Essay: Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan was a “media and communication theorist and is considered the first father leading prophet of the electronic age” (Kappelmann,Todd) but he was also the most controversial and most talked-about contemporary intellectuals.”, he coined the phrase “Medium is the Message” also known as Medium Theory. He was explaining the way in which we absorb information from media, and how it isn’t the information that affects us but the way we absorb it. McLuhan said “Indeed, it is only too typical that the content of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium” (McLuhan,1964) Medium Theory is his most notable piece of work, Medium Theory was introduced in his 1964 book, ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’’, which soon became known as the bible of media studies. It is defined as “the name assigned to a variety of approaches used to examine how the means of expression of human communication impact the meaning(s) of human communication(s)” (Folkerts,2003) Medium theory believes that we do not experience the world directly, but rather we experience it through different media of communication. “We experience reality through the filters of media – either oral, typographic or electronic – and these filters determine what we know and how we know it and our relationships to social power structures” (Ellis, 1999). McLuhan and Harold Innis were concerned with how we experience than what we experience unlike most communication theorists. This shows us that is not about what the content is but rather how we receive the content. “In McLuhan’s eyes, the content of any medium is another medium” (McLuhan, 1964). This way of looking at media could be “roughly compared to a set of Chinese boxes or to the famous Russian Matryoshka doll”. It is impossible for the viewer to consumes everything that we see each day, in the form of communication. Mass media influences us and is a huge determinant of what we perceive as important and what we should be paying attention to and limits us from information deemed unimportant .This is not to say that everyone absorbs the same information with the same context, “it guides us to personally filter out excess information to get what we want with unifying reference points of genre“. “George Gerbner describes this, explain mass media as the ability to create publics, define issues, provide common terms of reference and thus to allocate attention and power” (Littlejohn Stephen 2008). McLuhan argued that human senses were important to the communication process and that media extended the senses. McLuhan believed that technology extends our self into interaction with the medium. Using this logic we can say that television allows us to see “beyond the limits of biology”. The telephone does the exact same for hearing. Computers and electronic media allow information to be stored (electronic data bases), manipulated (word processing) and transmitted (email) far beyond the meager capabilities of human nature”. McLuhan believed that individuals develop expectations about their own needs with respect to sensory and perceptual information. “They internalize these expectations but these internalizations are subject to modification from outside sources”. In the typographic medium it is “fixed and processed aurally” (Ellis, 1999). This makes how we receive the information from the typographic medium, slow and orderly. “Politics, fashions and values were relatively constant for a long period of time” (Ellis 1999). On the other hand the electronic media have radically altered the “reference signals and changed the way in which we think, act, perceive the world”. McLuhan had coined this as ‘outering’ (Ellis 1999). “Just as a wheel is an extension of the foot and clothes the extension of the skin, media are extensions of the senses.” (Murphy, 1971)
Joshua Meyrowitz attempts to organize and distinguish theories associated with mass media by separating the schools of thought into three main categories. The three main categories are medium as a vessel, medium as a language and medium as an environment. Medium as a vessel refers to the idea “That media are more or less neutral containers for content” (Littlejohn, Foss 2011). With reference to television, it doesn’t matter what the focus of the information presented is but rather that the “television brings across all information unbiased in the same demeanour” (Bobbitt, 2011). Medium as a language reflect exactly what it sounds like, different mediums will express themselves in different ways, with different slang or grammar to define the genre. With printed mediums this could reflect in the “format of the piece, the way in which something in written and even font choice” (Bobbitt, 2011). The final category is medium as an environment, the idea is derived from the concept that media has the ability to create and directly influence our personal and individual experience within a mass population whether or not we realise it.
