2019
McLuhan
Acrylic on fine art print, 29,7 x 42 cm
Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian philosopher. His work is one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" and the term "global village", and predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented.
"The medium is the message" is a phrase introduced in McLuhan's book "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man", published in 1964. McLuhan proposes that a medium itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself.
For McLuhan, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled "the scale and form of human association and action." Taking the movie as an example, he argued that the way this medium played with conceptions of speed and time transformed "the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure." Therefore, the message of the movie medium is this transition from "lineal connections" to "configurations."
As society's values, norms, and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium.
Already in the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence": when electronic media replaces visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the "global village".
Furthermore, McLuhan coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term "surfing" to refer to rapid, irregular, and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements such as "Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave."
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan)
Isabella Til’s work "McLuhan" refers to and honors the studies of this far-sighted but since the 80's somewhat forgotten media theoretician. Every sheet that would never have been created without digital media integrates and cites various media, which significantly changed people's relations and collective memory, such as printing, the telephone and the radio up to the computer, world wide web and smartphone.
