Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, written by Marshall McLuhan was the one that caught my eyes. The mentioning of picking one end of the other in my words, or in his perspective the splitting and dividing of all things is what I found interesting. In the society we are now, we are never more divided in terms of logical thinking. We are given so much freedom to pick a side and we are encouraged to have a stand on every option. As technology is growing, we are shifting from people working to automatic jobs according to the reading. Although the decision has a pro and con, what is affected is what we are learning from this trial and error. However the trends we are seeing today, mainly come from the media. 

McLuhan describes this as the medium, a method of describing and explaining things through perspectives. Although this is somewhat confusing, the meaning we get behind things we see and hear is all subjective. This is where it comes in terms of perspective. Technology and media is very exponential in growth, we are not sure what will change in a year, or five years. Progression on technology based on McLuhan is an extension of man. To me that just means that we are more connected but also more disconnected in other aspects. We get to share more information in the media, but the drawback is that we are more disconnected in that the “social norm”outweighs the problems we should fix. This quote from the article is what it sums it up to be. “Today when we want to get our bearings in our own culture, and have need to stand aside from the bias and pressure exerted by any technical form of human expression, we have only to visit a society where that particular form has not been felt, or a historical period in which it was unknown.”

Looking through his work on the other reading, I could see the methods he uses. It’s more of a perspective you get. You coming from a different background or looking at it on a different day or finding it somewhere different can all change your perspective. For example, the ones with the extensions of the _____. They are vague and if you put this in a clothing store for “Clothing is the Extensions of the skin”, gives a different meaning than putting this on a homeless shelter.

Overall, I like his meaning and methods of describing the importance of medium, in terms of creating and adapting to the middle ground is better than what other works we looked at in the beginning of the semester, which is teaching us that sometimes targeting one audience is the correct method too.