In 1964, the Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan described the movie, radio, and TV as classroom without walls in his ground-breaking work Understanding Media. McLuhan was particularly interested how messages were extended from person to person giving space (and time) a completely new meaning in the pace of technological developments. Much have changed since the 1960’s and the views of the technological future, but I believe that McLuhan’s philosophical views on media are relevant in the perspectives of our contemporary time with constant challenges on knowledge and the development of learning tools. I have taught media and communication for the last 25 years, and my own discipline has undergone tremendous changes and what I taught students in 1995 is now more or less referred to the sub-discipline of media history. Many of the theoretical assumptions within the field of media and communication studies are still valid – but in a new light of digital communication and the digital convergence of media.
Media has always been part of education. Robert Park* wrote already in the 1920’s about the newspapers’ role for immigrants in developing language skills and gaining knowledge about the American society, and McLuhan stretched it further to the role of electronic media and how they became the space for education without boundaries.
* Park, R. (1925/1963). The Natural History of Newspapers. Reprinted in Wilbur Schramm (ed). Mass Communications. Urbana. University of Illinois Press.
Få nytt innehåll direkt till din inkorg.
The digital extension of space 