Explaining Media Ecology

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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?

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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.

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