Key Learning: ‘In what ways is the media an extension of ourselves?’
`We become what we behold. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.’ McLuhan
To understand this, is to understand much of Media Ecology!
A Recap and an New Concept
The Lenses of Media Studies (we have used during the course)
Task
Explore the evolution of media and the impact (superpowers) these new media tools have afforded humankind.
Take a copy of the image and insert it into a document.
Add callouts at each stage of the evolution of humankind and describe what new powers and abilities each stage has given to society, culture and the individual.
In essence, how has each stage of media development acted as an, ‘Extension of Man’? To coin a phrase from Marshall McLuhan.
Media and social evolution
Tribalisation, Detribalisation and Retribalisation…
Read this article from the BBC, which explores how media has acted to:
- Create human tribes
- Detribalise human groups
- Retribalise humans into groups
You can listen to an episode of The Digital Human that explore these ideas in the article in more detail here.
This is also a really useful article about social media and its negative impacts.
