Hatchet Job by Mark Kermode – review | Books | The Guardian

… Hatchet Job by Mark Kermode – review | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… In discussing the demise of the film projector's profession he glosses a well‑worn media studies shibboleth thus: "when it comes to the inevitable change from analogue to digital, the medium is not the message – at least, not in its entirety." This is an observation Kermode wishes to extend to every aspect of the web revolution, but I somehow doubt that he's ever actually read Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media; or, if he did, he simply cannot have understood it. McLuhan's point is that when it comes to the impact of new media on the human consciousness – both individual and collective – content is an irrelevance; we have to look not at what is on the screen, but how the screen is used. McLuhan saw in the early 1960s that all the brouhaha about what imagery was shown on television and what words were spoken was so much guff; the transformation from what he termed "the linear Gutenberg technology" to the "total field" one implied by the instantaneity of electricity was all that mattered, and this was a change in the human mind as well as the human hand. McLuhan's global village is indeed all about us now, and it already exhibits social, psychological and cultural behaviours that are entirely different from those implicit in the technologies of mass broadcast and individual, concentrated absorption.