Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Can you comment on this piece and correct grammar errors?
During a lecture at the University of Toronto, Marshall McLuhan stated his four laws of media: enhance, retrieve, reverse and obsolesce. By laws, I am apt to assume that he meant the four elements at which every technological advancement triggers. For example, if we were to take the cell phone as a technological advancement, we could say that it enhances and extends our ears, it obsolesces the need for humans to be social animals, it retrieves the idea of a global village and it reverses the effects of the cell phone by pushing us into physical social isolation. From my own experiences as a citizen of an urban era, I find myself to be in full agreement with McLuhan’s four laws of media. I believe that although technology has brought us many scientific discoveries, we still have to be cautious about using technology as a means of annihilating face to face communication with our fellow human beings. It is unfortunate that many people (including myself) see technological devices as animate objects when in truth they are inanimate and can only satisfy limited social and recreational desires. It is true that cell phones retrieve our human tribal needs, however, we seem to have somehow tricked ourselves in regards to what communication is- that is the combination of shared promises and experiences between two interacting humans. For this reason and from personal experiences, I believe that McLuhan’s laws of media are extremely relevant to our modern world.
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