McLuhan is known for coining the expressions
the medium is the message and the
global village, and for predicting the
World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented.
[4] Although he was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, his influence began to wane in the early 1970s.
[5] In the years after his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles.
[6] With the arrival of the internet, however, interest in his work and perspective has renewed.
[7][8][9]
《認識媒體 : 人的延伸》/ 麥克魯漢(Marshall McLuhan)著 ; 鄭明萱譯，台北市: 貓頭鷹出版, 2006
Marshall McLuhan and the Wired Future
Gregory McNamee - March 24, 2009
“As extension
of man the chair is a specialist ablation of the posterior, a sort of ablative
absolute of backside, whereas the couch extends the integral being.”
馬歇爾·麥克盧漢和有線的未來
格雷戈里·麥克納米 - 2009年3月24日
“作為擴展人的椅子後的專科消融，一種燒蝕絕對背面的，而沙發上擴展了整體之中。”
本書至少用了" implosion 內爆"27次
引文至少要包含上一句：
If the nineteenth century was the age of
the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch. As extension of man the chair is a
specialist ablation of the posterior, a sort of ablative absolute of backside,
whereas the couch extends the integral being. The psychiatrist employs the
couch, since it removes the temptation to express private points of view and
obviates the need to rationalize events.
做為人的延伸，座椅是後電臀的專工奪格化，算是臀部的一種獨立奪格，躺椅則延伸了整體存在。
*****
This 1961 report on the Glyndebourne Festival in Sussex, England, presents a rather dramatic contrast to the modern-day parks concert concept. Instead of loud cellphone talkers and cavorting children, women arrived in evening gowns and pearls and men wore tuxedos as they ate country picnics (with champagne) and played croquet.
The New York Philharmonic parks concerts recently brought free...
簡談麥克盧漢著《機器新娘》之翻譯
這篇是我的舊作： 2005.1.20
Marshall McLuhan（1911-80）大名人。在我讀大學的1971-75年間，他早已紅遍世界，我在『境與象』讀過同學翻譯的名作「媒介即信息」。那時候，台灣翻印業發達，我買過他與Quentin Fiore合作的圖文書The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects；（他們還有一本War and Peace in the Global Village，我沒買到）。
約20年之後，再買一本Reflection On and By MarshallMcLuhan（1911-80），這都不是他的經典作品。漢文世界對於他的作品之消化，或許約要再等50年。
本文主要為談論些Marshall McLuhan（1911-80）著作之翻譯品質。Marshall McLuhan的基本資料，可以參考繁體字網路的某些大學課程簡介。他的英文資料，更為「汗牛充棟」。
先以The Mechanical Bride:Folklore of Industrial Man（漢譯本：馬歇爾•麥克盧漢著《機器新娘》，何道寬譯，中國人民大學出版社，2004年10月版）。目前只能採取抽樣方式。日文本1968年由竹内書店出版：『機械の花嫁』（1968，井坂学訳，369p.，980日圓，這書2000年再版『機械の花嫁──産業社会のフォークロア』 ：竹内書店新社，369p. ISBN:4803500401，2000）
Peter Drucker 為
The Mechanical Bride by Marshall McLuhan (1951) 寫序、介紹。
他1980年12月31日過世，我在2004年之年尾，在網路上追讀他50幾年前的經典作品。The Mechanical Bride:Folklore of Industrial Man之漢譯本《機器新娘》--這本書圖文並茂，圖和其中的文案，都相當重要，最好要完全翻譯之，本書無法達成此標準。
我雖尚未取得整本的原文書參照，不過，我們可以從網路上找到其中的「50周年版(50th Anniversary Edition)之導言（Introduction by Philip B. Meggs）」與其中Freedom - American Style 等兩篇，中英對照校讀漢譯本，下了這判斷【Introduction一文中把sound bites誤讀為sound bits；Freedom - American Style一文中脫文「不少」】。不過，我一貫認為，本刊所談的都是高標準，而一般讀者或許只想想了解大概，所以即使是hc所批評的書，從「開卷有益」的觀點，都還是可以拿來讀讀的，起碼開眼界。《機器新娘》的譯者認真地作了300餘條腳注，雖然有些錯誤，不過相信對一般讀者有助益。我們談的翻譯上的「字句問題」，多屬於非關整體思想者。
翻譯者何道寬（１９４２-）為Marshall McLuhan 著作集的主要翻譯者：「（中共）政府津貼專家，深圳大學文學院副院長，語言文化翻譯研究所所長」，譯著「頗多」，不過，我們從這本《機器新娘》（麥克盧漢的第一本佳作）的翻譯質量來看（詳後），多少「很失望」，這多少也反映大陸學術和翻譯市場的痼疾。
要翻譯《機器新娘》及McLuhan之後的文集，可預見的困難相當多。，一是文本中所談的「汽車、廣告、電視」等等大眾化產業的社會-經濟-文化脈絡，台灣比美國「落後」（純中性用語）數十年，大陸比美國「落後」約五十年，翻譯者大多沒機會盛逢其會。現在幸虧internet發達，可以解決部分翻譯上的可能難題，否則，《機器新娘》等幾乎算「天書」（作了300餘條腳注，我認為還不足，我估計約需作500餘條「詳細而正確」的腳注，才能超脫純直譯字面的意思，稍為進入「了解」之境。）
*****
Understanding Media (1964)[edit]
McLuhan's most widely known work,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), is a pioneering study in media theory. Dismayed by the way people approached and used new media such as television, McLuhan famously argued that in the modern world "we live mythically and integrally ... but continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age."
