Final project outline

INFO 390 Final Project Proposal
Jen Hanson & Aaron Geiger

Purpose: To challenge the notion of a specific portion of McLuhan's theory as it translates into today's technological society.

Content Options:
*p.9
Indeed, it is only too typical that the "content" of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.

*p.15
And it is only on those terms, standing aside from any structure or medium, that its pinciples and lines of force can be discerned. For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary. Prediction and control consist in avoiding this ubliminal state of Narcissus trance. But the greatest aid to this end is simply in knowing that the spell can occur immediately upon contact..

*p.17
...literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat pathetic. Especially the child, the cripple, the woman, and the colored person appear in a world of visual and typographic technology as victims of injustice.

*p.24
Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes.

*p.26
However, backward countries that have experienced little permeation with our own mechanical and specialist culture are much better able to confront and to understand electric technology. Not only have backward and nonindustrial cultures no specialist habits to overcome in their encournter with electromagnetism, but they have still much of their traditional oral culture that has the total unified "field" character of our new electromagnetism. Our old industrialized areas, having eroded their oral tradiitons automatically, are in the position of having to rediscover them in order to cope with the electric age.

*p.38
The new magnetic or world city will be static and iconic or inclusive.

*p.46
To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it.

*p.46
Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology....The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.

*p.49
In other words, the greatest school had been put out for human use before it has been thought out. Now, this is especially true of our media. They are put out long before they are thought out. In fact, their being put outside us tends to cancel the possibility of their being thought of at all.

*p.51
For the fate of implosion and interdependence is more terrible for Western man than the fate of explosion and independence for tribal man...On the other hand, since consciousness and awareness seem to be a human privilege, may it not be desirable to extend this condition to our hidden conflicts, both private and social?

*p.58
Under electric technology the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing.

*p.59
Perhaps there is a key to some of these problems in the Freudian idea that when we fail to translate some natural event or experience into conscious art we "repress" it.

*p. 64
The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be considered.

*p.68
Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves.