The Things We Make, Make Us

Jeep's commercial, released earlier this summer, wants to convince you that media ecology is true. Why? So you'll buy a Jeep. Because "The things we make (read: buy), make us."

A Conspiracy for Truth

The Catholic Monitor blog recently featured an older interview with Fr. John Hardon. It is a worthy read, but of particular interest is the following: 

Well, on that day when my confessor and I were in conversation, Father Mole showed me the letter which he had just received from McLuhan, and in the postscript of that letter McLuhan wrote this statement, "The modern media are engaged in a Luciferian conspiracy against the truth." Certain statements you never forget. And that was prophetic. Since I've been with the Holy See, from Pope Paul VI to the present pope, John Paul II, the popes have wanted Catholics to change that. Imagine the alternative: "The modern media are engaged in a Christlike, shall I use the word, conspiracy, for the truth."

Read the rest of the interview to see what else he has to say about media and martyrdom in our age.


via: Dr. Read Schuchardt

Media and Magisterium

The conditions attending the exercises of the magisterium of the Church in the twentieth century are such as to present an analogue with the first decade of the Christian Church. There is, on the one hand, the immediacy of interrelationship among Christians and non-Christians alike in a world where information moves at the speed of light. The populations of the world now co-exists in an extremely small space and in an instant of time. So far as the magisterium is concerned, it is as if the entire population of the world were present in a small room where perpetual dialogue was possible.

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light, 1973

The Patron Saint of TV

Did you know that TV has a patron saint? St. Clare, companion of St. Francis of Assissi and the foundress of the Poor Clares, is the patron of television. Why? Be enlightened by this video:

The Lonely Crowd

The reigning economic system is founded on isolation; at the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins all technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to television, also serve as weapons for that system as it strives to reinforce the isolation of "the lonely crowd." The spectacle is continually rediscovering its own basic assumptions -- and each time in a more concrete manner.

--Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967

Inside the Whale

This day in history:

Source

One thing that comes to mind that is not in that volume (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man) concerns the habit of new media in swallowing older media, transforming them strangely. Perhaps the latest example is the swallowing of film by TV. The press had swallowed the book, and film had swallowed the press earlier. This had gone on since the origin of script, as is magnificently illustrated by Eric Havelock in his Preface to Plato. When swallowed, the older media tend to become high-class art forms. The new medium is never considered an art form, but only a degradation of the older form. This piece could be called "Inside the Whale."

Marshall McLuhan, Letter to Ashley Montagu, August 10, 1964 

Letters of Marshall McLuhan

The Lonely Parish

The following says more about airplanes than parish life, but it certainly does raise questions about the nature of parish community:

In Canada, the old parishes depended on horse and buggy to bring in the neighbouring farmers. Then suddenly the car appeared, and yesterday's communities disappeared because people no longer came together long enough to get to know each other. What sort of parish did that create? Made up of individuals who didn't know each other? Little by little we became like strangers at an airport waiting for the same airplane. And once in the airplane, we tended not to talk to our fellow passengers. To separate us better, we were supplied with headsets which, instead, put us in touch with the rest of humanity.

Marshall McLuhan, interview w/ Pierre Babin, The Medium and the Light, 1977

Explaining Media Ecology

Source

The electric transformation causes us to resist and to reject the old visual culture, regardless of its value or relevance. These kinds of psychic oscillation resulting from large environmental change are no longer necessary, any more than the plague. Psychic diseases can now be treated for what they are, namely manifestations of the response to man-made technologies. Environmental noise and disturbance can be controlled as readily as the unhygienic conditions that prevailed until recent times. The psychic effects of TV are no more necessary than the physical effects of polluted drinking water. As long as people persist in ignoring the subliminal and hidden effects of media on psyche and society, they will attribute these things to the "will of God."

Marshall McLuhan, Letter to John W. Mole, O.M.I., The Medium and the Light, 1974

Marshall McLuhan: Enemy of Society or Intellectual Thug?

Source

I’ve already mentioned the recent post over at The Heresy Hunter, naming Marshall McLuhan an enemy of society, a “mass media mystifier,” and a Gnostic. The author of the hefty post, TH2, draws from a wide selection of McLuhan’s work, but unfortunately arrives at the conclusion that Marshall McLuhan is who all the techno-savvy people think he is: a technological prophet who foresaw and embraced a future, post-singularity world.

