I have been examining media theory and came across Marshall McLuhan who theorised the idea of ‘The Rear View Mirror’ which essentially theorises that human nature deals with postmodern ideologies in the media by the inclusion of nostalgic influences (Theall, 1969). This is reiterated through the argument that designers weave intricate stories throughout their collections, consistently referencing history whilst exploring contemporary ideas and pondering the future and ‘styling both fears and hopes on the same body’ (R. Arnold)
McLuhan studies the media as a way of understanding what makes us live in the way we do.
Extension of our central nervous system.
Media as extensions of ourselves.
The Rear View mirror is the foreseeable future.
In terms of media, the thing that is occupying the rear view mirror is nostalgia.
“It is the persistent theme of this book that all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed”
“Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole
psychic and social complex. Some of the principle extensions, together with some of their psychic and social consequences, are studied in this book”
The security of translating something new into something which is familiar.
‘When faced with a totally new situation we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future’.
- Personal and social consequences of any medium/ any extensions of ourselves – results from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves.
- Mediums have a greater impact on the fundamental shape of society than the message that is delivered through that medium.
- The internet has had a massive impact on the way society interacts with one another.
- Not to discount the power of content and ideas because the idea of ‘medium’ is tied to the volume of the information that they (the internet/ mobile phone) carry.
- What’s powerful is the capacity – mediums extending our capability. Eg, Youtube’s capacity to deliver content. Ideas change our interactions, but mediums change the fundamental scale of those interactions.
- The mobile phone completely reshaped the personal habits and rituals of social gatherings – we have changed the way we think about clothing and its utility to accommodate our phones, for many, the location of the power outlets and plugs all but dictate how they arrange the public areas of the home.
- Mediums reshape social landscape.
- No arguments about ideas should ever be fully divorced from the mediums by which those ideas are delivered and the character of those mediums because more than just the way mediums shape our physical lives, they reshape the very nature of the content they deliver.
- How mediums imprinted themselves into the very fabric of any content that was delivered through them and how persistent exposure to that limitation alters social thought in the same way that the physical television alters the arrangement of the home.
- twitter users have to adjust to the way they think about their use of language to fit the character limit, this has a direct impact on vocabulary, grammar and the complexity of the communication.
- We as tool users view our tools as extensions of ourselves; the hammer is an extension of our arm, the car is an extension of our body, the camera an extension of our eyes, a photograph an extension of our memory.
- The internet is the pervasive and radical nature of mediums, the ability to get right down to the root of how we think about ourselves and our ability to interact with the world – it makes the medium so much more immediately potent than the content that is delivered over the medium.
- This is why social criticism is concerned with patterns like tropes and stereotypes and story formula because while we have been mostly talking about physical devices and software platforms, is a ‘genre’ a type of medium? The ‘three act’ structure is not a physical phenomenon, it’s an invention, it’s a tool.
- How do mediums you use shape the way we see the world?