[53]
McLuhan proposed that
media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study—popularly quoted as "the medium is the message". McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the
light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence."
[54] More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society—in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example—the effect of television on society would be identical.
[55] He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.
§"Hot" and "cool" media[edit]
In the first part of
Understanding Media, McLuhan also stated that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Some media, like the movies, were "hot"—that is, they enhance one single
sense, in this case
vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. McLuhan contrasted this with "cool" TV, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of the viewer to determine meaning, and
comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be "hot", intensifying one single sense "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book to be "cool" and "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value.
[56]
"Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue."
[57]
Hot media usually, but not always, provide complete involvement without considerable stimulus. For example, print occupies visual space, uses visual senses, but can immerse its reader. Hot media favour analytical precision, quantitative analysis and sequential ordering, as they are usually sequential, linear and logical. They emphasize one sense (for example, of sight or sound) over the others. For this reason, hot media also include
radio, as well as
film, the
lecture and
photography.
Cool media, on the other hand, are usually, but not always, those that provide little involvement with substantial stimulus. They require more active participation on the part of the user, including the perception of abstract patterning and simultaneous comprehension of all parts. Therefore, according to McLuhan cool media include
television, as well as the
seminar and
cartoons. McLuhan describes the term "cool media" as emerging from jazz and popular music and, in this context, is used to mean "detached."
[58]
This concept appears to force media into binary categories. However, McLuhan's hot and cool exist on a continuum: they are more correctly measured on a scale than as dichotomous terms.
[19]
§Critiques of Understanding Media[edit]
Some theorists have attacked McLuhan’s definition and treatment of the word "medium" for being too simplistic.
Umberto Eco, for instance, contends that McLuhan’s medium conflates channels, codes, and messages under the overarching term of the medium, confusing the vehicle, internal code, and content of a given message in his framework.
[59]
In
Media Manifestos,
Régis Debray also takes issue with McLuhan’s envisioning of the medium. Like Eco, he too is ill at ease with this reductionist approach, summarizing its ramifications as follows:
The list of objections could be and has been lengthened indefinitely: confusing technology itself with its use of the media makes of the media an abstract, undifferentiated force and produces its image in an imaginary "public" for mass consumption; the magical naivete of supposed causalities turns the media into a catch-all and contagious "mana"; apocalyptic millenarianism invents the figure of a homo mass-mediaticus without ties to historical and social context, and so on.
[59]
Furthermore, when
Wired interviewed him in 1995, Debray stated that he views McLuhan "more as a poet than a historian, a master of intellectual collage rather than a systematic analyst ... McLuhan overemphasizes the technology behind cultural change at the expense of the usage that the messages and codes make of that technology."
[60]
Dwight Macdonald, in turn, reproached McLuhan for his focus on television and for his "aphoristic" style of prose, which he believes left
Understanding Media filled with "contradictions, non-sequiturs, facts that are distorted and facts that are not facts, exaggerations, and chronic rhetorical vagueness."
