Advertising and Automation

Many people have expressed uneasiness about the advertising enterprise in our time. To put the matter abruptly, the advertising industry is a crude attempt to extend the principles of automation to every aspect of society. Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness. When all production and all consumption are brought into a pre-established harmony with all desire and all effort, then advertising will have liquidated itself by its own success.

-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

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.

Discarnate Man is Not Compatible with an Incarnate Church

When people are on the telephone or on the air, they have no physical bodies but are translated into abstract images. Their old physical beings are entirely irrelevant to the new situations. The discarnate user of electric media bypasses all former spatial restrictions and is present in many places simultaneously as a disembodied intelligence. This puts him one step above angels, who can only be in one place at a time. Since, however, discarnate man has no relation to natural law (or to Western lineality), his impulse is towards anarchy and lawlessness. Minus his body, the user of telephone or radio or TV is also minus his private identity, an effect that is becoming increasingly relevant.

-- Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media, 1988 

Guy Debord and the Return to Normalcy

A not-so-recent article in the New York Times by Clive Thompson (Web Ushers in an Age of Ambient Intimacy) discusses how new media like Facebook and Twitter have given us an “ambient awareness.” The multiple and often mundane updates we publish online provide us with “a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of our friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.” It is remarkable that we can be so intimately aware of the daily lives of any of hundreds of friends, family, and acquaintances that may be scattered over the globe, and it is very reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan's observation that electric technology involves "the family of man in the cohesive state of village living."

In fact, one of Thompson’s sources for his article described Facebook in this same way:

It's just like living in a village, where it's actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already," Tufekci said. "The current generation is never unconnected. They're never losing touch with their friends. So we're going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that's very new. It's just the 20th century."

So, in the broad sweep of history, we are finally returning to normalcy. Yet clearly, we are living in an entirely different environment. There is a qualitative difference between meeting your fellow village-folk at the well and discussing the events of the day and sitting in front of your computer or on your handheld of choice and being confronted with a list of updates. Twitter and the Facebook news feed both embody an evolution of our news media more than any other medium (it’s called a news feed). From the village herald to the newspaper to television news networks to electronic newspapers to Twitter, news has reversed from its pattern of broader and broader coverage to about as personal as it can get.

Yet is this really a return to normalcy? Guy Debord, a noted French social critic, wrote his esoteric critique of the technological society in The Society of the Spectacle. He claimed that the Spectacle—described variously as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” “a worldview transformed into an objective force,” and the “chief product of modern day society”—is the preeminent factor organizing society today. It manifests itself in the content of news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment, and in the forms of the mass media and technology. Debord noted that though our technology may unite us, it “unites only in its separateness,” as he saw it reinforcing the isolation of the lonely crowd.

The question is then, does his critique stand? Tufekci says that we are returning to normalcy in our social interactions while Debord says that everywhere he looks he sees the same intent: “to restructure society without community.” There seems to be truth in the fact that our online personas require a little more personal consistency in as much as they disallow us from really leaving behind any social group. On the other hand, though our news media have reversed into the personal village gossip, we are involved in the village only as long as we sit in front of our computers.


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Eternal Vigilance

The price of liberty and even of common humanity, is eternal vigilance.

--Aldous Huxley

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

--Marshall McLuhan

Required Reading

Excellent essay in the NY Times this weekend. I'd quote it, but it should be read in its entirety.

Only Disconnect

By GARY SHTEYNGART

The Well-Adjusted Man is a Robot

The world becomes a sum of lifeless artifacts; from synthetic food to synthetic organs, the whole man becomes part of the total machinery that he controls and is simultaneously controlled by. He has no plan, no goal for life, except doing what the logic of technique determines him to do. He aspires to make robots as one of the greatest achievements of his technical mind, and some specialists assure us that the robot will hardly be distinguishable from living men. This achievement will not seem so astonishing when man himself is hardly distinguishable from a robot.


-- Eric Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 1973