Research On McLuhan's Laws Of Media

As the "third school" of communication studies,north American Media Ecology focuses on the study of media technology itself.Marshall McLuhan as the main representative of this school,Laws of Media is one of his main media thoughts,which has attracted much attention and been full of controversy at the same time just like the theories of "media is the extensions of man","the medium is the message","hot and cold media" and "the global village".The four laws of "enhancement","obsolescence","retrieval" and "reversal" explain how media develops and evolves,and it is an important media analytical framework and method to study the evolution of media technology.The primary task of this study is to trace the theoretical roots of the Laws of Media.Based on the book "Laws of Media: The New Science",the interdisciplinary theoretical origin of the law of media is explored,which spans the fields of sociology,philosophy,linguistics,literature and communication.From Aristotle,Hegel,Richards,Leavis,Mumford to Innis and other scholars,looking for theoretical source of McLuhan's Laws of Media.Mumford incorporated technology into the history of human culture and analyzed the impact of technology on human and society,which was inherited by McLuhan and injected fresh water into his media theory.Based on Mumford's philosophy of technology,McLuhan put forward the famous theory of "media is the extensions of man" after continuous improvement.Innis believed that media had "time bias" and "space bias",McLuhan inherited,developed and surpassed Innis' s media research and put forward the theory of "sensory bias".After breaking the existing perceptual balance,the media will establish a new perceptual ratio and a new ecology balance.Media develops and evolves in a balance and unbalance ecology environment,which provides an important theoretical basis for the formation of the laws of media.Through systematical analysis and interpretation of McLuhan's major media theories,this paper emphatically analyzes McLuhan's media theories of "media is the extensions of man","numb narcissism" and "the reversal of overheated media",which provides an important theoretical foundation for the proposition of Laws of Media.Then,Laws of Media is explored and debated by combining with critical inheritance and extension of McLuhan's Laws of Media by Levinson,Gordon and Logan.Levinson's media theory research inherits and extends McLuhan's media theory,and he starts from the historical process of media development and evolution to study the interaction between media technology and people and society.Compared with Laws of Media,Levinson has different opinions and insights by putting forward the evolution of media theory of three stages "toy,mirror,art",and "remedial medium" and " anthropotropic" theory of media evolution to supplement and perfect McLuhan's four laws of media evolution of "enhancement","obsolescence","retrieval" and "reversal".Gordon edited the annotated edition of "Understanding Media: the Extentions of Man " to provide readers with a guide and key to understanding McLuhan's media thoughts,in addition,he further studied and interpreted McLuhan and his Laws of Media in numerous works.Like McLuhan,Logan as an interdisciplinary scholar who has made a comprehensive analysis of McLuhan's methodology,Logan analyzed "new media" with the tools of Laws of Media,and explained the importance of such viewpoints as appearance/background technique and the reversal of causality to the formation of Laws of Media.Laws of Media is a theory gradually formed in the process of McLuhan's media research,and an empirical product of McLuhan's media research.This theory is not a perfect theoretical exploration,and it requires more scholars to pay attention to and study it,to explore its value,and to systematically reflect on the Laws of Media through the analysis of the Laws of Media by Levinson,Gordon and Logan,Laws of Media is reflected on through Levinson and Logan's systematically analysis of Laws of Media."Humanistic concern" is the academic concern of media ecology,which is both the beginning and the end of the research on Laws of Media.McLuhan's Laws of Media offers a new perspective for the present media analysis,which takes care of people,society and technology,pays attention to the interactive symbiosis between people,technology and society to make them organically unified,thus facilitating the balance of media ecology.