POCKET MCLUHAN FOR STUDENTS IN SCHOOL OF SOCIAL COMMUNICATION

Abstract

This is the first article I am presenting in the series Pensamiento divulgativo de la comunicación for students of the schools of social communication and related disciplines of the Social and Cultural Studies of Communication line of the Communication Research Center of the UCAB. We are encouraged to motivate interest in the authors who have thought about mass media and technologies in all areas of our lives. They can even provide us with some coordinates to improve our relationship with our environment, today, configured by networks, artificial intelligences and algorithms on demand. That is why McLuhan invites you to understand the world we live in through the social representations of the mass media and the Internet. I start from the idea that understanding the communicational ecology, where our experience with the media and virtual realities converge, will probably bring us closer to a more harmonious and genuine coexistence with ourselves and with human beings. Will this not be the supreme cyber-ontology as long as we remain in this world? This being so, we begin with our "pocket" author Marshall McLuhan, an expression that means to have at hand the essential thought of this Canadian intellectual, one of the first to recreate for us his worldview on the digital being of the 21st century through this powerful metaphor "the medium is the message", an extraordinary augury that made voices four decades before the appearance of the Internet and the network-society.