MARSHALL MCLUHAN – THE GRANDFATHER OF MEDIA STUDIES

And Why It Peaked With Him

Some time ago, I came across a dense volume with the dry title, Understanding Media, by Marshall McLuhan, but by the time I had finished the first chapter, the read had been anything but dry.

Where I come from, Media Studies is considered a ‘doss’ subject, that students choose if they can’t or won’t do anything more worthwhile. But after reading McLuhan, I realised that that is what it became, not how it began. Along with others, McLuhan founded The Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963 at the University of Toronto. His ideas became so influential, that by the late 1960’s he was a known public intellectual, appearing on television around the world.

The sound bite often attributed to McLuhan is ‘the medium is the message’; the core idea being it’s not what the medium is showing that’s primary, but the medium itself is what influences the viewer/listener more. To explain this he referred to different media as either hot or cool. Hot was ‘high resolution’, meaning it delivered a lot of information at any given moment, like cinema. Television is a comparatively cool medium, as it delivers less information (smaller screen and a smaller dynamic range of sound). The effect is thus: we sit back in the cinema because the medium reaches out to us, whereas television draws us in, forcing us to become more involved in the medium, not just the content.

McLuhan had a unique ability to describe how media and technologies affect the human body and mind. He describes the wheel as an extension of the human foot, and all electronic forms of communication and entertainment as an extension of the human nervous system. But this immersion in the electronic has a peculiar effect on us. It creates a somnambulism (sleep walking), as the more we merge with electronic media, the more detached from reality we become. To illustrate this, McLuhan uses the Greek myth of Narcissus. As he put it, in a chapter titled The Gadget lover: Narcissus as Narcosis: “The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word Narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image…He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.” He goes on to give reasons for this narcissistic effect. “Physiologically there are abundant reasons for an extension of ourselves involving us in a state of numbness. Medical researchers…hold that all extensions of ourselves, in sickness and in health, are attempts to maintain equilibrium. Any extension of ourselves they regard as ‘autoamputation,’ and they find that the autoamputative power or strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation. Our language has many expressions that indicate this self-amputation that is imposed by various pressures. We speak of ‘wanting to jump out of my skin’ or of ‘going out of my mind,’ being ‘driven batty’ or ‘flipping my lid.’ And we often create artificial situations that rival the irritations and stresses of real life under controlled conditions of sport and play.”

Two of McLuhan’s many prescient predictions were the internet and the digital image. He said it is not the aeroplane that is shrinking the world, but instant electronic communications. This result he termed the ‘Global Village’. Unlike twentieth century progressives, McLuhan warned that this would not create a state of global harmony, by bringing different peoples together, but a “nosy concern with everybody else’s business”(a prediction that seems to have come true in the form of social media and contemporary news broadcasts!). If you couple the individual narcissistic effect of electronic media on a person, and the global village phenomenon of everybody intruding on everybody else’s business, as you can imagine, McLuhan was not optimistic about the future.

But McLuhan did see one ray of hope. Like his contemporary, Joseph Campbell, he believed that artists had the ability to accurately (though not always factually) describe the world we really live in and where we are headed. As he wrote: “The percussed victims of the new technology have invariably muttered cliches about the impracticability of artists and their fanciful preferences. But in the past century it has come to be generally acknowledged that, in the words of Wyndham Lewis, ‘The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.’ Knowledge of this simple fact is now needed for human survival. The ability of the artist to sidestep the bully blow of new technology of any age, and to parry such violence with full awareness, is age-old. Equally age-old is the inability of the percussed victims, who cannot sidestep the new violence, to recognize [sic] their need of the artist.”

I have often thought this is the reason for the proliferation of dark, vampire and zombie horror spectacles in recent years (take your pick; Twilight, The Walking Dead etc.) The vampire is a fitting analogy for a narcissist, as he looks like a human, but is really dead internally and projects a false image; and what better example of someone sleepwalking than a zombie.

One of the results of all-consuming electronic media is a move away from books and the printed word. Literacy, for McLuhan, is the primary cause of what we today understand as individualism. The mass printed word allowed everybody to inform themselves in their own way, reading being a solitary activity. He predicted that once the pendulum has swung far enough toward the electronic, it will engender a return to tribalism. With particular regard to music, it’s electronic amplification fills up space to a great distance. The hearing sense can receive this stimulus from 360 degrees, so it is not bound by any sequential direction, like reading from left to right. Just imagine a society that functions like a dance club writ large, and you will have some idea of where we’re heading (and in many ways already are). I don’t know about you, but I’m not rubbing my hands with glee. I hope enough fellow book worms will hold out, for if not, the world will become a much louder, less interesting place.

Marshall McLuhan died in 1980. He never lived to see the reality of most of his predictions, but he left behind many ideas and an analysis of the modern world that shifts the parallax from conventional thinking to give a better perspective on how our modern, electronic world really affects us. Perhaps that is why the subject of Media Studies became co-opted by less rigorous intellectual ideologies (postmodernism to name but one); the true face of ourselves reflected back in the television screen too ugly for us to accept.