My first post on the course's Wiki, a creative sharing website created for the course by our professor. The post reflects on Marshall McLuhan being interviewed in Playboy magazine. Often merely called "The Playboy Interview" http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/. This was the first work we read in our mass communications course and I encourage all of you to read it as well, at least with this blog post you will have a bit of help filtering through McLuhan's dense language and ideas. Just remember, it will make more and more sense as the interview goes on, don't give up early if you don't understand it right away.
The matrix is a system
I have looked at the matrix a number of ways throughout the years, from being just a good action movie, to being a perfect modern representation of Kafkaesque ideals. More recently I’ve started thinking of it in a whole new light thanks to McLuhan.
I’m not sure if the Wachowski brothers were students of McLuhan’s ideals, but it seems like they took a certain inspiration from them. When McLuhan talks about media being like the water that a fish is swimming in, how it doesn’t realize it’s there, reminded me of the matrix.
The technology, the media that we are merged with in our daily lives becomes so normal to us we become desensitised to its very presence. It’s just a natural thing, checking email, voicemail, calling people on cell phones, using our laptops, using the internet; it’s all just common practice. We do these things by instinct. McLuhan’s idea was that we need to detach ourselves from these processes and examine what’s happening to us because of them, before they consume us. His interview was a lot like a scene in the matrix called “the matrix is a system”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXQozTxQSiE
Morpheus (McLuhan) is informing the interviewer (Neo) about the way technology has taken over our lives so completely. He says “these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so immerged[1], so helplessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.” This sounds directly in line with McLuhan views, in that people in our society today could not survive without the technological connection that we have become so unwittingly dependent on. If someone were to come along and try to break the system to try to release these people from the media which controls them, people would not accept it and would fight against this person who is attempting to give them freedom.
We would see this person as an anarchist trying to hinder society, trying to undermine our vast array of technological advancements that make us who we are. But where does the technology stop being part of a computer and start being part of our consciousness? If we think of our email and our cell phones as an “extension” of ourselves, kind of an extra perception, a more efficient way of gathering information from others, faster. Then really that cell phone, that email, voicemail, etcetera, are as much a part of us as our eyes and ears. We use them as if they were merely another sense, that’s how natural they’ve become to us.
This whole topic has just been something that struck me whilst sitting in last Tuesday’s lecture. I suppose it could be a blog post [EDIT: it now is] but I decided to post something on our rather sparsely populated Wiki. This was mostly to give people another inference or perspective on McLuhan’s media consumption ideas.
[1] Defined interestingly enough as: to disappear by entering into any medium, as the moon into the shadow of the sun
No comments:
Post a Comment