McLuhan

Introduction

In the McLuhan video you watched for this week, an audience asks McLuhan questions about his thesis that the medium is the message. Below is a quick introduction to this idea.

Marshal McLuhan begins Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man with an explanation of his now famous declaration that the medium is the message:

“The personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.“   Within this concise summation are a number of assertions and assumptions that we need to break down in order to critique what has proven to be one of the most influential observations of the 20^th century.

1. McLuhan defines a medium as “any extension of ourselves”. By this definition, a medium is anything that we use to experience or interact with the world.
2. Media have consequences. They cause change.
3. This change is both social and personal. Media cause changes to both you as an individual and also in the society in which you live.
4. These changes “result from the scale that is introduced into our affairs”. The scale can be seen as a measure of some aspect of our awareness of or interaction with the world. For example, the increased speed of electronic media over earlier media resulted in changes in the rate at which we worked and socialized, and thereby changed our perspectives on the world.

For McLuhan, the verbal or communicative message transmitted by a medium is of little import. It is the message of the medium itself that causes the consequences he is writing about. The message of a medium just is the change that it introduces into human affairs. (Compare this to Benveniste’s claim that communication is a useful by-product, but not the primary function, of language.)

For example, one message of writing is the dominance of vision in the perceptual field. Prior to writing, most of our interactions incorporated all of our senses. The written word is a purely visual medium, and the formative cultural role played by writing over the past three millennia caused a change in the “scale” in the importance of vision compared to the other senses. This, in turn, changed the nature of literate man’s (or woman’s) awareness of the world. Vision is the most objective of the senses. When I look at something, I see the distinction between me and it, and the separation in-between is a part of the visual experience. Also, looking at something is an action that I take upon that thing. Hearing, on the other hand, is a result of an action taken by the thing being heard. The dominance of the visual field suggests that the world is separate from me and that I can act upon it. By increasing the scale to which vision dominated our perception, literacy also changed the scale to which objectivity dominated our relations to what we perceived.

McLuhan believed that electronic media were introducing new scales (or reintroducing previous ones) that would change the nature of our interactions with the exterior world. The dominance of vision was giving way to a field of perception without a center, from which there is no single, objective point of view. As mentioned above, the pace of perception and interaction was increasing. Even the very limitations of our “surroundings” were changing.

McLuhan is careful (though not always successful) to avoid value judgments regarding these changes. He believed that any new “scale” would introduce potential advances and dangers. The important thing, in his mind, was to be aware of the medium itself and the changes it entailed. In this way, we can try to mitigate the dangers and maximize the advances.

Questions for McLuhan Discussion

1. What does McLuhan mean when he says that it doesn’t matter what you say on the telephone.
2. Explain how reading is an activity of rapid guessing
3. What are some of the connotations behind McLuhan’s reference to media as something that is “triggered” at populations?
4. In what ways to you think literacy might promote objectivity?
5. What does McLuhan mean when he states the hidden aspects of a medium have an irresistible force?