In this passage something stuck out to me more then anything. It was talked about how technology is an extension of ourselves. In this day and age we are no longer responsible for our own individualism but also the part of us in the technological world. Yet I find it funny how people treat this extension of themselves. One main analogy I can use is what my baseball coach told me. He told me that when a player is not doing well and is not succeeding he gets the blame. Kids tell the coach that what he taught does not work and causing him to fail. Then on the flip side when the kids succeed the coach gets no credit. Kids say THEY did it and THEY did great. No acknowledgment is given to the coach for helping. This all relates to the extension o ourselves. We tend to blame technology when they do not perform for use. We think the technology is ruining our image and ruining our technology extension. Then when technology performs greatly and does great we say we did it and it was all us. We need to realize that while we may be doing work ourselves we still need to respect our extension of ourselves.
-SOUTHPAW
Very interesting – what you described reminded me of the idea of postmodernity. We have become the tools of our tools. The things we own and use end up owning and using us. Yes, that last sentence is an extension of a quote from Fight Club which is one of the greatest movies ever made and must be watched if you never seen it. The film actually deals with a lot of the things McLuhan writes about, including postmodernity and the ways that messages are shaped by different mediums.
ReplyDeleteGoing back to what McLuhan was saying about how the content of a medium is always another medium, what do we blame when communication goes wrong in the heavily computer-mediated-communicative world we live in? If my ideas fail to get across you to you in this post, do I blame my computer? Your computer? The internet? Or do I blame myself for not taking into account the fact that all these things will ultimately alter my message?