Marshall McLuhan Response Questions

• Briefly blog answers to the following questions from the reading:                                                                                   - “The medium is the message” is a catch phrase in our culture, especially in discussing new technologies.  Describe an instance in both your own experience and in the videos that you have seen thus far in the course where the content and the medium of a particular video or technology were inseparable.

         - How can media be “a prison without walls for its human users?” Give an example from your own experience and           a few examples from readings and/or art we have viewed.

-I don't think that any technology can be entirely inseparable from the content unless there is artistic intent for a medium to be the message. A technology can be invented for some particular purpose, but the way humanity responses to a technology is always unprecedented. In my own experience, the technology of a toothbrush and the act of scrubbing or cleaning something is almost inseparable, but I could also use a toothbrush as antlers when making a deer costume. In the stop motion movie of the sand creatures, the medium of the sand is inseparable to the content. The flowing, transformative, impermanent nature of sand creates the theme of the movie, as intended by the artist. In art, the medium is always the message and is most always inseparable.
-A media closes humanity's realm of imagination and behavior by limiting possibilities of what can or cannot exist. In 500 BCE, for example, the human race could not even imagine the existence of the internet. If the internet suddenly existed in that time period, it would literally completely transform the structure of their brains and their patterns of thought and behavior. The prison is completely ingrained in the way we perceive reality and is nearly inescapable (NEARLY not entirely! meditation!) It has no walls because we are blinded to the restrictions of our perception. Before the invention of microscopes, there was no possible way that we could know that we are made of tiny atoms which are made of mostly space. If you were able to communicate to a prehistoric human that our bodies are made mostly of space and energy, they would be entirely unable to conceive of that. In my own life, the use a cell phone is like a prison without walls. It is embedded within the fabric of modern society and it is nearly impossible to be active within the society without one. In all of the art we have watched, it is only able to exist due to a camcorder or digital camera. However, the machine connecting us to the documented art prevents us from experiencing the art in a 3-D immersive experience, something we cannot conceive of. The video of the street art stop motion is entirely dependent on a collective understanding of street art/graffiti, the technology of stop motion, and the structure of cities. If our minds were not imprisoned into understanding all of these elements, we would not understand what was happening within the art piece. Perhaps we would believe all of the things happening in the video were happening in real-time, like when the first audience in a movie theater jumped out out of their seats when they saw a train coming at them on the movie screen. In that moment, the way their minds construct reality were permanently transformed.