Todd Kappelman's critique of McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message"

I read this article before doing the other two readings, and it served as a nice introduction to what I was about to get into.

Kappelman's discussion of extenstions and amputations brought to mind something I've heard about the loss of one sense causing an enhancement in the others. For example, a blind person might have a superior sense of smell and of hearing. It also brought to mind the necessary polarity of progress, as in most aspects of life. Nothing comes for free -- there has to be some sort of sacrifice.

Kappelman notes that McLuhan is concerned with the extent to which humans ignore the amputations and focus only on the positive parts of extensions created by new technologies. He calls this "over-extension," and says it ends in a "reversal of the benefits." The example Kappelman uses -- the culture of high-speed transportation -- is a good one, and I found myself rationalizing why it's okay that we ignore the amputations of some aspects of it. It is indeed difficult to detach oneself, as McLuhan says we must, from a technological extension to truly analyze it.

The discussion of advertising was interesting to me. According the Kappelman, McLuhan saw advertising companies to be in control, but I think that time has changed this. Now, the consumer controls the advertisers, at least in part. Advertisers must bow down to our media-consumption habits and though sometimes they are sneaky (viral ads), they still have to follow our buying trends.

A conclusion I drew from this reading is that it seems we are constantly creating new technologies to make new extensions which make up for the amputations created with other technologies.