McLuhan’s Insights into Present Life

Marshall McLuhan wrote a short novel published in 1967 that explored insights still relevant today, maybe even more prevalent than ever before. He talked about the information technology era that began in the modern era and has developed into what we call postmodernism. Although not everything he wrote about is entirely true, there is a lot of truth to much of his writing. For example, how as we have moved into this information age we are changing the way that we do things previously from before. Education, specifically, is no longer an institutionalized means of learning. In the novel The Medium is the Massage McLuhan explores ways that society was developing during his time, which still resonate in today’s society.

McLuhan discussed how new mediums were changing the way children received their information and therefore their education. He noted that they were no longer as child-like as before. The role of the child had only been around for a couple hundred years, before that they were just absorbed into adulthood. I agree with his insights that “Today’s television child is attuned to up-to-the-minute ‘adult’ news — inflation, rioting, war, taxes, crime, bathing beauties — and is bewildered when he enters the nineteenth-century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules” (McLuhan 18). He was saying that after all the chaotic exposure these “adults”, who were really children, would be then throw into an institutionalized education system where order was key. The information available to these children showed them things beyond what the education systems were willing to teach, both good and bad. Kids are exposed with almost no limits especially these days with the internet and cell phones. McLuhan’s ideas are still relevant though because once they go to school they are expected to maintain order and be given lesser information. This is not something they are used to because outside of the educational system rules don’t exist when it comes to the network. In present society the exposure is even more than it was for people during McLuhan’s time, children are attached to technology at the hip. Before technology was more of a group activity were the whole family would listen to the same radio station or watch the same television show. Now kids stay in their rooms scanning the internet on their personal computers. Times have definitely changed but McLuhan’s ideas about children and the information age have basically continued to develop the same ideas.

I do think McLuhan was incorrect about his idea that children never grow up. In today’s society they have no choice but to grow up into adults. Although there are adult outlets to act like children, adult responsibility is encouraged and also necessary once children have to start acting like adults. McLuhan writes that “Today’s child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up — that is our new work, and it is total” (McLuhan 18). Young children are coddled and allowed to act like children as they develop, playing is a part of existing even if it is playing on the computer. It is all a part of the learning process for them. However, these children must grow up in order to survive in the world. There is a buffer of time, let’s call it adolescence, that gives these children some time to experience and make mistakes in an adult world. Once that is over they are no longer children and they are considered adults, grown up and ready to make it in the real world. Even during McLuhan’s time, children were allowed to act like children and then eventually as they grew up they had to act like adults. There are no two worlds that doesn’t allow children to grow up. There is just the real world and people overcome it in phases. First childhood then adulthood. I do wonder how McLuhan would see children in today’s world? Would he still think children don’t grow up? There is no choice but for children to grow up, but they are always allowed some time for childhood.

The novel The Medium is the Massage discusses how Marshall McLuhan saw the world during the start of technological advancement. Some of his ideas and theories do still carry truth to them today. Children are a main point for McLuhan’s ideas. He noted their existence is overwhelmed with information from advancing technologies and there learning is no longer done solely in a classroom setting. However, he was wrong in some aspects like that children never grow up. This is not true because these children have no choice to grow up and adapt into adults which eventually is just the accepted way of life.