What Would MM Think?

Colin posed the question, "What would McLuhan think about our class?" Honestly, I think it would be a mix of excitement and anxiety. As Matt D. points out in the comments to Colin's post, there are increasing number of students using laptops during class time. During a media class, this could be both a positive and negative. When studying media, having the tools that you're discussing right in front of you could be a good thing, assuming that the said laptop is utilized correctly. However, at the same point, it seems to be McLuhan's exact fear of users blindly utilizing technology without thinking about it. In fact, it couldn't be a better example for it. Instead of paying attention in a class designed to talk about the intersections of old and new media types, people are absorbed into a piece of technology. It seems to be McLuhan times 10!

However, at the same point, McLuhan might be pleasantly surprised to see the increasing number of upper level classes that have media and the way it affects our lives on the syllabus. Let's face it, over the past 10 years, talking about emerging media in an academic environment has broadened tremendously. No longing does a student have to be in a Computer Science course to be able to seriously discuss technology. We all sit in an English class and have covered such topics as Twitter and Facebook, two technologies that have barely/not existed for 5 years. Forget about a history of scholarship, Trinity is offering a course on topics literally as they are taking hold. Rather than sitting back and allowing these new techs to blindly take over our lives, we've spent the better half of the semester critically engaging with alot of ideas and themes that many mainstream American's take for granted or even worse, don't even think about.

We now live in a time period where emerging tech takes significantly less time to reach a wide usage. For McLuhan, the speed in which computer and user interaction is moving would have to be worrisome. Rather than saying stop and think, people are flying into these new ideas without considering their impact. I'm not sure that McLuhan could have imagined the speed in which we now consume information, not to mention the number of ways that we can. However, the very fact that our class exists is proof enough that we need not be worried about these technologies, but must merely more carefully consider the advantages/disadvantages that they offer. I'm throwing it out there that McLuhan would be happy with our class, some minor quibbles aside. At the very least, he'd be happier with ours than with other classes, in which the same type of laptop use is permitted despite nothing on the syllabus that warrants their being there.