In this week’s readings Marshall McLuhan, a pop prophet and media visionary, gives us his thoughts and ideas about the media. The media explosion in which he describes was a series of explosions that will last us through and beyond our lifetimes such as the radio, television, and film. The second explosion in the media generation are the coming of video games and discs and cable. Perceptual numbing McLuhan describes is a stubborn insensitivity to all but the most extreme experiences in life. Another idea by McLuhan, depth involvement, is something in the media that may be undermining our confidence in the possibilities for first hand individual experience and reliable knowledge about events in the world. The irony of McLuhan’s achievement is that his description of media’s effects applies better to the new, second generation of media than to the initial generation of radio and television he was trying to describe. He saw that these two media explosions would create two possible alternatives. One was Utopian, in which people’s view with television would create a change in people’s views and perspectives with other media modes. There is a critical distance between the reader and his book, between the moviegoer and the screen. The videogame player becomes his game in a way that the reader does not become the book. He is saying that there is a gap between this types of innovations that have captured people in way that they have ignored the old ways of media.
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