Marshall McLuhan and the Next Normal

摘要

Marshall McLuhan had a long view of technological change. He defined technology very broadly-as any "extension of man"-and he was primarily interested in the eventual (and inevitable) cultural implications of a new technology. In McLuhan's model, people create technologies (or new "media") to fulfill a particular design intent; it is only later-often decades later-that the technologies manifest their cultural implications (what McLuhan called their "message"). This message-this emergent meaning-is often as unobserved as it is unanticipated. The message can wash over us and change us without our even knowing it.