Marc Prensky response to Douglas Rushkoff

My reading of the quotation is that if people (like MB, but let's not use him as a scapegoat), see only the "entrancing" side of technologies (i.e. the harm they do) and don't strive to understand (and thereby anticipate and control) them so that their own goals get accomplished through them (and not by just going back, as in the second quote), and if these people focus instead only on their own personal pain and loss (e.g. "I love books--I would miss them") rather than on moving forward to the new stuff, then we have a problem.

McLuhan's point is that it is not the technology that causes the upheaval, but rather the movement and change, and that's what the "old" folk can't abide. They can't let go of books and say "today we tell the same stories in movies or games, or other media." Books (at least some books), told the stories very well, and this is not to negate that there is good in the books, but they are fast becoming an earlier way for an earlier time, just as unamplified, unenhanced music is (like it or not). I just re-read A Tale of Two Cities, and frankly, I think I could have gotten just as much (perhaps more) out of the classic comic, or a movie, or a good manga version, i.e. pretty much anything that that contained the story (sometimes nail-biting, but any medium can do that) and the only two parts worth remembering literally (i.e. the first sentence and the last.) Certainly the guillotine, which plays a gig role, could have become much more effective in media other than words.

Our same stories get retold and reinterpreted over and over again in the media of their times by the creators who figure out how to use those media effectively. (Some new stories get invented, and some of the best old interpretations survive thanks to recording techniques such as books, records, CDs DVDs or other media.) It's nice that we can still hear the original Beatles, but what survives, and what should, are their songs, however one interprets them.

All this said, it is kind of useless to bring old dead people (like McLuhan) into the conversation and then to fight over what they meant. Woody Allen got it right--either get him there there to speak for himself, or leave him out of it. :-)

M