Are You Determined to Keep Up with Technology?
As technology is constantly changing, it is hard to keep up with. From the tribal paradigm (the era before printing) to the print paradigm to the electronic paradigm we have today, it is continuing to evolve. Technological determinism says that society’s technology determines its cultural values, social structures, and history. Marshall McLuhan figured out how media technologies affect the way humans think and relate to the world around them. The historical era has been the dominant communication medium of the time. We, as people change our social organization accordingly.
A limitation in this idea is that individuals are affected by the content. McLuhan basically says that the content doesn’t matter, it is the medium of the message that affects us. I find myself affected differently based on the type of content I watch, so I think it still matters. Our mobile phones are having a large impact on society making his global village feel a whole lot smaller. When he described this global village, technology was continuing to develop further. It seems the trend with technology is to stay inside in isolation rather than socializing with those around us. McLuhan also sees that the content of the media cannot be viewed independently to the media’s technologies. He said that the content of any new, current media is always the format of the media that came before it. Although this is true to an extent, it is hard to keep up with.
Although McLuhan’s ideas have their fair share of limitations, a society is in fact dominated by electronic media. Society today has their world controlled by social media as it is a way to stay connected. Do you find yourself going a day without social media? As much as I wish I could say I did, reality is, I never do. McLuhan also theorized electronic media will link up the world, which is more than true. In today’s world, we are not limited by geography to interact with people which further enforces his technological determinism idea.
Personally, I find his idea that technological development is predictable misleading since technology is constantly changing it is hard to keep up with. Technology is out of control. It is useful to know that technological inventions have a major impact on societies. It helps to understand why we are the way we are. We could use his theory to address the problems of society. McLuhan looked at the future as highly tactile and placed the main importance of a message in its medium or means of conveyance and not its content. How do you keep up with the evolving world of technology?
