...It is not the increase of numbers in the world that creates our concern with population. Rather, it is the fact that everybody in the world has to live in the utmost proximity to created by our electric involvement in one another's lives. ... Departmental sovereignties have melted away as rapidly as national sovereignties under conditions of electric speed. Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. ... This reverse pattern appeared quite early in electrical "labor-saving" devices, whether a toaster or washing machine or vacuum cleaner. Instead of saving work, these devices permit everybody to do his own work. What the nineteenth century had delegated to servants and housemaids, we now do for ourselves. This principle applies in toto in the electric age.
This section of the text seems similar to Shirky's argument (Here Comes Everybody, page 66), that journalists are as outmoded as scribes when the printing press was invented. In the example above, washing machines have similarly made servants obsolete. McLuhan's description of the decentralization of electricity also could apply to the internet, where the ease of publishing is allowing many new voices to join the media conversation (albeit to a much smaller audience), than in the old media world, where you needed a printing press or a broadcast license to become part of the media. This passage from McLuhan could also be used to buttress Colin's argument in class, that young people will have to work faster in the future. In offices where secretaries did typing, minor writing, and filing a generation ago, now that work no longer requires as much time or skill, so it is computerized and spread around the staff (decentralized).
BUT... Does McLuhan's example about work at home still apply? There has been another change on the homefront since he wrote this book in 1964: Many more married women now work. This is another example of decentralization in the electric age, as both men and women are in the workforce. It could be argued that electricity contributed to the move of women into the workforce, after the feminist movement of the 1960's and 1970's. The home electric work saving devices McLuhan mentions, may also have given women in the home enough time to stop and think about whether they should be allowed to work, if they choose, or if their families might be better able to get by, if they were bringing home a paycheck.
Page 37
Will the techies driving the internet and inventing social media become the next "betrayers to power?" Perhaps by collecting massive amounts of information about people for the use of "authorities" like marketers, governments, or other organizations?
No comments:
Post a Comment