The Golden Age of Radio as Compared to the Internet
April 3, 2017
Here is an article going out to all those old fogies who remember when radio was the main source of news, entertainment, and communication. Me Shed Society compares the Golden Age of Radio to the continuous information stream known as the Internet and they discuss more in the article, “The Internet Does To The World What Radio Did To The World.”
The author focuses on Marshal McLuhan’s book Understanding Media and its basic idea, “The medium is the message.” There are three paragraphs that the author found provoking and still relevant, especially in today’s media craze times. The author suggests that if one were to replace the Hitler references with the Internet or any other influential person or medium, it would be interchangeable. The first paragraph states that Hitler’s rise to power is due in part to the new radio invention and mass media. The most profound paragraph is the second:
The power of radio to retribalize mankind, its almost instant reversal of individualism into collectivism, Fascist or Marxist, has gone unnoticed. So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain. It goes without saying that the universal ignoring of the psychic action of technology bespeaks some inherent function, some essential numbing of consciousness such as occurs under stress and shock conditions.
The third paragraph concludes that there should be some way to defend against media fallout, such as education and its foundations in dead tree formats, i.e. print.
Print, however, is falling out of favor, at least when it comes to the mass media, and education is built more on tests and meeting standards than fighting hysteria. Let us add another “-ism” to this list with the “extreme-ism” that runs rampant on the TV and the Internet.
Whitney Grace, April 3, 2017
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