Class 02 | Assignment: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Chapter 1: The Medium is the Message | Link
I must say “Understanding Media” is a hard read. There are some theories McLuhan’s examples I don’t understand. For instance, when he gave an example of Othello, a Shakespeare play, it just seems like he’s babbling about the way the play was communicated.
Anyway, my thoughts on the reading are that McLuhan’s theory of media or technology is that it's all about looking at media as a form of an extension of human’s senses. Radio expanded our senses of hearing, phone expanded our voices, printed books and television expanded our eyes, computer and electronic media now acted as our central nervous system where they were once limited.
In addition, the reading revealed that the influences of media/technology is more than its content and these technological advances manifested its impact in all types of medium. At the beginning of the chapter, he mentioned that airplane as a mean to commute to work speed up the existing means to get to the destination, it connected us to work and business to home where we take leisure. Media and technology consequently maneuvered its way and its influences, good and bad into our everyday lives routine. This means that we always link to everything, in particularly to work, the idea of taking a rest at home away from the office, a two separate entity are slowly becoming one.
The creation of airplane also contributed to this concept, although airplanes are convenient, it reduced the time of commute from one place to another, it took away conventional means of transportation like railways where one used to enjoy the journey and does not always care about the destination. Personally, I feel like I want to get from one place to another as fast as possible.
We don’t often realize the media’s effects that it’s little by little slowly numbing one part of our sensation while straightening another part of our sense, which I do find convincing. We have to start thinking that technology is a part of our physical body, a limb that we, humans has created and begin to explore its implications and having the ability to control it as well.
Class 02 | Assignment: Build a simple Express application which takes in data from a form and outputs the results on an HTML page. One example might be a quote generator or you could build a guestbook.