This project was created to provide examples and context to Marshall McLuhan’s medium theory.
The Medium is the M(e/a)ssage
McLuhan is best known for his phrase “the medium is the message”. A funny anecdote - there was a miscommunication on the first edition of McLuhan and Fiore’s work that resulted in the title being printed as The Medium is the Massage. The story goes that McLuhan found it humorous and it roughly lined up with the message of the book so they kept it.
His perspective focused on the ways that content (media) was influenced by the affordances and limitations of the means it was transmitted (the medium). He believed that people should not only observe the media itself but how the medium reshapes social life and tradition. Furthermore, McLuhan observed the way that some mediums privileged certain senses over others leading to the primacy of certain modes of experience.
While the concept itself may seem somewhat esoteric you don’t have to look very far to see evidence in the world. For example the introduction of radio led to an entirely new genre of home entertainment, one that was simultaneously private and a shared experience with others listening to the same program. Going back further in history, precursors to MacLuhan’s ideas can be seen in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus. In Phaedrus Plato critiques the medium of writing, saying that by storing thoughts in a fixed, immutable form that is separate from the speaker ideas cannot be challenged or criticized in a meaningful way like they can during a spoken dialogue. As we can see, McLuhan is far from the first person to critique the way that technology can shape society.
Hopefully, this project can serve as an aid to better understand McLuhan's theories and the significance they have in the modern world that is positively saturated with media.
Acoustic
In the beginning...
(Click for the full immersive experience. (Plays sound, press again to stop)). Prior to the emergence of villages, languages, or societies, there was sound all around the very first humans. McLuhan describes sound as “boundless, directionless, and devoid of all horizon”.
In this unstructured environment, it was not as if there were nothing to see, the world would still be full of plants and animals of all shapes, but sound was the dominant sense. It is easy for a person to close their eyes and withdraw from sight, to close their mouth to avoid tasting something unpleasant, but it is far more difficult to withdraw from sound. In this pre-historic space sound was paramount both for experiencing (and surviving) the environment and engaging in social behaviors with other early humans.
Another key feature of sound is its impermanence. Sounds are made, possibly heard (tree in a forest, anyone?), and then they are gone. Prior to the late 19th century, there was no way to record sound for reproduction at a later time. Prior to the evolution of language there was no way to communicate complex thoughts in a way that could be transferred or remembered.
The acoustic medium is incorporated into all successive mediums, in a more structured and refined way, but in the beginning that’s all there was.
Marshall Says:
"The acoustic world, which is the electric world of simultaneity, has no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, and no stasis. Everything is changing. To move from one of those worlds to the other is a very big shift. It’s the same shift that Alice in Wonderland made when she went through the looking glass. She moved out of the visual world and into the acoustic world when she went through the looking glass. Now to explain a bit about the implications of this rather large shift: It concerns the whole problem of learning, teaching, social life, politics and entertainment, and I’m going to try to tie it into some of those places."
Speech
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Speaking of Which,
Over time the evolution of many mediums is a formalization of the precursors it has incorporated. The formalization of sound occurs in the form of languages. Languages form the basis of the earliest civilizations and are often referred to as “oral cultures”. This means a culture that does not use a writing system to permanently record their language. These cultures have almost entirely been superseded by cultures with written language however there are still some that exist in the world today.
The nature of oral culture means that the components of the culture their stories, histories, riddles, and proverbs are all communicated from one person to the next in a spoken form. Ancient Greece is often regarded as the archetype of oral culture. They had a rich tradition of public dramatic performances and legendary debates among scholars including Aristotle, Socrates, amd Plato in their schools of rhetoric and philosophy.
Unconscious consonants
Marshall McLuhan describes early languages as growing from unconsciousness, rather than constructed conscious thought. What this lack of formalization means is that the language does not exist outside of either speaking it or only in potential. The advent of writing allowed for thoughts and ideas to separate from their speaker which leads to more cultural and societal innovation and change.
Marshall Says:
"There is only one part of the world that ever did go visual, and that is the Western Greco- Roman Hellenistic world. About 500 B.C. something happened which made it possible to flip out of the old acoustic world, which was the normal one of the tribal Greek society, the Homeric world. Something happened which flipped them out of the old world of the bards into this new, rational, philosophically logical, connected, private, individualistic, and civilized world. And that thing is called the phonetic alphabet. The origins of the phonetic alphabet are by no means clear. All we know is what it did to people."
