Oral Rhetoric 2008 :: Blog :: Phenomenology: My McLuhan Experience

O' the differences personality make!

I sit and listen to the radio-only McLuhan Predicts the World. After one minute my visual-learning brain finds the knicks in the wall, dust bunnies in the corner, the professor, the hat of a classmate, the clicks of a laptop, my purse, my pen, my paper, back to my purse, back to the professor, back to the dust bunnies. Fyi: these are called saccadic eye patterns, the different points of an image (in this case the whole classrom) your eyes dart to when evaluating, or just seeing it.

I noticed when I do not have images to accompany sound, I tend to lose the context of information presented to me, and although I listen, I do not follow as well as if I can see what I'm listening to.

Other students in the class commented they liked the radio McLuhan better because there were less visual distractions like background images, movements and sounds. They said it took away from what McLuhan was saying because the images were distracting; I find images focusing.

This is phenomenology. What I experienced was not what others experienced. They did not stare at pens and purses and professors, they sat quietly and listened. Others like me may have stared at cell phones, jackets, and red backs of chairs. Every experience was different. Perhaps classmates did not listen at all because his girlfriend needily texted him the entire class, or she just spilled coffee on her new pink suede boots. Every experience is different.

When the McLuhan Television Interview appeared onscreen I was intrigued, interested by the nuances of the conversation, watching for facial expressions to give away the real reaction to a tough or annoying question. I watched the interaction between the two men, their posture, their attire, do they fidget their hands when they talk? I like to have all of these signs to compose a deeper context behind what is simply heard without images. I like to know what is really going on in the interview. 

I noticed these men have two dominant personalities, neither one backed down in posture or facial expression. McLuhan is deliciously cool while Peter Gzowski did everything he could to rile him up. Their intertactions were playfully challenging, in good nature, but I will argue that each one hoped to leave the other at a loss for words.

The physical context of the interview gave a whole new level to the interview that just listening to a radio version would leave out to visual learners. Audio learners are likely adept at picking up clues like tone of voice, up and down nuances, and other cues visual learners are simply too distracted to pick up. Regardless of learning style, whats really going on in the listener, or watchers' life emotionally, or cognitively has a static effect on wether or not they listen or watch at all.