McLuhans idéer är svåra att sammanfatta, men det finns några centrala element som är värda att poängtera, konstaterar Peter Dahlgren, professor i medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap vid Lunds universitet. Han säger det i förordet till McLuhans bok Massmedia när den i Sverige gavs ut på nytt 1999.
"Bakom han mest kända slogan, att mediet är budskapet, kan vi se en djupgående tes konstaterar Peter Dahlgren och fortsätter. "McLuhan anser att de olika medierna utgör olika 'språk' det vill säga att varje enskilt medium har sina specifika villkor som möjliggör vissa framställningsformer, vissa tankesätt, vissa sorters upplevelser - och utesluter andra...
McLuhan har naturligtvis inte alla svar på frågorna kring mediesamhället men han har fortfarande mycket stimulerande att erbjuda den nyfikne som vill försöka förstå den medialiserade värld vi idag på gott och ont lever i."
Begripsam och fungerandemedier.se tar inte ställning till utsagorna utan ser de bara som viktiga infallsvinklar.
Bob Hanke, Sessional Assistant Professor, Communication Studies Program and Joint Graduate Programme in Communication & Culture, York University. Marshall McLuhan offered a critique of media that probed, among other social and psychic consequences, the shift from the experience of time to the experience of speed. Simultaneity, instantaneity and the uncertainty and unpredictability of living in the global present were among his concerns from early on; accelerating speed became a significant theme in his later, lesser known, writings. Instead of the evolution towards a global village of simultaneous social action and unified consciousness that McLuhan spoke of in the 1960s, during the 1970s he began to see new technologies of ultrarapid communication as giving impetus to greater acceleration with paradoxical effects and detrimental consequences. In his last posthumously published book The Global Village, he announced that we are no longer living in a community of speed, but at the ìbeginning of a speed of light society.î As technology penetrates the human and social body more deeply, McLuhan warned that we were not designed to live at the speed of light.
The later McLuhan began to rethink his earlier technotopian views of computing in order to observe the satisfactions and dissatisfactions, positive and negative results, of living in a ìspeed of light society.î About Bob Hanke Bob Hankeís work on McLuhan will appear in G. Genosko (Ed.), Marshall McLuhan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 2005) and P. Grosswiler (Ed.) Transforming McLuhan: Critical, Cultural and Postmodern Perspectives (Hampton Press, forthcoming). His has recently written on the political economy of Indymedia practice (Canadian Journal of Communication, forthcoming) and co-edited TOPIA 11, a special thematic issue on Culture and Technology. He is a co-founding member of CAMERA--Committee on Alternative Media Experimentation, Research & Analysis. CAMERAís first pilot video project is tentatively titled ìUnderstanding Media Poll-itics.î TOPIA - Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies in partnership with Probe 2004, the McLuhan International Festival of the Future The Underground, Drake Hotel, 1150 Queen St. W., Toronto. 2004