Reading Marshall McLuhan is a little like being introduced to Morpheus in the movie "The Matrix". Somehow the world comes into a little better focus.
The key points for me were that all literacy and technology is an extension of man, the content of the media is not the specific message but the change in human behavior, and the electronic age is causing a cultural implosion.
Simply put, McLuahan points out that every form of technology, a hammer, a light, or an automobile are an extension of man. The mechanical age enabled us to expand our distance and reduce time’s effect on our range. “During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space.”
However, during the mechanical age McLuhan and others assert the literacy necessary for operating the technology caused a fragmentation of society and created social stratification. Our earlier reading of Schmandt-Besserat pointed out the implications of literacy being used to assert control and power through the development of economic record keeping. I think we must always keep in mind that technology is created by man for the extension of man, and as such is a further revelation of our true nature. McLuhan writes, “Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex.” He describes the mechanical age as a tearing apart of homeostatic culture because the change brought on by new technology was relatively slow to bring about a reaction as the result, “western man acquired from the technology of literacy te power to act without reacting.” He went on to describe “we acquired the art of carrying out the most dangerous social aperation with complete detachment.”
McLuhan looks to history to see the future. The impact of technology that we miss at it’s introduction reveals its self as an unanticipated consequence. The development of the automobile changed society by introducing the concept of the suburbs. A particular model of car is un important, it is the function of the media that matters. This is when I start to feel Morpheus’s presence in McLuhan’s words. “For the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale, or pace, or pattern that it introduces to human affairs.” The term “The Media is the Message” simply states that the change brought on by the medium is the hidden message. Reading the newspaper or watching television news delivers information, but the real message is the change in attitude or behavior that is the result of consuming the information. It is easier to see this in advertising. We consume advertising and readily understand that any buying behavior is the result of the Ad media. Television is the perfect medium for delivery advertising messages. Reality television like “America’s Got Talent” has mastered the art of getting consumers to glue themselves to the couch by showing one performance and then delivery three or more advertisements. They have recently added the feature of having the audience text message their votes to affect the outcome, but in reality they have convinced people to spend 5 cents per message. The message of the media is not its individual content, but its outcome in terms of changing human behavior.
McLuhan wrote this article during the rise of television, not the internet. As such, he seems to have a bit of a utopian view of the possibilities for electronic media. He asserts that the development of electronic mass communication is the “final phase of the extension 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 medium.” While the telephone and radio extends our sense of hearing and photography the sense of sight, television on the other hand brought more senses together and has “extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.
McLuhan seems to think that television and its immediacy would “… involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate in depth, in the consequences of our very actions. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner” He also states, “Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree.”
Perhaps initially he was justified in his beliefs that there would be a cultural implosion that would establish a more homeostatic world where the subordinated would be set free through technology.
The civil rights marches would seem to offer evidence of this. However, over time the medium machine has produced more discourse through advertising and news broadcasts that highlight the importance of corporate profit and “everyday low prices” that there seems to me to be apathy as evidence by the limited coverage of any domestic protest, and even further limitations on world coverage of alternative viewpoints. The media even caught the ambivalence of our leaders during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina where concern over outfit what to wear on camera was greater than the desire to help. Where is the outrage over genecide in Rawanda or more recently in Sudan?
I recall an instance several years ago where I heard a BBC radio broadcast about a group of Nigerian mothers who took control of a international conglomerate oil field and held the management hostage, demanding schools to be built in their villages. When I looked for the story a month after the event, all archives from major news sources were virtually empty. The only archive I could find was on an international labor union website. While it seems the media does have the power to bring us together in the electrical age, the “message” of the electronic media is that history can disappear in a flash and be rewritten so quickly as to no cause us the heard of consumer wildebeest to even raise their head from their dollar menu item.
It would seem to me that the message of any "extension of man" is the further revealing of our human nature. Technology doesn't change us; it shows us who we are.
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