MCLUHAN AND NAOMI KLEIN

Comparison of McLuhan and Naomi Klein Concepts

Comparison of McLuhan and Naomi Klein Concepts

McLuhan -Understanding Media "The Medium Is the Message"

“The message is the medium” is a phrase representative of the thought of Marshall McLuhan, philosopher Media Canada. It means that the nature of the media (the channel of transmission of a message) is more important than the meaning or the message itself. The phrase comes from the book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Understanding Media), released in 1964. In its work, McLuhan studied the relationship established between the content and the channel that carries it. The results of his research, on which he bases much of his theory, based on the phrase "the medium is the message".

According to McLuhan, the transmission medium through which we receive the message, that is to say the media has as much or more influence on us as the content itself. The way we perceive information is transformed by the media that we send. According to McLuhan, the way we perceive the messages is processed by the media. As explained by the filmmaker André Martin, we do not understand Shakespeare in the same way it was once understood as perceptions are modified.

How to address the issues, the basics, such space or time, have also changed and this change affects our civilization, let alone changes. The media is to say, the channel that allows the transmission (radio, television, newspapers, telephone, etc), creates an environment that acts on our sense perceptions. Our senses: taste, touch, hearing, smell and sight, react differently depending on the media. McLuhan said that media are extensions of us: the book is an extension of the eye; telephone and television are the extension of the nervous system (Appadurai, 1996).

According to McLuhan, "the man is not aware of the influence exerted upon him by the media, or if he discovers it, he discovers too late and will not surrender that he rose from the age of Gutenberg at the age of electricity once it has left the age of electricity”. If McLuhan is engaging in this reflection on the media, is to convince the man of their effects on behavior and it is no longer the victim of the instruments he invents and uses. For McLuhan, the new collective scattering techniques such as press, radio, television, film, and now the Internet, are extensions and tools of the human being.

The idea found throughout the works of McLuhan is in one sentence: "The message is the medium." This is not the content that affects society, but the transmission channel itself. A simple example to better understand this statement: print is a medium because it allows transmitting information from a transmitter to a receiver. As a medium, it is faster than speech transmitted by word of mouth, for example. But most of the time saved is the greatest distance covered by this printed in a time constant that is important (Thomas, 2002).

McLuhan is the message not only in the sense expressed ...