New Media Theory and Marshall McLuhan
Our remediation of Marshall McLuhan's New Media theory will be by representation of a hypothetical city that has been started by committed supporters of McLuhan's theory. The societal and physical system will be structured after the core values set forth by McLuhan such as the global village, hot and cold media, electronic media and ultimately the town motto of "the media is the massage". The benefits of living in such a society will be highlighted via a photo slideshow with both video clips and photos of various aspects of the city. The housing accommodations along with technology availability within both the urban and rural settings. Also technological innovations which are present throughout the city will be touched on along with their purpose and benefits to the residents.
Handing out tactile material to the audience, such as brochures, have garnered consideration and will be included if they contribute to the overall project's message. The purpose of our final project is to have viable model of a thriving city based on the foundational New Media theory of Marshall McLuhan. Our main considerations will be the city setup and internal structure of the living quarters. Also to focus on how educational, legislation, and community systems would be structured and how they would function. The presentation style will be similar to a development meeting of a potential addition to a city with a voiceover to again highlight the benefits of choosing to live there.
To create an example of such a society, different aspects of the assumed public must be examined. In the case of children and education, for instance, students at "McLuhan Elementary" would quickly learn the concepts of hieroglyphics and ideograms and electronic media at the same pace "outside" children would learn phonetics and the alphabet. In terms of hot and cold media, the citizens will not watch television (a "cold" media), but settle for watching cinematic sequences on their laptops ("hot" media). Radios and newsprint adorn the households. Citizens are enamored with lectures, and attend them daily, however seminars are disdained and physically do not exist.
Due to everyone in this hypothetical city following McLuhan's New Media theory, McLuhan's "Global Village" theory is upheld in a manner reflecting a self-induced paradox. It is also possible that by utilizing the mantra "the media is the massage," citizens are perpetually experimenting with their sources of media. For example, one person takes pictures of the newspaper headline story, and emails the news to a friend, who then prints out the email and creates a silkscreen of the print image and puts it onto a t-shirt that he gives his wife. His wife won't wear the shirt, instead she uses it in place of the American flag. This type of process is prominent within the city and helps to tie together the "global village".
No comments:
Post a Comment