Hyperglyphics

Today my Writing for the Web students and I will be discussing McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” and a chapter from Amy Devitt’s A Theory of Genre, two texts that provide important theoretical grounding for this course.  Both McLuhan and Devitt warn us that medium and genre can constrain and limit us if we are, in McLuhan’s formulation, “unwary” (15). We are ever in danger of being entranced and hypnotized by media, leading us to make certain assumptions about the way the world operates without ever understanding that we have made the world operate that way by the extension of our technology - ourselves - into it. It is the same with genres. They constrain our expression by giving us prefabricated containers in which to place our thoughts and ideas, formulaic ways of responding to a rhetorical situation. But both Devitt and McLuhan argue that we need not remain under the spell of media and genre, that we can awaken and recognize that both media and genre are “extensions” of the human, a way of ordering, organizing, enabling. Such a project of extending ourselves into the world via technology means that the products of that technology - media, tools, templates, etc - necessarily impose certain assumptions on us that we must continually resist through an interrogation of the media and genres rather than a passive acceptance of them. That’s not to say we can’t effectively use these tools, but only if we take them and their role in our lives seriously. So that’s my justification for studying Twitter! While some Tweets may be trivial, the Twitter-verse is serious academic business.

Work Cited

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hil, 1964.