"Critique of McLuhan’s Technological determinism viewpoint or lack of one thereof" by Mentor Cana

I did not enjoy reading this. It took me three times to finally make some sense of what Cana was trying to say.

Right from the start, I was unsure of what point Cana aimed to impress on the reader. "Critique of McLuhan's Technological determinism viewpoint or lack of one thereof?" Huh? Does he think McLuhan has a technological determinist point of view or not? I think that there is some technological determinism in McLuhan's ideas.

A major contention I have with Cana's essay is his assertion that McLuhan does "not address the process of technological innovation" and that the process of the coming-to-be of new technologies is something important that McLuhan is ignoring. The way I read McLuhan, he does address the process of technological innovation, however implicitly. In the excerpts from "Understanding Media" assigned in class, McLuhan says that in order to understand the technologies and extensions of man, we must first examine aspects of the media which begins with looking at the "never-explained numbness that each extension brings about in the individual and society." Cana also states that because Man creates these technologies, Man is actually in control. He seems to think that McLuhan suggests that once a technology exists, it is running the show. The feeling I got from reading McLuhan is that it a more entangled situation than that: Man has a need, Man creates technology to suit need, technology giveth and taketh from Man, Man creates new technology to account for downfalls of other technology, ad nauseum.

The first time I read through this piece, I was very resistant to buy into any of Cana's claims. But after re-reading it and re-reading the McLuhan piece, it all started to come together for me.

One point that I can come to grips with that Cana makes is that it is difficult to consider the content independently of the medium. Cana makes the assertion that, indeed, the content is dependents on the medium. And the message each delivers is not the same. However, McLuhan seems to have little interest in content, so I'm not sure Cana's point is very important in his critique. McLuhan makes the argument that the content of a medium is often another medium whose content is often yet another medium. It takes a while to bore through the layers of media to find the information that is being transmitted.

In the end, I think that Cana's ideas were bogged down by his language.