An Extensive Republic: Andie Tucher

"By the end of the Revolution, Americans had become accustomed to thinking of the press as a preserver of liberties and a guarantor of republicanism, the essential source of the information citizens needed to understand thier government, participate in it, and hold it accountable" (390)

Sounds great right? Yet, Tucher correctly follows this statement with two poignant questions:

"Which information? Whose truth?" (309)

I found this chapter very relatable to today's society. I don't have a basic cable in my house; the small tv that I have is used for DVDs only, so I miss much of the 'news.' My parents were never ones to have CNN on (unfortunately, if they were watching the news it was Fox); I never cultivated an interest in politics and government. I've always had the feeling that I couldn't make much of a difference--especially after reading lots of philosophy of technology. In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase "The medium is the message." He was interested in looking at how technology affected populations and propopsed that we should start to study the mediums we use to convey messages, rather than looking at the content (which is  obviously destructive). I've been thinking McLuhan's theory is one that might aid me in my understanding of why Americans during this time were so reliant on the press--it was their ONLY medium. McLuhan made this claim before we even had the internet, smart phones, tablets, etc., and I believe that MchLuhan was correct. If we focus only on the content we receive from such devices as harmful, we're still missing something. We miss the societal structural changes and how such mediums influence our lives. We've talked quite bit in class about the mediums we use to convey our place in society (displaying books, reading Kindles on planes and feeling like a snob), but I think something worth noting is that the medium, whether it be book, tablet, I-phone, laptop, carries a message itself and that there are social implications when we begin to rely on such mediums.

Perhaps this is just the paranoid luddite on my left shoulder (WARNING: reading too much dystopian science fiction will cause one to pop up), but what are the mediums we're using doing to our culture? our understanding of "self"? our constructions of "self"? And how has it changed our conception of culture in general when we we can communicate with people on the other side of the world with a click?