia facets are soaring. The internet is where more and more people are going in order to find information. Many people, that were born and raised in times where they never have even needed to navigate the stacks , are learning to ask simple questions and receive simple answers.

The sheer accessibility of the tool has created the notion that “Google is making us stupid.” We as a society are more and more dependent upon our tools every day. The more and more that we rely on our tools, the more we do not rely on our selves, or memory or intellect thus leaving us as dependent upon the tools, whether it is a computer or a calculator society is being transformed. Marshall McLuhan knew this and explores it throughout his book. It seems that his book is a call to arms, so to speak. I feel that his intent to use interdisciplinary research to explore the power and the danger of the new media. He also understands that it is not going to go away; therefore we need to educate ourselves in order to combat the influence of these new and constant mediums.

His use of the light bulb idea is interesting because it works well as a metaphor for his book. He is, in effect, trying to illuminate his audience into understanding the need to educate ourselves on how to properly manipulate the tools that we use rather than letting them manipulate us.

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the way media work as environments (McLuhan 26).