[61]
The work of McLuhan was a particular culmination of an aesthetic theory which became, negatively, a social theory [...] It is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism [...] If the medium - whether print or television – is the cause, of all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history is at once reduced to effects. (Williams 1990, 126/7)
[61]
David Carr states that there has been a long line of "academics who have made a career out of deconstructing McLuhan’s effort to define the modern media ecosystem," whether it be due to what they see as McLuhan’s ignorance toward sociohistorical context or the style of his argument.
[62]
While some critics have taken issue with McLuhan’s writing style and mode of argument, McLuhan himself urged readers to think of his work as "probes" or "mosaics" offering a toolkit approach to thinking about the media. His eclectic writing style has also been praised for its postmodern sensibilities
[63] and suitability for virtual space.
[64]
§The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967)[edit]
The Medium Is the Massage, published in 1967, was McLuhan's best seller,
[8] "eventually selling nearly a million copies worldwide."
[65] Initiated by
Quentin Fiore,
[66] McLuhan adopted the term "massage" to denote the effect each medium has on the human
sensorium, taking inventory of the "effects" of numerous media in terms of how they "massage" the sensorium.
[67]
Fiore, at the time a prominent graphic designer and communications consultant, set about composing the visual illustration of these effects which were compiled by Jerome Agel. Near the beginning of the book, Fiore adopted a pattern in which an image demonstrating a media effect was presented with a textual synopsis on the facing page. The reader experiences a repeated shifting of analytic registers—from "reading" typographic print to "scanning" photographic facsimiles—reinforcing McLuhan's overarching argument in this book: namely, that each medium produces a different "massage" or "effect" on the human sensorium.
In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan also rehashed the argument—which first appeared in the Prologue to 1962's The Gutenberg Galaxy—that all media are "extensions" of our human senses, bodies and minds.
Finally, McLuhan described key points of change in how man has viewed the world and how these views were changed by the adoption of new media. "The technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth [century]", brought on by the adoption of fixed points of view and
perspective by typography, while "[t]he technique of the suspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century", brought on by the
bardabilities of radio, movies and television.
[68]
An audio recording version of McLuhan's famous work was made by Columbia Records. The recording consists of a pastiche of statements made by McLuhan
interrupted by other speakers, including people speaking in various
phonations and
falsettos, discordant sounds and 1960s incidental music in what could be considered a deliberate attempt to translate the disconnected images seen on TV into an audio format, resulting in the prevention of a connected stream of conscious thought. Various audio recording techniques and statements are used to illustrate the relationship between spoken, literary speech and the characteristics of electronic audio media. McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand called the recording "the 1967 equivalent of a McLuhan video."
[69]- "I wouldn't be seen dead with a living work of art."—'Old man' speaking
- "Drop this jiggery-pokery and talk straight turkey."—'Middle aged man' speaking
§War and Peace in the Global Village (1968)[edit]
McLuhan used
James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake, an inspiration for this study of war throughout history, as an indicator as to how war may be conducted in the future.
Joyce's
Wake is claimed to be a gigantic cryptogram which reveals a cyclic pattern for the whole history of man through its
Ten Thunders. Each "thunder" below is a 100-character portmanteau of other words to create a statement he likens to an effect that each technology has on the society into which it is introduced. In order to glean the most understanding out of each, the reader must break the portmanteau into separate words (and many of these are themselves
portmanteaus of words taken from multiple languages other than English) and speak them aloud for the spoken effect of each word. There is much dispute over what each portmanteau truly denotes.
McLuhan claims that the ten thunders in
Wake represent different stages in the history of man:
[70]
- Thunder 1: Paleolithic to Neolithic. Speech. Split of East/West. From herding to harnessing animals.
- Thunder 2: Clothing as weaponry. Enclosure of private parts. First social aggression.
- Thunder 3: Specialism. Centralism via wheel, transport, cities: civil life.
- Thunder 4: Markets and truck gardens. Patterns of nature submitted to greed and power.
- Thunder 5: Printing. Distortion and translation of human patterns and postures and pastors.
- Thunder 6: Industrial Revolution. Extreme development of print process and individualism.
- Thunder 7: Tribal man again. All choractors end up separate, private man. Return of choric.
- Thunder 8: Movies. Pop art, pop Kulch via tribal radio. Wedding of sight and sound.
- Thunder 9: Car and Plane. Both centralizing and decentralizing at once create cities in crisis. Speed and death.
- Thunder 10: Television. Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. The last thunder is a turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.
