The Heresy Hunter Hunts McLuhan

The Heresy Hunter

The Heresy Hunter has a long (and when I say long, I mean L-O-N-G) post on why McLuhan the Mass Media Mystifier was Gnostic and a heretic (available here). The author has put some serious research. I don't agree with many of his conclusions, but I will quote what stood out to me on my first read, and in a couple of days try to draft a response.

"McLuhan was unmindful to this because he, like Hume, wrote that "the effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinion or concepts" [the mind], but at the level of "sense ratios or patterns of perception" [the body].

If "electric light" has no "content", if it is not substantial, then what is it? If it is not something that can be perceived (whether biologically or with some technical instrumentation), what is it? It cannot be something and nothing at the same time, as this is in defiance of the principle of contradiction.

Moreover, McLuhan wrote that light and power "eliminate" time and space.[29] But do they really? No. They only lessen the scales of "time and space factors" involved. They do not completely remove, effectuating an entire change in the character of technology. Rather, they noticeably reduce quantifiable magnitudes in a biological-sensorial sense.

As is now being evidenced, all kinds of fallacies are coming to the fore. This is simply because McLuhan presumed the medium to be equal to the message. When one really ponders the phrase "the medium is the message", it is classic Humeanism. The messages that man relays around the world are in themselves irretrievably tied in with the physical/technological contraption utilized to emit these messages or information, be it via satellite, television, radio, fax machine, internet, and so forth. The message, represented by universal signs, are fashioned to be equivalent to the medium, which is a singular thing or device. Information (in the forms of language, alphanumeric codes, graphical images, and so on) then become, not representations of commodities (things); instead, they are converted into commodities as such. To McLuhan there was, à la Hume, no distinction between the sensible and intelligible. The signs that communicate ideas to the mind, and the thing in the world as a really distinct existential unit from the mind, were not deemed as such by Marshall McLuhan. Again: he made understanding equivalent to technologically heightened sensation.

Thus TH2 [author of the post] concludes that Marshall McLuhan was a gnostic who mystified mass media. This is straightforwardly confirmed with the following:

The main obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of the new media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of view.[82]

As with any gnostic, ancient or modern, philosopher or scientist, the remission of specificity or "a fixed point of view" is an error betraying a propensity towards relativism, leading inescapingly to obscurantism. "

My response will follow, soon.