Critique of McLuhan's Technological determinism viewpoint or lack of one thereof -- Mentor Cana

Article here.

Mentor Cana notes two criticisms of McLuhan's ideas:

1. McLuhan excludes the process of technology innovation and social constructionism of media technologies in his argument

2. McLuhan oversimplifies the medium-message argument with the content being excluded in most cases. This leads McLuhan toward a "conclusion that media somehow have a life of their own independent of the context and social structures, thus attributing hegemonic like processes and properties to media technologies." The properties of media are manifestations of attributes that have been embedded within themselves as a result of a more complicated process of the play of context, socio-economic, and political factors.

The medium is the message.
The medium is kind of the message?
The medium is also a message.

Well, that I can hop on board with.

I had a hard time grasping that the technology had so much power and its effects had little to do with people and societies and their attributes and beliefs. Technologies indeed have social and political effects, but it would be wise to examine by whom they were developed. What social and political structures were in place when they were created? So Cana makes more sense to me.

One aspect of McLuhan's body of work that stuck out is the idea of people being unaware of the downfalls of technology and defenseless to its growth. On one level, it makes sense -- I consider the sometimes-significant effects of advertising on people. However, I've never been completely in the "poor defenseless humans" and "big bad technology" camp. So Cana's conclusion made a lot of sense to me:

"The conditions under which McLuhan could make lots of sense would be when media and communication technologies become so advanced that they could transparently and in totality, through complex web of advanced sensory probes, absorb into themselves the complex conditions of their environments, and at the same time be able to manifest the same into the environment. In these conditions, medium might be the message, media might posses in and by themselves hegemonic tendencies. But we are not there yet. I don’t believe we’ll ever get there."

And maybe we will get there. But as it is, let's not write off our ability to understand the effects of technology.

Or maybe that's what the machine wants me to think...