“The Mechanical Bride” Notes

Making Connections: “These habits blind people to the real changes of our time” (McLuhan).

The world is more connected than ever, yet it has never been so disconnected at the same time. Humans, who were once unable to send letters across seas in under six months time are now able to send messages across the globe in a fraction of a second. With ability, we should know what’s going on everywhere, right? Humans may have developed all this technology to connection, yet we also developed the habit to skim. McLuhan discusses not how social media has caused us to develop this habit, but the newspaper did. This habit has expanded into today’s world and has only grown. When we view our phones, we scroll through and quickly view posts or articles, unless something of interest appears. We started this habit with the newspaper due to it’s jumbled formatting. In school, we may still be taught to analysis, but we do not carry this habit through everyday life because of our built in habits since we were given a cell phone.

 

Summary:

In this article, “The Mechanical Bride,” McLuhan describes how the newspaper relates to work Margaret Mead, Picasso and James Joyce, the cluster of visual material. He then relates physics to prove a point of, “They demand much greater exertions of intelligence and a much higher level of personal and social integrity than have existed previously” (McLuhan).  Continuing to relate works of art with the newspaper, McLuhan states, “The past is made immediately available as a working model for present political experiment.” Yet, he counters this statement by describing how people do not actually take in media by saying, “The sheer technique of world-wide news-gathering has created a new state of mind which has little to do with local or national political opinion” (McLuhan). In the article, he describes how humans do not absorb information because of the past layout of media, how it blinded man to the events around him. This habit has caused man to have no desire for information, as McLuhan claims, “The same man would rather dunk himself in the newspaper than have any esthetic or intellectual grasp of its character and meaning.”

 

Commentary: “This inside point of view would coincide with the practical point of view of the man who would rather eat the turtle than admire the design on its back. Industrial man is not unlike the turtle that is quite blind to the beauty of the shell which it has grown on its back” (McLuhan).

When I first read this statement, I was confused as to what McLuhan was really trying to say about industrial man. Obviously, the industrial man referred to the man of the 21st century, connected to the industry he has built and connected to people through his technology. What is the design that McLuhan discusses? I then realized that it is technology. We grew it, manufactured it to keep use secure, to keep people connected. Through it, we can do amazing things, yet the average male doesn’t realize it. As humans, we hide ourselves within our creation and let it consume our lives, yet we don’t admire what we originally made our design for. We created phones to stay connected to people, but now people give us a reason to stay connected to our phones. Instead of taking in the beauty of our design to stay open to the world, we use it to hide ourselves from it.