Response: Understanding Media : The Extension of Man || Marshall McLuhan

Introduction + Challenge and Collapse

The passages seem to predominantly center on one specific idea - how is it possible to be able to distinguish local and global implications simultaneously. McLuhan gives several examples (and at times draws a little too heavily from the metaphors) such as the doctor diagnosing the patient, the man exerting tremendous energy for water from a well, the increase in production from slave labor, cars, etc... McLuhan makes a convincing argument, namely the soley the artist is able to remove themselves from the effects of new forms and stimuli and look at the global picture, but at the same time he implies that non-artists are incapable of being drawn in the newness of a innovation. This problem, according to the introduction, is particularly imposing due the recent explosion of digital meda and technologies that have attained another level of interaction past the electrical-mechanical and what can now only be referred to as the Dark Ages. Interactions are becoming increasingly rapid causing the interval between execution and evaluation to become ephemeral. With this falls the introspection of one's actions culiminating into what it elegantly portrayed as the equivalent of a mindless zombie.

On some levels I agree. Yes, techonology is advancing at an incredibly rapid pace and only recently are we beginning to study the implications of these technologies to the public. Yes, I agree that the artist is usually more prone to identify this evil doing and bring it to the attention of others. But no, I do not agree that the artist is the sole individual that is able to bring this to attention. This is a bit of a contradiction, partly due to the fact the word artist as defined by McLuhan is: 

The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his action and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness. 

My main counterargument against this view is this implication that the artist must do something (write a book, produce a theatrical production, or embed images on the street walls) to further their acknowledgements of the unforeseen implications of technological advance. Rather, in the act of producing a work, are they not contributing another technology to the world. Is their idea not novel, represented uniquely, ubiquitous? What stops an artist work from adding to the converging circle? Does an artist look at the implications of another artist's works?

I believe this question is left unanswered in these passages, leaving the artist as a being able to "sense ratios of the psychic and social outlook" but unable to move past that. McLuhan touches softly on the subject, mentioning that artist write " the history of the future for the present." Oddly, I feel that translates that all an artist can do is stay connected to the past (in this sense, the time past the immediate present) to gear for the future. It makes me hesitant to say that art should expose more people and create more artists (robot production imagery runs through my head), but then what are the implications of such an idea???