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mcluhanisme

MARSHALL McLUHAN
(and why he's so damn infuriating)

Canadian scholar and media critic who studied under Harold Innis. McLuhan believed that the main thrust for societal change in human society was development in communication forms. As new forms of communication became dominant, society changed to accommodate these developments. Thus the nature of cultures changed dramatically with the development of writing.

Where's he coming from?

Toronto, actually -- well, the University of Toronto, to be exact (he was born in Alberta). He taught there until his death in 1980. In between, he became about as famous as a modern intellectual can be. His most important works include The Mechanical Bride (1951), The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), and Understanding Media (1964). >> McLuhan was very quotable -- you could put many of his ideas on a bumper sticker. Here's some of the most prominent ideas:

The Medium is the Message. McLuhan was very optimistic about the change from a print to an electronic culture; hence his famous dictum, "The Medium is the Message," which suggests that the nature of the communications medium has a direct impact on how society and its members think and operate, outlines why. Television, for example, does not simply present a picture of the world to its audiences -- it fundamentally alters the way people think about the world. Its role in determining what audiences see and how they make sense of what they see is central. Incidentally, the medium is also the massage, since it works us over, saturates us, and molds us even as we are molding it.

MORE ABOUT McLUHAN:
From tribes to retribalization

McLuhan was primarily concerned with changes in cultures and societies under the influence of the media.

McLuhan's Three Ages of man:

1. The Preliterate, or Tribal, era (the spoken word and the ear ruled);
2. The Gutenberg Age (the printed word and the eye ruled);
3. The Electronic Age of Retribalized Man (involving full sensory involvement).

Therefore, McLuhan's probes included much about the media and its effects Because new media alter our sense ration, their impact involves a psychological dimension, which needs to be studied for its effects.

To McLuhan, any medium is an extension (actually, a virtual extension, or "prosthesis") of our bodies, minds, or beings (just as a prosthetic arm is a physical extension of the body, clothes are an extension of the skin, and the stirrup, the bicycle, and the car extend the human foot; also, the computer can be thought of as extending our central nervous system -- more on this below). Hence, "the Medium is the Message". Why?
Because it is the very nature of the medium itself -- not its content -- that changes society. And medium is defined by McLuhan very widely. For example, the light bulb is a medium that can be thought of as completely changing society. Think of all the things that would be impossible to do without the electric light bulb (all these activities which, BTW, could be thought of as "content").

New media >> lead to new sensory balances >> leads to new environment.

This is a very technological determinist argument, btw.

1. Oral, preliterate societies -- very non-hierarchical, democratic, relying on the the ear, as opposed to the eye, to keep us "sensitive, hyperaesthetic, and all-inclusive"; the reliance on the ear held us closer to "the seamless web of tribal kinship and interdependence in which all members of the group lived in harmony" (Playboy interview, 1969).

2a. The phonetic alphabet (an extension of both our bodies and minds, BTW) set off a whole chain reaction of changes in human societies. The phonetic alphabet disturbed out tribal sensorium, fragmenting us and turning us into psychically impoverished "individuals", or "units." It thus led to hierarchical societies, linear, empirical thought, centralization, and everything from logic to nationalism. In other words, everything that happened to the world happened because of the new communication form.

2b. "The Gutenberg Galaxy" Print culture intensifies the effects of the older (writing) technology. According to McLuhan, Gutenberg's invention of moveable type vastly extended the impact of the phonetic alphabet, inexorably forcing "man to comprehend in a linear, uniform, connected, continuous fashion." Remember, before writing and print, human communication involved all the senses simultaneously, but especially the ear. The development of writing downgraded the sense of sound, and upgraded the sense of sight.

3. "The Constellation of Marconi" Electronic media -- starting with the electronic telegraph, so, strictly speaking, it should be the "Constellation of Morse" -- are helping us to retribalize in a global village, where our senses become fully invloved once again (and the written word loses its old prominence and power over us).

The Global Village. McLuhan also famously pronounced in the 1960s that the world had become a "global village" - thus drawing attention to the developing trend of globalization. Why did he say this? Well, he posited that communications media and technology had become in effect an extension of our bodies and our senses. This is pretty significant. Just as a prosthesis is a mechanical extension of a body, so the communication network is an extension of the nervous system. Now that the electronic communication has spread around the world, so has our neural network. "Television has become our eyes, the telephone our mouths and ears; our brains are the interchange for a nervous system that stretches across the whole world" (Woolley, 125).

In recent years McLuhan has been heavily criticized and castigated by many in the field, particularly for his later writings, which are regarded by many as "off the wall." He and Innis both have been damned by many as simple technological determinists (or at any rate, media determinists). However, there is also much in their work that was a valid continuation of the work of the Frankfurt School. Further, there was much that was prescient in McLuhan's earlier work, and which still remains relevant, especially to students of critical theory, global communications, and the developing role of the Internet.

Hot and Cool Media:

One of McLuhan's most problematic theories. I don't like it, but there you go. Basically, there are two types of media, based upon their impact on your senses: hot and cold media. Cool media, like television or a cartoon, are "low-definition," since they require us to "fill in the blanks" and complete the image ourselves. Hot media, like film or photography, are "high-definition," i.e., they tell us a lot about the content of that medium.

