Marshall McLuhan: Pop Philosopher

McLuhan looked at the changing landscape of media and predicted a shift from a book culture to a culture of electronic media. Because of this he sees a shift in western thought as he notes a similar shift when the oral tradition shifted to a typographic media. Neil Postman puts it well when he writes, "This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas." To me this is a call to study emerging medias more closely as they offer insight into our developing discourse. Advertisers are already ahead of me here as the new philosophy in advertising is to "let the media be the content." In so doing, they hope to create buzz around the innovative new technology as opposed to the message. Here it is good to note that text messaging is the quickest growing media in the history of the world. What does this say about modern discourse? Impersonal or efficient?