Alphabet
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ABCDEFGHI... You get the gist
While the creation of a written version of a language seems a compulsory part of a language’s existence, the technology of affixing meaning to symbols to be interpreted later actually came after the existence of language.
we have to understand what written language does. Writing means assigning meaning to symbols and having those symbols affixed to something in the world. The first symbolic language emerged in Mesopotamia in the form of bulla (plural: bullae). These were clay spheres used to contain markers that indicated a quantity of something, typically agricultural products such as grain, cattle, etc. The clay served as a type of tamper-proofing intended to prevent the quantity contained within being modified.
Eventually, languages like cuneifom emerged, using soft clay as a substrate for symbols to be pressed in with a wedge-shaped stylus. As technology in the ancient world evolved the substrate became papyrus, vellum, parchment, or any of a number of plant and animal products that could be combined to produce a uniform sheet to scratch symbols into or upon. Bulla evolved to be used as a seal of approval or security, much like a wax seal on later documents.
Plato pushes back
Written language produced a fundamental paradigm shift: words can be moved away from the person who spoke them. In oral cultures, words and ideas always come from a person speaking them into existence. As we discussed with acoustic space and oral cultures, those words disappear as soon as they are said, only recorded in the memory of the speaker and audience.
Some scholars in ancient Greece such as Plato were suspicious of writing because they viewed it as a crutch for those who could not engage in rhetoric. Plato went so far as to state that use of written language will lead to the death of rhetoric and the exchange of ideas, because ideas can be removed from the speaker, bad ideas might spread without a means to challenge them.
Clearly, this hasn’t happened. What this does show is that as far back as the very concept of writing something down there have been those worrying about how new technologies will lead to the downfall of the human race or other catastrophes. Those ideas have appeared in modern times focusing on jazz music and video games, and yet society continues to function. Will wonders never cease…
Marshall Says:
"The phonetic alphabet has a very peculiar set of characteristics which are not shared by any other alphabet on this planet. The phonetic alphabet, the one we all call the ABCs,has a very peculiar structure. It is made up of phonemes—, bits that are meaningless. The twenty-six letters of our alphabet have no meaning at all. They’re called phonemes because in linguistic terms that word means the smallest possible meaningless bit. All the other alphabets in the world—the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Hindu, the Chinese and so on—are morphemic. The bits they are made of have meaning—some meaning, however small."
Writing
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Getting it in writing
After the formalization of speech into letters, the next medium McLuhan discusses is writing. The first uses of written language were to record transactions, agricultural yields, and other simple information. The evolution of writing came when written language was used to create longer strings of words that became stories, laws, instructions, and religious texts.
Some of these evolutions may seem so simple they are inconsequential but long-form writing as a technology is the foundation of human societies. You are reading writing right now and receiving information and ideas from someone you’ve never spoken to before. The power to package and move thoughts and ideas across great distances is incredibly powerful and has been the driving force behind many events that have shaped the world.
Ong that topic
Language theorist Walter Ong describes that writing became a challenge to hierarchies because printed words cannot be challenged or refuted, even after thoroughly refuting them, the words remain unchanged. Ong discusses that writing enables new thought patterns and gives space for more complex ideas of religion, society, and the world in general to form. One of the key points that Ong brings up is that certain languages lend themselves better to analytical or logical processes and some might lack the structural capacity for higher logic. This theory of language shaping culture is a central point in the significance of written language as a force that drives cultural development.
Marshall Says:
"One of the peculiar things that happened with the phonetic alphabet was that the people who used it underwent a kind of fission. Their sensory life exploded and the visual part of it was cut off from the kinetic, acoustic and tactile parts. In all the other parts of the world where writing is employed, the visual life has always remained associated with the acoustic, tactile and kinetic life. The Chinese ideogram is a wonderful instrument of unified sensations. It is so richly unified that people in our twentieth century have begun to study it carefully as a corrective to our Western highly specialized alphabet. One of the results of the use of the phonetic alphabet was that Euclid could indicate the properties of visual space in his geometry."
Printing
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Hot Off the Presses
The next great revolution was printing. A common idea is that the printing press was invented independently in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. Chinese scholars also created moveable type printing processes in the 1200s, and trade between regions through the Silk Road could have influenced the invention in Europe. The mechanization of reproducing text was another major paradigm shift.
Previously written works were laboriously reproduced by hand-copying existing texts. This process involved an incredible amount of labor and was usually reserved for religious texts or producing texts on behalf of the rich and powerful, oftentimes both. Admittedly, the first things that Gutenberg printed were religious, of which the now-famous Gutenberg Bibles are the most widely known.
Art in the Age of Mechnical Reproduction
The mechanical reproduction of print was the start of the global publishing industry where millions of books are produced every year. This process took time but today most people own personal copies of books, something unimaginable 500 years ago. The proliferation of books has meant a proliferation of the ideas contained within them. Take religion for example, far and away the most printed book in history would be the Bible (in all its many editions), closely followed by political literature like Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung.
