Rhetoric Is The Medium

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Rhetoric Is The Medium

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian communications theorist and educator. He taught in Canada and the U.S. He gained fame in the 1960s with his proposal that the electric media had a greater influence on the people than the information itself. This man who examined the electronic media, and the emergence of a Global village, was also the man who spent most of his life studying the power of rhetoric in relation to those ideas. Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born on July 21, 1911. He is a figure in twentieth century history that has influenced the minds of many. His work included the idea of the world creating a global village where we are going back to our tribal senses, the ones that the printing press abridged us from.
Marshall McLuhan's studies included his classifications of the media into hot and cool divisions, where the medium of communication has different type of interactions with its audience. He implied that the medium of communication had a negative effect on society, and said that we must be careful with the new technologies that the world has come up with. Our lives have came from tribal societies, and then transformed into societies where sight was more important than verbal abilities. We are, however, gradually going back tribal ideals with the invention of new media.
McLuhan has defined existence into four eras. His first era, the Pre-Literate Tribal Society was a face-to-face (lecture 4/14) medium of communication. There was a greater balance of the senses, and because there was no phonetic alphabet, an emphasis was put on hearing and speech. This society required more local forms of communication, which were spontaneous and inconstant. This was because the medium of those forms of communication had nothing written down. There was no keeping a consistent form of interpretation if the medium was always changing. McLuhan believed this tribal state of life to be the normal human condition
With the development of the phonetic alphabet and written down manuals, McLuhan developed a new stage for the world, the Manuscript era. According to McLuhan only a few had access to manuscripts, but more and more people were learning the alphabet, and the medium of communication was changing from ear to eye. As one sense gains supremacy, the other is de-emphasized.
The development of the printing press lead the world into a new era. This era, The Gutenberg Galaxy was the time where the eye basically cut all the other senses off. McLuhan st...

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