The Other Environment
Monocle suggests that the new W. Terrence Gordon’s book about McLuhan should probably be a podcast. The idea comes in a straightforward McLuhanesque manner, ready to provoke reactions and even infuriate some probably resulting in more attention to the book itself, which is a good thing.
The beginning of the book drills on McLuhan’s idea of technology as catalyst for the development of new environments that both transform and contain their predecessors. The spatial metaphor to “express the idea of the medium as a message,” comes handy at a time when our understanding of the evolution of media has been obsessively focused on our own narrow definition of “mass media communications:” For example, we dwell on the question of whether or not newspapers will survive the internet while ignoring bigger questions related to the environment created by networked digital devices, which include citizens and their thought process as well as institutions, etc.
Daniel Henninger provides an excellent example in his WSJ column: “If indeed the Web and microprocessors have brought us to the doorsteps of a Marshall-meets-Milton world of individual choice as a personal ideology, then record companies, newspapers and old TV networks aren’t the only empires at risk. Public school systems run by static teachers unions may find themselves abandoned by young parents… ‘accessing’ K-8 education in unforeseen ways.”
Probably one of the most important contributions from McLuhan to our modern world can be found in “the broad sense of medium” that he envisioned a few decades ago, and which allows us to see media as extension of ourselves and therefore everywhere as environmental happenings that are produced by people but hardly controlled by anyone but the environment that they create. Understanding the environment as opposed to the more traditional concept of the medium is essential to truly see what's going on today in our very real "information
megalopolis."
Like most books in today's environment, Everyman's McLuhan is not confined to its physical form...