During my studies at the University of Tartu in the field of journalism I read a lot of text by respectful researchers in the field of media and elsewhere. Although I’m familiar with McLuhan’s thoughts and ideas (phrases) regarding the media, there still were some now angles which I found from this article.
For example – I guess I never gave second thought to what the media exactly is. For me it was simple – television, radio etc. by book, right? To think of our clothes, or haircuts or pets as a media also is fascinating and even true. If the aim of the media is to communicate then clothes fit perfectly.
I am a little bit disappointed by the negativistic look on life what McLuhan has. “Slaves to the media, manipulative audience etc.” – I hope that he was so convinced of these possibilities because of the era of the time when the interview was taken. Because what exactly there is to be manipulated for? The individualism of man has become so elaborate that if we are indeed slaves to something, it’s the materialism. But this is a whole different line of thought…
McLuhan proposed an interesting view on our perception of the world - humans see the world from the rear-view mirror. When changes occur, we see them only when we are passing them. Funny is that Jüri Käo (respectful businessman) just used the same parallel - http://www.e24.ee/?id=167655. Check it out!
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McLuhan is definitely one of the most quoted researchers when talking about media studies. French language itself has a term “mucluhanisme” which is a synonym for the world of pop culture.
McLuhan contends that „all media - in and of themselves and regardless of the messages they communicate - exert a compelling influence on man and society“. The effects of media on men have had a long history. The start point of it can be as follows: “Three basic technological innovations: the invention of the phonetic alphabet, which jolted tribal man out of his sensory balance and gave dominance to the eye; the introduction of movable type in the 16th Century, which accelerated this process; and the invention of the telegraph in 1844.” These were the turning points – times when media really started to change the world (or how we “feel” it at least).
McLuhan’s ideas have not been widely accepted always (maybe even today, who knows). He himself sees the reasons behind that as a battle of generalists and specialists. Him being the generalist and wishing, that social science would step out of the specialist field of studies and “see the big picture”. “Any approach to environmental problems must be sufficiently flexible and adaptable to encompass the entire environmental matrix, which is in constant flux.” McLuhan believes that the effect of media (printed books e.g.) has been greatly overlooked by social researchers, thus never giving them the right or ability to study societies (they are not grasping the media’s role in the formulation of society).
McLuhan isn’t troubled (not so much at least) by the fact, that humans don’t realize the media-affected environment where they live. “Human remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in.”
It is important to distress the main idea, what McLuhan is famous for (in my opinion): “It is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, what affects us.” So Van Damme beating up everything is not affecting child-audiences, rather the television, with its existence is (so don’t ban van Damme, ban the television). McLuhan interestingly points out that "The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb" – the bomb being the medium of course.
So what should a man do in this constant unawareness of media effects and how it controls or at least changes our lives? "If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves" is McLuhan’s answer.
From here one, the article focused more on detail thoughts about certain fields, so I try to cover them more narrowly but still cover them.
It is important to distress that media, in the viewpoint of McLuhan, is not our everyday radio and internet. It is more than that. Media is all what we use to communicate (even clothes) with our surroundings.
One of the beliefs McLuhan also distresses is that we – the mankind has ever from the begging of print (see the 3 major steps towards enslavement to media) shifted from acoustic to pictorial space of man. That meaning that at first, the caveman listening and communicated (discussions, one-on-one communication), but now, with the use of non-semantical figures – letters, we are solely dependent on our eyes to understand everything. "Literacy, contrary to the popular view of the "civilizing" process you've (the interviewer*) just echoed, creates people who are much less complex and diverse than those who develop in the intricate web of oral-tribal societies," McLuhan states.
He believes also that print benefitted the rise of nationalism (because of the creation or widespread of mother tongue) which itself is like a mass media.
One would think that with the monopoly of television nowadays the people are concreted to be in the pictorial space, but McLuhan sees television not as a visual medium but rather sensible by touch. "It is television that is primarily responsible for ending the visual supremacy that characterized all mechanical technology,” McLuhan states, "… television is primarily an extension of the sense of touch rather than of sight." By my understanding it meant, that we have to look inside us when consuming television, because we fill in the blanks when doing that. We have to “touch” ourselves.
McLuhan also introduced the theory of hot and cool mediums. Hot medium excludes and a cool medium includes the potential consumer according to McLuhan. A perfect example of the two is lecture (hot) vs. seminar (cool).
McLuhan distresses that it is important to grasp the possibilities offered to us by the media. "... like Mussolini, Hitler and F.D.R. in the days of radio, and Jack Kennedy in the television era. All these men were tribal emperors on a scale theretofore unknown in the world, because they all mastered their media."
McLuhan also focused on the effects the television era had and has on our children. In the 60s the youth (hippies) rebelled (or still rebel maybe), because the old literate (visual) system agents - parents, schools - clashed with the changed youth (more tribalized now). "Today's child is growing up absurd because he is suspended between two worlds and two value systems," McLuhan states. When in school, the child is “suddenly and without preparation, he is snatched from the cool, inclusive womb of television and exposed - within a vast bureaucratic structure of courses and credits - to the hot medium of print,” McLuhan noticed. It is impressive that more than a half a century ago McLuhan distressed the problems that still effect the educational system nowadays.
Stopped reading at "Do you think the surviving hippie subculture is a reflection of youth's rejection of the values of our mechanical society?"
Link to the text:
http://folk.uio.no/gisle/links/mcluhan/pb.html
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