Marshall McLuhan

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Marshall McLuhan

• Messenger of Mediums

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Biographical Info

• Born July 21, 1911
• A Canuck
• Earned BA MA in English after briefly
  attempting an engineering major
• Learned under I.A. Richards, friend of Walter Ong
• Died 12/31/1980

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The McLuhan Legacy

• The medium is the message
• Surfing the web
• Global village
• One of the first intellectual celebrities
• THE figure in communications ecology
• Patron saint of Wired

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The Medium is the Message

• Everybody says it, but what does it mean?
• McLuhan posited that the content of media was not
  as important as the effect that the medium itself
  had on human minds and culture
• The Chain
• Each medium changes/emphasizes perceptual habits,
  which in turn effects social interaction
• This effect is more powerful than any message the
  medium might contain.

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Example Lightbulb

• The electric light escapes attention as a
  communication medium just because it has no
  content. And this makes it an invaluable
  instance of how people fail to study media at
  all. For it is not till the electric light is
  used to spell out some brand name that it is
  noticed as a medium page 203

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The Hidden Message of Lightbulbs

• The message of the electric light is like the
  message of electric power in industry, totally
  radical, pervasive, and decentralized page203
• Lightbulbs create lit space where once there was
  darkness seems important, but radical and
  pervasive?

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Cultural Impact of Lightbulbs

• Effective light 24/7
• Is the industrial revolution possible without the
  lightbulb?
• Is the extended work week possible without the
  lightbulb?
• Many analysts believe that the lightbulb is
  directly responsible for reducing birth rates

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Every medium contains hidden messages

• Any technology tends to create a new human
  environmenttechnological environments are not
  merely passive containers of people but are
  active processes that reshape people and other
  technologies alike
• We become what we behold. We shape our tools
  and then our tools shape us.

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Oral Culture to Print Culture

• Oral culture active, participatory, social
• Gutenberg Press movable type turns the world
  upside down
• Visual
• Homogenized experience
• Linear
• Individualism/Fragmentation

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What did these cognitive changes do for print
culture?

• Individualism
• Specialists
• Democracy
• Protestantism
• Capitalism
• Nationalism

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Onward to the future Print Culture to Electric
Culture

• Print Culture is nearly extinct
• McLuhan sees Electric culture as the future
• Electric Culture
• Interdependence
• Collective Identity
• The future is the past a return to tribalism

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The Global Village not as cuddly as we were led
to believe

• In our long striving to recover for the Western
  world a unity of sensibility and of thought and
  feeling we have no more been prepared to accept
  the tribal consequences of such unity than we
  were ready for the fragmentation of the human
  psyche by print culture
• For any medium has the power of imposing its own
  assumption on the unwary. page 206

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The dark side of the global community

• Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian
  library the world has become a computer, an
  electronic brainand as our sense have gone
  outside us, Big Brother goes inside.
• as we transfer our whole being to the data
  bank, privacy will become a ghost or echo of its
  former self and what remains of community will
  disappear.

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McLuhan Criticism where is morality?

• Is it not obvious that there are always enough
  moral problems without also taking a moral stand
  on technological grounds?
• To raise a moral complaint about this is like
  cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. It
  is a problem, but not a moral problem and it
  would be nice to clear away some of the moral
  fogs that surround our technologies.

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Intersections with our readings Baudrillard

• But it is not as vehicles of content, but in
  their form and very operation, that media induce
  a social relation
• The media are not co-efficients, but effectors
  of ideology.
• Baudrillard, NMR page 280

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Intersections with our readings Manovich

• As we work with software and use the operations
  embedded in it, these operations become part of
  how we understand ourselves, and others, and the
  world. Strategies of working with computer data
  become our general cognitive strategies
• Manovich, Language of New Media page 118

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Intersections with our readings Manovich

• During waiting periods, the act of communication
  itself-bits traveling through the network-becomes
  the message.
• So as the user keeps checking whether the
  information is coming she actually addresses the
  machine itself. Or rather, the machine addresses
  the user.
• Lev Manovich, Language of New Media pgs 205-206

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Intersections with our readings Haraway

• Technologies and scientific discourses can be
  partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as
  frozen moments of the fluid social interactions
  constituting them, but should also be viewed as
  instruments of enforcing meanings.
• Donna Haraway, NMR page 524

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McLuhan Recap

• Each medium affects the brain differently, which
  produces a different social interaction
• These medium specific changes are far more
  culturally important than the content of the
  medium

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McLuhan Recap

• McLuhan wouldnt be terribly interested in the
  sex violence contained in certain video games
• the question for McLuhan would be how does the
  human brain process this medium, and how will
  that ultimately effect social interaction?

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Print/Electric Culture

• McLuhan sees us moving from an individualistic
  print culture to an interdependent global village
• The prognosis
• This new form of tribal cultures says hello fear,
  goodbye privacy
• Is he correct?
• What can we do to transition more effectively?