McLuhan Galaxy

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The term McLuhan galaxy coined the sociologist Manuel Castells in his trilogy The Information Age from 1996 after the Canadian media theorist and visionary of the electronic age, Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980).

features

Castells sees television as the leading medium of the McLuhan galaxy , which has become the "dominant form of communication" ; For him, the McLuhan galaxy is characterized by the orientation of the other media towards television: even books are increasingly being written with the ulterior motive of being able to become scripts for television programs or thematized TV characters or topics that have been made popular by television .

The essential characteristic innovation of television consists "less in its centralizing power" or "its potential as a propaganda instrument " , but rather in its effect on ending the Gutenberg galaxy , i. H. "a communication system that was essentially dominated by the typographical understanding and the order of the phonetic alphabet" (Castells: Der Aufstieg der Netzwerkgesellschaft , p. 378 ff.)

The McLuhan galaxy represents the end of the Gutenberg galaxy and forms the transition to the Internet galaxy ; Castells means a media-genealogical connection that other theorists refer to as the Turing galaxy (Grassmuck 1995, Coy 1995). However, Vilém Flusser developed a considerably more radical connection scenario with the utopia of his telematic society .

From Marshall McLuhan's line of argument , a few more features and effects should be added. For McLuhan the end of the Gutenberg galaxy begins with the appearance of the medium electricity ; therefore he describes the epoch after the age of printing as the age of electricity :

"[...] it is typically the age in which we are aware of the unconscious. With our systematically numbed central nervous system, the task of consciously grasping and organizing is transferred to the physical life of the human being, so that for the first time he is expanding his Obviously, it could not have come before the age of electricity, which gave us the possibility of an instantaneous comprehension of the entire field " (McLuhan, Die magischen Kanal 1992, p. 64).

Castells distinction conceptually suggests that the McLuhan galaxy and the Internet galaxy represent clear turning points; This may make sense from a sociological point of view, but it is by no means compulsory in terms of media genealogy and may not even be meant by Castells: his thesis, the central thesis, is based on the rise of network society. McLuhan therefore sees the 20th century in a more differentiated way as a phase of long-lasting transition or transformation; he is aware that patterns of perception do not disappear ad hoc and that cultural upheavals do not occur spontaneously, but are embedded in a long phase of transition. For him, the change processes are much more profound and by no means only characterized by the exchange of what is known as a key medium.

McLuhan is more concerned with the change in sensory perception and the interruption of synaesthesia that have brought about the "great" media upheavals in human history - orality , literacy , printing and electricity . From this point of view, Castells McLuhan and the subsequent Internet galaxy belong to the same transformation process, which is by no means complete today and can possibly be described more as a future telematic society (Flusser) or a rhizome ( Deleuze / Guattari ).

Electronic age

For Marshall McLuhan , the Electronic Age follows the Gutenberg Galaxy . The invention of telegraphy meant the abolition of space and time, action and reaction happening almost simultaneously. McLuhan also calls the electronic age the “age of implosion”. This is in contrast to the Gutenberg galaxy as the age of the "explosion", which got this because information could now spread in space. The age of implosion, on the other hand, is so named because due to the simultaneity of telegraphy, time no longer played a role, space had now imploded, and information could now be transported from space to space without a time difference. For McLuhan, the electronic media mean a return to collective ways, to tribal-organizational behaviors of intensive participation. From now on the people in the community of the " global village " live in interdependence, a new form of oral tribal culture.

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