The Media is The Message (new ForumSME)

Whith the parantal role of television today above statement would mean education is the message, an opinion I've always held.

Most people are likely to learn more from the media, than from school today, even more in times to come. Education is becoming more and more a personal agenda to insight and self-realization, more a selfdeveloping tool, than a mean to gain position. Thus the Web sure is the message of today.

That's why ATS is so important... to deny ignorance, and to go behind and further than Big Media.

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With that declaration I would like to introduce myself as the assigned SME to the forum of Education & Media. That's the fine badge in my avatar.

My task will be to keep an eye on civility and decorum in the threads --and you doen't seem to have trouble with the standards in general here seen-- so I'll more likely just see to that some threads might be moved, if they somehow should be misplaced within the boundaries of "Education & Media".

I cannot warn, ban or anything like that.
...but I can applaud, so better be nice.

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That the media is the message, we can discuss if you like. A revelation chocking society when Marshall McLuhan in 1967 broke the media wall with this statement work "The Medium is The Message", initially originating in his 1964 book "Understanding Media".

His first venture into the substance of media he did in 1962 in "The Gutenberg Galaxy" where he first time coined the phrase "The Global Village".

Here's a snippet from The Gutenberg Galaxy

McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the global village, a term which has predominantly negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy (a fact lost on its later popularizers):

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

Note again McLuhan's stress on the importance of awareness of a medium's cognitive effects. He argues that, if we are not vigilant to the effects of media's influence, the global village has the potential to become a place where totalitarianism and terror rule.

Another he coined.

Though the World Wide Web was invented thirty years after The Gutenberg Galaxy was published, McLuhan may have coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term "surfing" to refer to rapid, irregular and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements like "Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave." Paul Levinson's 1999 book Digital McLuhan explores the ways that McLuhan's work can be better understood through the lens of the digital revolution.