Marshall McLuhan's "rear-view mirror" metaphor has long been one of my favorites - "we look at the present through a rear-view mirror, we march backwards into the future" (McLuhan & Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, 1967) - by which McLuhan meant that we first understand the future by relating it to the past. The danger of such initial perceptions is that we can miss and misunderstand important, unexpected impacts of new media. A radio is much more than a wireless (telegraph or telephone) - it brought into being the simultaneous mass audience, and was a powerful tool for good and bad political leaders ranging from FDR and Churchill to Hitler and Stalin.But I realized this morning, on a panel at the Lunacon science fiction convention, that the rear-view mirror not only obscures or distracts from the future, but does the same for the deeper past.
Think about it. All we see in the rear-view is what we immediately passed - not what we passed on the previous block or in the previous hour. Similarly, if we engage new media, technologies, and events by only their immediate predecessors, we lose sight of the deeper history from which they emerge.
Radio was not only not just a wireless, not only a simultaneous mass medium, but was a kind of public speaker's corner which went much further back in our history than the telephone and the telegraph. McLuhan did talk about these retrievals of the deeper past in his "laws of media," but they also have a role in what is unseen in the rear-view mirror.
Something to consider - how do our new technologies relate to the deeper past that stretches out far beyond and before the rear-view mirror...
5 comments:
Our new technologies leave us teetering on the verge of cacophony. So many "voices" are shouting at once that it is becoming impossible to know who to listen to.
It was the cacophony that drowned out the Cassandras* who were warning about things like Bernie Madoff and those many who warned that the sub-prime mortgage situation was a serious risk to the economy.
Verge of cacophony. That's a good book title. :)
*to any who do not know, Cassandra was a character in Greek storytelling who was cursed with the ability to see the future but never to be believed.
Actually, I think new new media are giving us the tools to deal with the many voices ... making it easier, not more difficult, to deal with what William James called the "blooming, buzzing confusion" - see New New Media...
Good to have your comment here, John!
While new media increases our capabilities, often the content of it is, as McLuhan said, the old media. Much of e-learning is of the page turner variety because it puts the textbook online. Better to put the content in a new media form such as an online game.
Excellent point, John G!
To your point Paul, the computing environment allows for a simultaneity of depth, ie--
I can read your latest article written this morning (directly in the rearview mirror)
or, I can delve as deep as I'd like into the archive and resurrect the 'distant' past of 7 months ago with this comment.
(Google scanning old books is another example)
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