Blog Post Two/ tech lit narrative

ENG 1710 tech lit narrative

1. McLuhan had an interesting approach to answering questions. He never had a fixed answer to questions and preferred to observe things in a multidimensional way. Things aren’t simple and there almost isn’t always a single way of looking at things.
2. What did McLuhan mean when he wrote “The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way” ?
3. I.A Richards was a mentor of McLuhan and had influenced McLuhan’s philosophies and how he would write and interpret the world.
4. McLuhan believes with the invention of the alphabet previous human expressions were reduced to abstract visual code.
5. McLuhan believed in the evolution of different ages, Preliterate, Gutenberg age, and electronic age.
6. McLuhan’s investigating method called “probes”  was a way for McLuhan to gain insight into media and its effects. 
7. Did critics hate McLuhan’s “probes” because of his method of not committing fully to certain topics, and not having enough material to properly criticize him? 
8. What did McLuhan mean by “we become what we behold”?
9. What does McLuhan mean when he said “Transformed into writing, speech lost the quality it had in the age of acoustic space”
10. What are the differences between hot and cool media?

“Yet, while stepping into a newspaper is inevitable, McLuhan claimed that stepping back from it, to perceive it as an environment. Is indispensable to understanding its power and its effect”. 

(Pg. 14)

I believe this quote is one that really encompasses what McLuhan believed in and incorporated into his works. McLuhan believed in questioning all answers and methods and to not take things for what they are. McLuhan wanted the reader to really understand what it is they are reading and to not absorb information without thought. McLuhan describes “environment” as having power to shape people’s thinking and the way they see the world.

This image appears on page forty-three and what the image did was made me feel uneasy. Which is what I believe was the feeling the author was trying to invoke. Next to the image the quote states “the computer extends our central nervous system”. The image shows a human head with its nerves exposed and appears to replace the monitor with its head. The point of this image shows that the computer is an extension of our senses so in a way the computer is a medium that shapes our senses and the way we interact with the world around us. Whether good or bad the image gives me a sense of unease as to how digital technology is affecting us.