McLuhan Monday: Print and Islam, mobile gaming medium theory, McLuhan's relevance, and more

• In an article for Haaretz reflecting on last week's terror attacks in Paris, Michael Handelzalts invokes McLuhan's infamous aphorism in relation to the emergence of print culture in the Islamic world:

So, in the Muslim world, books and literacy became generally accessible (instead of being accessible only to the educated male and the wealthy) about a quarter of a millennium later than in European-Western culture. I found this information, together with an assessment of the damage this 250-year lag caused to Muslim society and culture, in the works of Muslim scholars.

This lag could be made up in the blink of an eye as the cultural world moved from Johannes Gutenberg’s galaxy into the era when “The medium is the message,” and with the development of the virtual and digital world (at the expense of the printed one, of course).

• Today the Santa Barbara Independent published an article by Dean Stewart looking at McLuhan's message 50 years after the publication of Understanding Media:

McLuhan had a lot of ideas and subsets of ideas. But he had one very big idea: that human civilization had passed through two stages of communication history, oral and print, and was embarking on another: electronic media. He believed the new media would change the way people relate to themselves and others and would change societies dramatically. Is the computer, then, the ubiquitous laptop and other devices, the McLuhan “audile-tactile” dream come true? There is no way to know. And it will take at least another 50 years to make a full evaluation of the work of Marshall McLuhan.

• At TechCrunch, Tadhg Kelly uses McLuhan's famous formula to consider how mobile games are marketed:

Taking a leaf from McLuhan then, I submit that the message is the product. The tone, approach and strategy of how marketing is conducted shapes what kinds of product can be allowed by a product’s developer. What kind of ad you’ll run determines what kind of game you’ll believe can work, and therefore what kind of game you’ll fund and make.

[...]

The medium is the message and the message is the product, remember. In Marvel’s case the medium of cinema sends the message of the big experience, and the message disseminated through a high value trailer leads to the will to make a high value product: a big splashy movie. That’s how it earned the right to be thought of as premium. That’s how games do that too.

• At Newsday, Clarence Page uses McLuhan's media theory to argue that the Internet can be used to undermine freedom:

When media guru Marshall McLuhan declared back in the 1960s that "Every innovation has within itself the seeds of its reversal," I had no idea what he meant. But, like his other catchy quotables -- "global village," "cool media," "the medium is the message" -- it stayed with me. Now, in the Internet age, I am seeing proof of his prophecy every day.

For example, McLuhan predicted that a rapidly expanding automobile culture would lead to more traffic jams, air pollution and longing for space to take long walks or ride bicycles. I'm sure he'd give a knowing I-told-you-so nod to today's battles between car people and bike people for asphalt space.

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But more recently and less happily, I see far more sinister seeds of reversal in this era's greatest innovation, the Internet. We greeted the Web as a liberator, but in today's age of terrorism and post-Cold War autocrats it also poses a growing menace to the press freedoms it otherwise has invigorated.

• Lastly, Hervé St-Louis at ComicBookBin considers whether McLuhan is still relevant:

Two common critiques of McLuhan’s are his obliviousness to political economy and his technological determinism. McLuhan’s prognosis on media appears to celebrate a burgeoning world order and global capitalism. The way he foreshadows cognitive capitalism appears deterministic. Critics attack McLuhan for being silent on the transformation of global capitalism. This criticism focuses on what McLuhan did not write inUnderstanding Media as opposed to what he did. It is interesting to note that European scholars, even those who with political economic inclinations do not scorn McLuhan the way North Americans do. They do not blame him for being the messenger of a cognitive capitalist message.

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McLuhan rightly described and to some extent predicted how messages need not be unidirectional. When he argued that technology is an extension of the senses, he did not argue that a select few had agency over the shaping of the message. He argued that any person had that potential. Specifically, he described how alternates modes of literacy allowed non literary people to participate in a global discourse. This is McLuhan’s legacy and part of why his work should be celebrated today.