Clearly, ideology is often the content of print, but not exclusively. Mechanical printing of all kinds of writing for leisure, information, and education has all been enabled by the advent of printing. Whether this is for good or ill depends on who you ask. Much like Plato of old there are those today who say that new frontiers of writing, the internet in particular, are a detrimental force to language as a whole.
Marshall Says:
"Today everyone in this room is being subjected to a new form of oral education. Literacy is still officially the educational establishment, but unofficially the oral forms are coming up very fast. This is the meaning of rock music. It is a kind of education based on oral tradition, an acoustic experience, which is quite strangely remote from literacy. I will be glad to come back to the whole problem of rock and its relation to the modern city and the modern society. It’s a very big subject, and it is not very much studied. Rock is not something that is merely stuck onto the entertainment card as an extra item but a kind of central oral form of education which threatens the whole educational establishment."
Visual
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The Specter of Technology
The most engaging medium by far is visual. Humans are intensely visual creatures, we love looking at stuff! Classic art, from frescoes and watercolors to ancient fertility idols and cave paintings are all examples of this. The evolution of technologies has enabled ever more ways that humans can be presented with things to look at. I would bet that the person reading this site has been grateful for the inclusion of graphics, animations, and sounds to break the monotony of text on a page!
Technology has been the biggest driver of visual culture spreading across the world. Innovations such as high-quality color printing, television, and the internet have all driven human visual culture to new and sometimes strange heights. All of the people reading this website (another curious hybrid presentation of all kinds of media) have likely been distracted while reading it. Either from opening a new browser tab to look up a word or claim made, looking at your phone to answer one of a dozen ways to message you, or simply being bored with this and navigating away! (If you made it this far, thanks!)
The human animal has always enjoyed visual representations of things they experienced, saw, or thought about and wants to see that from others. You only have to look as far as paleolithic cave paintings to see that before the creation of language, art, and even society early humans had the desire to record what they saw and did in a visual format. Why? Maybe even the artist of a cave painting couldn’t tell you, but today we see much the same from social media.
Marshall Says:
"One of the peculiar flips that goes with the change from the visual to the acoustic is a change in joke styles. First I’ll tell you a couple of old-fashioned jokes to show you what I mean. A friend of mine went to Kennedy Airport a few months ago to pick up an Irishman who was coming into New York. On the way in from the airport, the Irishman was enjoying the advertising and was especially attracted by a sign which read, “Be Younger. Use Ex-Lax.” “How about that?” he asked. “What is Ex-Lax?” His friend replied, “We’re coming to a drugstore right now, and I’m going to get you some.” He popped in and brought out a cake of Ex-Lax, which the Irishman proceeded to gobble down—and with relish. About half an hour later his friend said, “Are you feeling any younger?” The Irishman said, “Well, I’m not sure, but I’ve just done something very childish.” Now that’s an old-fashioned joke—it’s got a story line."
Electric
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It's electric!
The electronic medium is by far the greatest representation of McLuhan’s idea of mediums being “an extension” of human senses. There’s a lot of speculation on where the future of the electronic medium will lead humanity, and the pros and cons that will come with it. We can look back through the previous mediums and find patterns to make an assessment.
Plato’s Phaedrus claimed that books were the death of speech and it will be the end of human thought, and today we see many saying that electronics will be the death of books and will be the end of human thought. While are still here today, there is some merit to the concerns presented. The electronic medium has brought us closer to McLuhan's concept of one large “tribe” that has every means of connection and communication, the global village
While we are the least isolated in terms of ability to connect to the world, there is a trend of isolation from humanity as we begin to replace real-world human interaction with electronically mediated interactions. Behaviors such as use of social media, impersonal communications through the use of the internet, have created a raft of new social issues. The full impact of social media and the ubiquitization of
Marshall Says:
"One of the peculiar flips that goes with the change from the visual to the acoustic is a change in joke styles. First I’ll tell you a couple of old-fashioned jokes to show you what I mean. A friend of mine went to Kennedy Airport a few months ago to pick up an Irishman who was coming into New York. On the way in from the airport, the Irishman was enjoying the advertising and was especially attracted by a sign which read, “Be Younger. Use Ex-Lax.” “How about that?” he asked. “What is Ex-Lax?” His friend replied, “We’re coming to a drugstore right now, and I’m going to get you some.” He popped in and brought out a cake of Ex-Lax, which the Irishman proceeded to gobble down—and with relish. About half an hour later his friend said, “Are you feeling any younger?” The Irishman said, “Well, I’m not sure, but I’ve just done something very childish.” Now that’s an old-fashioned joke—it’s got a story line."