Well, shall we begin?

First of all I wanted to say, when I had first imagined this I had hoped it would look somewhat like The Nib, in my technicolour media fuelled dreams I imagined infinite white scrolling space and professional cartoons, but the lack of <<funding, tech-support, time, knowledge>> has left us with the somewhat less classy mixture of typing and dorky illustrations… but a lot of heart.

Seeing as we are talking about the medium being the message, it feels somewhat revolutionary and rebellious to be bringing the world of ink into the world of the internet… I started thinking about what this blog would look like as a comic after reading Scott McCloud’s ‘Understanding Comics‘… McCloud argues, unlike McLuhan that the medium should never be mistaken for the messenger (his whole argument however is hinged on the fact that he is promoting comics as a serious medium that shouldn’t just be thought about in terms of Batman and Robin whisking around in tights…)

Mind you, McCloud doesn’t entirely avoid the McLuhan vortex by navigating his whole academic career as a speccy ink drawing yakking on about comics… the messenger literally becoming the media! (That’s Scott below btw).

To begin with I was somewhat sceptical about what McLuhan had to offer…

Even though I had to concede that what he was writing about was quite revolutionary …

I began to wonder how much of the fabric of my identity, the way I exist in the world was made up by and connected to the media around me…

I remember trying to explain to my parents once about what it was like to grow up in a world where you could remember watching 9/11 happening on your TV screen, how profoundly that changes your outlook, the way you navigate the world.

Where revolutions begin with text-messages and hashtags…

And oppressors’ actions can no longer remain invisible.

McLuhan does much to predict the connectedness of our world, and how much of this is not simply formed or shaped by, but actually a product of the medium.

On page 24 McLuhan writes a statement that is both extremely applicable to 401F, but also problematic in terms of discussing this issues that come up in First Nations Studies.

In this paragraph, McLuhan at once opens up a world of connection and responsibility; a reflection of campaigns, protests and revolutions such as the Arab Spring, #BlackLivesMatter and #NODAPL…

Although he spends some time discussing ‘The Age of Anxiety”, this is attributed to the disconnect between new ways of doing and old ways of being… rather than the political apathy that comes from hyper connectedness…

Perhaps even more problematic is McLuhan’s failure to expand his theory to be inclusive or open… Although he analyses the “idea” of “The Others”… he does very little to address the experiences and/or lived realities of “Othered” lives and bodies, or treat them as holding an equally valuable or rich with precious inner life..

Something that continues both in image and text throughout the entire work..

McLuhan’s idea of “tribal man”, “evolving” into the more “developed” culture of reading/writing/technology and then back full circle into the Global Village carries with it some pretty harmful and heavy colonial baggage…

For example:

“Until writing was invented, men lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror…”

McLuhan,  pg. 48, 1967

A somewhat problematic statement from someone who, although is trying to understand and begin to break down ways of knowing and ways of being,  is still ultimately trapped in a frame of Western ontological understanding…

 McLuhan envisaged the media world as a sort of pure new Utopia… Of infinite connection and understanding…

But at the same time I also wonder if he could fully comprehend what was lost, not simply through the clash of old ideologies and new technologies, but by actual true connectedness of being in the world…

Media allows us to touch and be touched so infinitely, yet at what cost? Surely our most important lesson in “growing up” into a world of media that is new to all of us, is learning to live well in spaces that we create in both realities.

One thing is for sure, media has expanded our world further than I even think McLuhan could imagine.

 

 

Works Referenced:

McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Jerome Agel, 1967.

McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics, Harper Perennial, 1994.

With apologies to Scott McCloud.