Where hot and cool in this context might make more sense is in their application to individuals. McLuhan compares "cool" politicians such as Kennedy with "hot" political figures like Nixon or LBJ. Now Kennedy seemed to be much more likable -- and liked -- by the voters because he was "low definition," and therefore much more adaptable to TV; therefore, people could "fill him in" with their own ideas, prejudices, and opinions -- in short, they could thus identify with him. On the other hand, Nixon was very high-definition and hot -- and therefore incompatible with "cool" television -- and his sharply defined image and action on TV reduced the ability of many people to "fill him in" and transfer their identification over to him. Thus he was generally disliked by people who saw him on TV -- even those who generally believed in his policies.

McLuhan on Computers:
Media Combinations (from old to new media):
When media combine, their form and use changes, as do their users and their environments.

Thus ...
McLuhan thought of the computer as an incredibly powerful instrument -- a new medium -- with the ability to change society fundamentally. Whereas the older mechanical technologies allowed us to extend the mechanical function of our bodies, the new computerized electronic technology now allows us to extend the function of our minds. As a result, all society is transformed into collectives of information systems. This happens at the local level -- schools, businesses, citizens groups, etc. -- as well as the national, cross-national, supra-national, and international levels. We are collectives of information systems all interconnecting in a vast information system (think about the Internet in relation to this).

Turkle & Rheingold >> reconceptualizing computers
(this will eventually be hived off as a separate SPECIAL TOPIC)

This seems to be a good place to move on to talking about Sherry Turkle, and later Howard Rheingold. As Turkle sees it, objects like the Apple II DOS, or UNIX "support a modernist interpretation of understanding, according to which understanding proceeds by reducing complex things to simpler elements." Her "stripped-down Apple II both embodied and symbolized a theory that it was possible to understand by discovering the hidden mechanisms that made things work." In other words, "Analyze and you shall know" (Turkle, p. 34). Thus, during the 1960s and 1970s, "computers carried the psychological, philosophical, and even spiritual message of the culture of calculation."

From a Culture of Calculation to a Culture of Simulation:
Macs, the GUI, versus UNIX/DOS, or the command-line environmentUnlike DOS or the PC, Macinoshes "encouraged users to stay at a surface level of visual representation and gave no hint of inner mechanisms" (Turkle, p. 34). Although of course the Mac worked the same way as other computers, its workings were kept well hidden, and "the tools of the modernist culture of calculation became layered underneath the experience of the [postmodern] culture of simulation. In many ways the experience of working on a PC is very different from that of a Mac. The simulated desktop environment of the Mac "all pointed to a new kind of experience in which people do not so much command machines as enter into conversations with them" (Turkle, p. 35).

So why is the Mac "Postmodern"? Well, says Turkle, "Postmodernists have suggested that the searc for depth and mechanism is futile, and that it is more realistic to explore the world of shifting surfaces than to embark on a search for origins and structure" (p. 36).

Turkle draws our attention to American postmodernist Fredric Jameson, who in the 1980s wrote a classic article on the meaning of postmodernism [the Crisis of Late Capitalism]. He included in his characterization of postmodernism the precedence of surface over depth, of simulation over the 'real,' of play over seriousness, many of the same qualities that characterize the new computer aesthetic. At that time, Jameson noted that the postmodern era lacked objects that could represent it. The turbine, smokestack, pipes, and conveyor belts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had been powerful things-to-think-with for imaging the nature of industrial modernity." Jameson suggested that the new postmodern era required a new "aesthetic of cognitive mapping" (Turkle, p. 44).

Well, postmodernism seems to have found its object-to-think-with: the computer. "Prefigured by Neuromancer's matrix of informational space, postmodernism's objects now exist outside science fiction. They exist in the information and connections of the Internet and the World Wide Web, and in the windows, icons, and layers of personal computing" (Turkle, p. 45). This, then, is the crux of the matter.  

On the issue of computers as objects-to-think-with:

Finally, "Fredric Jameson wrote that in a postmodern world, the subject is not alienated but fragmented. He explained that the notion of alienation presumes a centralized, unitary self who could become lost to himself or herself. But if, as a postmodernist sees it, the self is decentered and multiple, the concept of alienation breaks down. All that is left is an anxiety of identity. "... Today, the PC culture's most compelling objects give people a way to think concretely about an identity crisis. In simulation, identity can be fluid and multiple, a signifier no longer clearly points to a thing that is to be signified, and understanding is less likely to proceed through analysis than by navigation through virtual space" (p. 49)  

John Perry Barlow
"Selling Wine Without Bottles"

Traditionally, intellectual property rights -- copyright, patent laws, etc. -- protect the container ("the bottle") rather than the wine: what is known as "an original work" that must be "fixed in a tangible means of expression."

Remember: You own the book (the physical object; but the author or creator or copyright holder owns the contents of the book. S/he he owns the rights to copy or reproduce that work. This is starting to break down in the era of the Internet and the World Wide Web, when information is breaking out of the traditional, physical bounds of reproduction. It used to be relatively hard to copy and reproduce a book or a film (its contents, that is). Now it's as easy as downloading a file, or copying and pasting a document. Furthermore, developments in cyberspace are moving so rapidly, the legal community simply can't keep up.

A Taxonomy of Information
Freed of its physical constraints, information is not a thing but a process.

"Information Wants to be Free"
Like a virus; it replicates.

"Information is a Life Form"

"Information has to keep moving"

"Information is a Relationship"
Between producers and consumers (think of Barlow's Grateful Dead experience here).

"Information Wants to Change; to develop, to interact"
It isn't "fixed" anymore.

Information in the "Third Wave"

See also Barlow's home page at http://www.eff.org/~barlow/