Come un'introduzione. Il telegrafo è nello smartphone. Ri-esplorare i media a sessant'anni da Understanding Media di Marshall McLuhan = As an introduction. The telegraph is in the smartphone. Re-exploring the media sixty years after Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

Abstract

This paper discusses some of McLuhan's ideas on the media, presented in Understanding Media. The analysis is informed by the following research questions. First, what are media and how can they be distinguished? This question allows us to evaluate the relevance of McLuhan's definition of the media as "extensions of human beings" and to update the distinction between hot and cool media. Current media are the result of digital technology and its ability to re-mediate media that already existed in the 20th Century. All current media have high definition (like McLuhan's hot media) but involve high participation (like cool media do). Second question: is the definition of "global village" still relevant? We can say this label is more suitable for the social network environment than for the physical-social world. However, our digital global village is not hegemonized by the secondary orality generated by electric media, as in McLuhan's explorations. Instead, we experience a constant overlap between the written and oral dimensions. Finally, is the content of a medium always a previous medium? The answer to this question leads to the analysis of the device that holds all the media together today, that is, the smartphone, the new extension of current humanity