Marshall Mcfarlane's How Modernity Forgets

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Recommended: Media influence on communication

As we are introduced to the existence of new informational and communicational technologies within our society, it is valid to argue that our communication patterns and routines are being directly influenced by them. Since we use communication as a way of understanding ourselves, the people, and the world around us, the different media we use for communication can have major effects on our way of thinking and perceiving information. Marshall McLuhan metaphorically states “we shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us” (Module 5: From Exploration to Gutenberg Galaxy). This explains how using a new medium to convey our message has mental and social consequences on the individuals within society. These media of communication are not a separate …show more content…

To explore this further, one can argue that the rapidness and fluid quality of the internet, and the way it is able to provide us with information has made our process of digesting information just as rapid and passive. As McFarlane also mentions, it seems quantity and efficiency is valued more over quality and effectiveness in our day (McFarlane 2). In other words, the amount of information that is accessible to us contradicts the depth of our understanding of it. Moreover, the constant distraction, which is also one of the consequences of the internet, makes us passive against the information we receive, and changes how we decode and remember that information. We rely on finding relevant information at the click of a button, rather than properly building our knowledge and processing them through to our memory (Sparrow et al.). Consequently, we have developed a more surface-scratching approach of decoding information, which makes us more forgetful of the information we do take …show more content…

The transition between orality to literacy is what Ong and many other communication scholars believe is the most visible and significant transformation in our cultural, social, and even educational patterns (Ong 7). Ong also believes that writing is just like any other form of technology; he, in fact, argues that the technology of writing has made the most drastic change on society (Ong 81). In the primary oral society, speech was the main mode of communication, and consequently one’s face-to-face interactions and nonverbal communication was of great importance (Postman 23). Moreover, since they were not able to document any kind of information, or in other words, store information exosomatically as we do today, they relied solely on their memory to do the same tasks (Module 4: Role of Memory). In contrast, literate societies rely on external sources of information. This ultimately reduces the value of using one’s memory to store and recall information, and instead emphasizes learning new ways of how to access information exosomatically. Consequently, literate societies are capable of adapting to changes more rapidly compared to oral societies (Module 4: Oral Cultures). In addition, writing provided a platform for us, as a society, to create new forms of communicational media. In

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