McLuhan in Reverse

About this book

"McLuhan's General Theory of Media (GToM) is developed despite the fact he claimed not to work from a theory. His GToM has been formulated from his writings and it consists of the following ten items: 1. probes; 2. figure/ground analysis; 3. the medium is the message; 4. the subliminal nature of ground or environment revealed only by the creation of an anti-environment; 5. the reversal of cause and effect; 6. the importance of percept over concept, a focus on the human sensorium and media as extensions of man; 7. the division of communication into the oral, written, and electric ages along with the notions of acoustic and visual space; 8. the notion of the global village; 9. media as environments and hence media ecology and finally, 10. the Laws of Media that states all media and all human artifacts: i. enhance some human function; ii. obsolesce a former way of performing that function; iii. retrieve something from the past and iv. when pushed far enough reverse or flip into a complimentary or opposite form. It is shown that McLuhan's GToM is about the reversals of a focus on ground rather than figure; the medium rather than its content; percepts rather than concepts; effects rather than causes among many others. It is posited that McLuhan's notion that "media are extension of man" flips into man as an extension of their digital media as their data becomes part of the digital system. It is also shown that McLuhan's GToM is a form of general systems thinking"--