Most problematic in TH2’s analysis of McLuhan is his misunderstanding of several of McLuhan’s key ideas, especially “the medium is the message.” TH2 sees McLuhan’s (in)famous aphorism as an epistemological fallacy:

Note here that McLuhan's equalization of information with the commodity intimated his famous dictum "the medium is the message", i.e. medium = message, commodity = information or, philosophically abstracted, the thing is equal to the sign which represents that thing. The "medium" belongs to objective reality, and the "message" is the formal signification of that medium. Yet if a thing is made equivalent to a sign that represents that thing, all kinds of quandaries emerge in the area of epistemology. If the sign represented to the mind cannot be differentiated from thing in the world, if the message is not seen as really distinct from the physical medium, this would make understanding impossible. The distinction between the intelligible and sensible, the mind and the world, therefore become blurred, fused into one unit so to speak.

Yet this is not at all McLuhan’s goal. In saying “the medium is the message,” McLuhan hoped to shift the focus within the realm of media studies from the content of media to the media themselves. What is significant about watching television isn’t whether you are watching The Real World, Hannity & Colmes, or Monday night football, it is how the television affects what you are doing, how you think, and the social relationships between people. Thus, McLuhan said that “the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” We often ignore the medium itself as we investigate the content.

To explain why the medium is the message, McLuhan’s favorite illustration was the electric light:

The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it can have no 'content'. And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all. For it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is notices as a medium. Then it is not the light but the 'content' (or what is really another medium) that is noticed. (Understanding Media)

Unfortunately, TH2 misunderstands McLuhan again:

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.

McLuhan uses the word “content” in the common understanding: something contained within something else. In the context of media studies, the word refers to the information or subject matter contained within a medium. For television it is a television show; for the Internet, a website; for the telephone, a conversation; et cetera. McLuhan used the example of the electric light because it has no content in the traditional sense. This allowed McLuhan to show just how much influence the medium itself can have, without considering the content.

Further, his example of the electric light demonstrates his broad understanding of technology as “extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed.” TH2 seems to think that McLuhan “did not see a real distinction between man and his technological ‘extensions,’” for which he accuses him of ascribing mysterious qualities to technology (“a sure sign of Gnosticism”). Yet is this really mystifying? It is somewhat obvious that our tools increase the power and speed of some activity performed by our natural body (i.e. consider a shovel as an extension of your hand). Why does this become mystifying when applied to electric technology?

One particularly mystifying aspect that TH2 points out is McLuhan’s concept of the ‘global village,’ which he compares to the idea of monopsychism found in the work of Islamic philosopher Averroes. McLuhan:

Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. (Understanding Media)

The difference between electric technology and all previous technology for McLuhan is that where as non-electric technology extended our physical bodies, electric technology extends our consciousness. In fact, he went as far to say that computer technology was our externalized centralized nervous system. Many like to point to the combination of the Internet and the computer as embodying this exact notion (consider Wikipedia and IBM’s Watson). The Internet is a huge store of human knowledge, collectively developed and available to many. This is not really a mystical explanation. Though the technology that allows me to write this and you to read it would seem magical to anyone not born in the last century, it is old hat to us. McLuhan’s writing helps us to step back and consider our technology for how strange they really are.

Further, when you consider McLuhan’s more personal and religious writing (and interviews), it is clear that he was not the techno-prophet the singularity-types would like to make him:

Electric information environments being utterly ethereal fosters the illusion of the world as a spiritual substance. It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body, a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ. After all, the Prince of this World is a very great electric engineer. (The Medium and the Light, 72)

In fact, McLuhan undertook the study of media not because he wished to mystify the new electric technology, but because he thought that if we could understand our older media and the principles by which they operate, then “we could reduce or even eliminate the electric factor from our lives.” (Understanding Media, 131)

This deals with TH2’s main contention with McLuhan: “his prioritization of sensation and negation of linear/logical thought/understanding.” McLuhan saw linear thought, visual space, and individualism as functions of the phonetic alphabet and the printing press. With the introduction of the telegraph and the rest of the electric media, McLuhan saw us returning to an acoustic concept of space and tribal involvement with each other, so that individualism “has been scrubbed right off our culture.” He saw this change as problematic:

Christianity definitely supports the idea of a private, independent metaphysical substance of the self. Where the technologies supply no cultural basis for this individual, then Christianity is in for trouble. (The Medium and the Light, 85)

Though McLuhan’s work often focused on electric technology, his body of work, especially his letters and interviews, reveal that not only was he wary of electric technologies and the changes that they would bring to linear thought and the private individual, but through his study hoped to better our cultural education and provide a “civil defense against media fallout.”

Initially, his work is hard to understand, but given time and patience McLuhan provides a helpful framework for encountering our mediated society. Is he an enemy of society? I think not.