Marshall McLuhan: Enemy of Society or Intellectual Thug?

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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.

AVATAR: The Future of the World

Is not the mechanical at its best a remarkable approximation to the organic? 

-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964


Most reviews of Avatar described it as a sort of sci-fi retelling of Pocahontas or Dances with Wolves. Jake Sully enters the world of the Na’vi to get the inside scoop on this group threatening the economic interests of the humans, much like John Smith or Lt. Dunbar. But a much more interesting message reveals itself to us if we consider McLuhan’s thoughts about art in Understanding Media:

No society has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extensions or technologies. Today we have begun to sense that art may be able to provide such immunity.

The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs. He, then, builds models or Noah’s arks for facing the change that is at hand. 

The folks over at Metaphilm have a sense that movies may be able to provide us with immunity to technological change, if we try to “see through” them to the real message. As Fr. Barron says about the Dances with Wolves plot in Avatar, it really seems like something that would only appeal to a 14-year-old boy. Yet, as the viewer identifies more and more with the Na’vi people and less with the human antagonists, we sense that Cameron is playing with us.

The technology used by the humans in the movie is cool, but not unimaginable (that cool computer screen hand manipulation is demonstrated at a TEDtalk), except for the technology that allows Sully to enter the Na’vi body. But the technology that really steals the show is the interconnectedness of the Na’vi people to each other and their environment.  There is a scene where Sigourney Weaver’s character, Dr. Augustine, is studying a tree root and is amazed at the networking capabilities she finds. We see these capabilities utilized by the Ethernet-like braid extending from the back of all Na’vi heads that they use to communicate with Eywa--the Mother Nature-esque deity—and all the animals on their planet. Reminiscent of how Neo and company enter the Matrix, these braids connect the Na’vi completely and seamlessly with their entire planet, rather than pulling the wool over the eyes of the human race.

Avatar may really be best understood as the flipside of The Matrix. In his avatar, the world that Sully enters becomes more real to him than his human-embodied life, so much so that the movie shows him becoming more of a visitor in his human body and more connected to his Na'vi avatar. By the end, taking the blue pill, Sully abandons his human body for his avatar. This action is perfectly understandable, as the audience has seen the destruction and brutality of the human race in contrast with the peacefulness and community of the Na’vi. Why would Sully choose to live in a disjointed, violent society in his imperfect body when he could live in perfect harmony with a “body like Shaq that moves like Kobe”?

The Na’vi people represent our cultural ideal for technology, especially since the internet. We want our technology to bring us closer together, to connect us in a beautiful web that nature could never accomplish. Cameron shows his vision of the future, wherein the mechanical doesn’t just approximate the organic, it is organic. With Avatar and The Matrix, we are given two visions of our technology.

We are also given two very different versions of people interacting with technology, which is most likely influenced by changes in how we used to interact with the internet and the changes that are still occuring with the advent of the social media--Twitter, Facebook and the like. The realm of computers and the internet used to be mostly for solitary types who were into technology, but these days, who isn't into technology? In America, technology is quickly becoming as universal a conversation topic as the weather--everyone understands the annoyance of a mysterious bad connection or the tragedy/joy when your computer breaks days after/before the warranty expires. Computer technology and the internet especially have become the new centers of our mediated lives, and if that was the fear of The Matrix, Avatar shows that we have nothing to fear and should embrace our new environment.

The mentality the Singularity movement--which you can read about here--takes to technological evolution is similar to the Noah's ark that Cameron built for us to face the technological changes that are coming. Avatar is a movie about "the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state. At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past." Cameron's movie beautifully expresses this dream, but we must wonder if the dream will change as dramatically as it has since The Matrix.


See also the review of The Matrix at Metaphilm.

Singularity

Really interesting article in the NY Times: Merely Human? That's So Yesterday. Check out the full article, but here are some of the standout points:

"ON a Tuesday evening this spring,Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at aNASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen."

"The BrinBot was hardly something out of “Star Trek.” It had a rudimentary, no-frills design and was a hodgepodge of loosely integrated technologies. Yet it also smacked of a future that the Singularity University founders hold dear and often discuss with a techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state. At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past."

“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.”

"Some of the Singularity’s adherents portray a future where humans break off into two species: the Haves, who have superior intelligence and can live for hundreds of years, and the Have-Nots, who are hampered by their antiquated, corporeal forms and beliefs."

“There are enormous social and political issues that will arise,” Mr. Clarke says. “There are vast groups of people in society who believe the earth is 5,000 years old. If they want to slow down progress and prevent the world from changing around them and they engaged in political action or violence, then there will have to be some sort of decision point.”