Media Education

a. What is / are the tools and techniques being put into practice? 

b. What is / are the key issue(s) outlined in or underlying the text (think in terms of Green’s model: operational, cultural and critical)? Who's responsibility is it to teach critical medial literacy?

c. What are your feelings and opinions on the reading?

d. Be sure to reference the reading including author and page number

What is / are the tools and techniques being put into practice? 

The thought I found most striking in the McLuhan Speaks videos was this statement:

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Having been involved and interested in media for a while, I of course had read and researched a bit about Marhsall McLuhan but I’d always thought of him as the proponent of the information age. When he spoke about the shift in society's predominant communications to a mostly technologic one, and new media being the force behind social changes, I thought he saw this as the natural evolution of things, which by extension, was a good thing. In fact, McLuhan was interested to understand media as the predominant force behind modern culture, not to embrace it. His famous quote “The Medium is the Message” is an observation of the power the medium has on society and that power far out weights whatever the message actually is, but surprisingly to me, he did not love new media, nor was he a proponent. He sought to understand it so he would know how to mitigate its effects for him personally.

McLuhan really strove to understand the effects on our brains, our cultures and our global society as a means of knowing what to expect. He had no illusions that the global society would be any better than a national or local one, in fact he probably would not be surprised about the advent of cyber-bullying, or stalking as this would have been seen as a natural progression of the lack of privacy in this new age.

Related to the Jenkin’s reference, that schools” foster a critical understanding of media as one of the most powerful social, economic, political, and cultural institutions of our era” I believe his point is similar that, schools need to teach critical thinking skills related to new media. To analyze and understand the effects of video, print and other media and not take all messages at face value.

What is / are the key issue(s) outlined in or underlying the text (think in terms of Green’s model: operational, cultural and critical)? Who's responsibility is it to teach critical medial literacy?

McLuhan talked about Cool media and Hot media and described Cool media as being "low" in definition and information and it requiring that the audience participate to complete the experience. This is in some ways related to Jenkins idea that collective intelligence and community responsibility. Schools and classroom teaching needs to change due to electronic media, for one because kids are more sophisticated in their expectations and skills with digital media and would be bored and unchallenged but as the power and reach of new media enters the classroom, McLuhan’s idea of the global village is created. Kids can learn about other cultures directly from kids in those cultures, or see real data from a satellite or Google maps. Schools become the mediators and providers of these tools, and the kids are more and more creating their learning experiences.

Print reshaped the sensibility of Western man, for whereas he once saw experience as individual segments, as a collection of separate entities, man in the Renaissance saw life as he saw print--as a continuity, often with casual relationships. Print even made Protestantism possible, because the printed book, by enabling people to think alone, encouraged individual revelation.

As with art criticism in the early days of   initiating great transformations not only in social organization but human sensibilities. He suggests in "The Gutenberg Galaxy" that the invention of movable type shaped the culture of Western Europe from 1500 to 1900. The mass production of printed materials encouraged nationalism by allowing more rapid and wider spread of information than permitted by hand-written messages. The linear forms of print influenced music to repudiate the structure of repetition, as in Gregorian changes, for that of linear development, as in a symphony. Also, print reshaped the sensibility of Western man, for whereas he once saw experience as individual segments, as a collection of separate entities, man in the Renaissance saw life as he saw print--as a continuity, often with casual relationships. Print even made Protestantism possible, because the printed book, by enabling people to think alone, encouraged individual revelation. Finally: "All forms of mechanization emerge from movable type, for type is the prototype of all machines."

c. What are your feelings and opinions on the reading?

d. Be sure to reference the reading including author and page number

I think McLuhan was really a product of his age. Although he was the guru of the technological age, he really dreaded and was suspicious of the advent of this age and how it would change humanity, although he appeared to hold this as the natural evolution of the species. He was interested and concerned about how people are changed by the instruments they employ. I had always heard the term global village as a positive term, yet McLuhan really thought of this as an inevitable evolution towards a world of no privacy, and connectedness to the point of possible bloodshed, rather than utopia. As he mentions in McLuhan Speaks, “Electronic communications affords us more opportunities to interfere with and shape the future”.  His ideas that we are responsible for the effects of the outcomes of what we put out there in a world where we are interconnected and always on.