Marshall McLuhan is best remembered for his now famous quote “the medium is the message”. It is undoubtedly one of those statements that has blazed a trail in the history of 20th century thinking, and whose understanding is, even today, just short of spurious. Indeed, McLuhan’s propositions were not taken all too seriously by contemporary parties, who regarded him more as a pop culture star than as a thinker worthy of serious consideration. His provoking theorizations on mass media and his tough and intricate writing style have made of his figure a sort of ambivalent sign, crossing between the slight and the dense, between the rigorous and the light. However, it is as though all those entangled terms that McLuhan had coined in the fifties and sixties became objective in the eighties, and, what at first seemed to be an intellectual delirium, turned into a go to glossary to understand our times.
The article starts with a general reflection on media theories and the emergence of media ecology as a discipline. This first section also deals with the role of Marshall McLuhan in media ecology and the revival of his contributions in the last 20 years. The second part addresses McLuhan’s perspective on history, and tries to track down the way in which technology redefines human perception. It is from this vantage point that the fundamental axis of our proposal for reading McLuhan stems, namely the impossibility to segregate technique and culture in his works. It is impossible, mainly, because there is a need to think about the extension of his idea of medium.
This is an idea that brings about the ways in which humans enter in a relationship with the world, and it should be set against works foreign to McLuhan’s own, such as those by Don Ihde and Martin Heidegger. The idea is to separate the notion of the classic readings immediately associated with the notion of “mass media” and start a new search that allows for a deeper and wider understanding of media within McLuhan’s work, closer to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of technology. This article ends with a discussion around the meaning itself of medium embedded in the relationships between humans and their techniques, and the way in which McLuhan couples’ technological pursuits with sensorial and thought organization.
Marshall’s Concept of ‘Media’
McLuhan uses the words medium, media, and technology.
For McLuhan a medium is "any extension of ourselves" or, more broadly, "any new technology." In addition to forms such as newspapers, television, and radio, McLuhan includes the light bulb, cars, speech, and language in his definition of media: all of these, as technologies, mediate our communication. Their forms or structures affect how we perceive and understand the world around us.
McLuhan says that conventional pronouncements fail in studying media because they focus on content, which blinds them to the psychic and social effects that define the medium's true significance. McLuhan observes that any medium "amplifies or accelerates existing processes," introducing a "change of scale or pace or shape or pattern into human association, affairs, and action," which results in "psychic and social consequences." This is the real "meaning or message" brought by a medium, a social and psychic message, and it depends solely on the medium itself, regardless of the 'content' emitted by it. This is basically the meaning of "the medium is the message."
In a further explanation of the common unawareness of the real meaning of media, McLuhan says that people "describe the scratch but not the itch."] As an example of "media experts" who follow this fundamentally flawed approach, McLuhan quotes a statement from "General" David Sarnoff (head of RCA), calling it the "voice of the current somnambulism." Each medium "adds itself on to what we already are", realizing "amputations and extensions" to our senses and bodies, shaping them in a new technical form. As appealing as this remaking of ourselves may seem, it really puts us in a "narcissistic hypnosis" that prevents us from seeing the real nature of the media. McLuhan also says that a characteristic of every medium is that its content is always another medium. For an example in the new millennium, the Internet is a medium whose content is various mediums which came before the printing press, radio and the moving image.
An overlooked, constantly repeated understanding McLuhan has is that moral judgement (for better or worse) of an individual using media is very difficult, because of the psychic effect’s media have on society and their users. Moreover, media and technology, for McLuhan, are not necessarily inherently "good" or "bad" but bring about great change in a society's way of life. Awareness of the changes are what McLuhan seemed to consider most important, so that, in his estimation, the only sure disaster would be a society not perceiving a technology's effects on their world, especially the chasms and tensions between generations.
McLuhan argues that media are languages, with their own structures and systems of grammar, and that they can be studied as such. He believed that media have effects in that they continually shape and re-shape the ways in which individuals, societies, and cultures perceive and understand the world. In his view, the purpose of media studies is to make visible what is invisible. The effects of media technologies themselves, rather than simply the messages they convey. Media studies therefore, ideally, seeks to identify patterns within a medium and in its interactions with other media. Based on his studies in New Criticism, McLuhan argued that technologies are to words as the surrounding culture is to a poem. The former derives their meaning from the context formed by the latter. Like Harold Innis, McLuhan looked to the broader culture and society within which a medium conveys its messages to identify patterns of the medium's effects.
Compiled by: Priyanka, Priyanshi and Sakshi
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