Is McLuhan Still Relevant For Information and Communication Sciences? Some Reflections on the Topic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Marshall McLuhan (1911 − 1980) was a Canadian philosopher known primarily for his work in Media Theory. Famous for such phrases as “the media is the message” and later “the media is the massage” his background was in the history of the verbal arts, the trivium (traditionally consisting of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, although in his post-humous work Laws of Media, they are listed as grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics, probably reflecting how his thought on electronic communication technologies had changed his thinking). My basic contention is that McLuhan recognized the significance of historical patterns in language and communication and used this understanding as a means of interpreting the significance of the onset of electronic media. Among his many ideas that continue to be relevant was his recognition of how media shape the user albeit in ways that escape the awareness of said user. I suggest that McLuhan’s questions and historical sensibility are still pertinent and topical for those attempting to understand communication, information, and their social and psychic affects. In presenting his famous tetrad of questions, consciously modelling his work after the much earlier work of Francis Bacon and Giambattista Vico and intending to move to a “New Science”, he intended his questions to be readily applied by anyone to any technology in any situation, as follows: 1) What is enhanced or intensified?; 2) What is rendered obsolete or displaced?; 3) What is retrieved that was previously obsolesced?; and 4) What is produced or does it become when it is pressed to an extreme?. I believe that McLuhan’s work and questions still provide useful ways of beginning to understand the nature of consciousness and the significance of self-awareness as we attempt to work out who we are, what we do, and what it means.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".