“The media are not toys; they should not be in the hands of Mother Goose and Peter Pan executives. They can be entrusted only to new artists, because they are art forms.” Marshall McLuhan, Counterblast (1953)
Don’t let new media fall into the hands of managers of big companies and their marketing departments. New media are safe with artists, because new media are art forms, media theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote in his seminal manifesto ‘Counterblast’. At that time McLuhan still was professor of English literature at the University of Toronto, but the imagination of the possibilities of new media pushed him with firm hands towards the slowly emerging media science.
Media as extensions
According to McLuhan new media — radio at that time, the first steps of television and budding pop culture — were meant to liberate mankind from the yoke of the literate society. From the media, emerging during the enlightenment, that enslaved us: typography and the printing press. To grasp the full meaning of the ideas of McLuhan it is important to understand his definition of media…