He categorized media into hot and cool, it was categorized in the way each type of media affects our brain. His classification of media takes into account two factors: participation and information. Medium that is low in participation and high in information content is categorized as hot. A medium that is high in participation but provides low information is cool. Examples of hot media are print, lectures, photograph and film, they provide high definition data, and cold media are speech,cartoon,telephone,television,seminars, they provide low definition data.The medium is also categorized into hot and cool based on how much we depend on the certain medium, in a certain society. Media tend to interact with one another, when new medium are introduced it can change the way in which the other older media are used. McLuhan states “no medium has its meaning or existence alone, but only in constant interplay with other media”(McLuhan, 1997) and “media as extensions of our senses institute new ratios, not only among our private senses, but among themselves, when they interact among themselves. Radio changed the form of the news story as much as it altered the film image” (Bobbitt, 2011). McLuhan also states that television changed the way we use radio, which McLuhan notes when he writes: “One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system” (Bobbitt, 2011). With that we can say that a medium’s impact on society is not linear and static, but multi-dimensional and dynamic as that medium interacts with other media and as the society changes how it uses the medium. Media overtime can heat up, McLuhan once described television in the 1960’s as a cool medium, but we couldn’t say the same for today. Since the 1960’s, television has heated up due to it becoming more high definition and more ubiquitous. The way in which we view television is also different, there used to be only one television in which the whole family was forced the same tv show at the same time but we have come along since then. Now we watch entertainment on multiple televisions, and anything from tablets, laptops to mobile phones. In McLuhan’s hot and cool media, he is describing the effects rather than the definitions.  “These effects can vary depending on the society’s stage of technological development, and those effects can change over time as that society changes and as that society changes how it uses that medium” (Bobbitt,2011)
McLuhan explains how we are now living in a “Global Village”. A Global village is defined as a “community in which distance and isolation have been dramatically reduced by electronic media” (Webber,1999) McLuhan spoke about the global village before there was even “a CNN, let alone a World Wide Web” (Potts, 2008). McLuhan wrote about electronic media way before the technology age, around 30 years before, he spoke about how electric media will allow us to be “present to each other across the globe” (Potts, 2008), he was describing email and instant messaging that “was beyond the imagination of most of his contemporaries” (Potts, 2008). The improvement of technology and the mass amount of new communication media, distance no longer matters. We have eliminated “the concept of space with virtual extensions of our extremities: vehicles extend our feet cross-country; telescopes enhance our optical capabilities” (Rosenberg, 2011) even the written word is “an extension of spoken language through time and space- itself an extension of basic thoughts, feelings, and intent”.(Rosenberg, 2011) Everything is right at our fingertips, within seconds you can find out the weather in Australia, the news from the United States, you can even video chat loved ones living abroad.
McLuhan’s Medium Theory has both fiercest supporters and the harshest of critics. His supporters cited the strengths of medium theory as the ability to think beyond the message and focus on the medium as each medium was unique and had the ability to influence and reshape society. “McLuhan was a prophet of both the media and computer age, noting how more and more forms of culture and consciousness are being rendered into ‘the form of information’” (Meyrowitz, 2001). McLuhan’s Medium theory has transcended time as it is just as much if not more relevant today than it was in 1964. Another advantage of medium theory, is its “orientation to medium specificity”.Technology and forms of media “will have unique properties” (Potts, 2008), which will lead to produce the potential for differing cultural effects.
The shortcomings of medium theory according to critics is its “technological determinism”. Technological determinism describes how “technology influences human evolution: who we are is determined by the tools we invent and use” (Heidinger,2011). McLuhan and his other scholarly successors, define cultural history by technological change, they focus on the changing of communication technologies. Raymond Williams criticized McLuhan by saying “the medium is the message’ he argued, is such a reductive formalism that all other, causes apart from the medium – ‘ all that men ordinarily see as history’ – are reduced to mere effect”.
(Williams, 1975). The main difficulty regarding technological determinism is it’s separation of technology from society. Technological determinists interpret technology in general and communication technologies in particular as the basis of society in the past, present and in the future. They say that technologies such as writing, print, computer or television have changed society. Society has been seen as being determined and influenced by technology, “new technologies transform society at every level, including institutions, social interaction and individuals” (Swearengen, 2007). Individuals interpret technological determinism in everyday life, current technology change the way in which we learn, feel and think the way we do things because of the messages we receive through them. “The radio required us to only listen and develop our sense of hearing” (McLuhan, 1962). Also the television “engages” both our hearing and our senses”. Once the senses are developed, we then transfer and use them in our everyday lives. On the other hand there is the metatheoretical assumptions are categorized into three different categories, they are ontological,epistemological and axiological assumptions. Ontological refers to the fact that humans do not have much free will. They are influenced by others around them, what society is using they too will use it. Epistemological assumptions refers to the medium changing, when the medium changes so does society’s way of communicating. Axiological assumption is the theory that is “objective to everyone that will act and feel the same no matter what the medium they are using provided that they are using the same medium. Values are not involved because evidence is seen strictly through observation” (McLuhan,1962). Another shortcoming of medium theory according to critics, is the fact that McLuhan prophesied the global village, but he said nothing at all about ownership, control or regulation of the global village. He spoke a great deal about how medium is the message, but he nothing to say about the content of the message. “He could assert that radio created Hitler in Germany and the teenager in the US, but he allowed no role for the economic,political and social factors which most scholars would consider crucial to such historical processes”.
Media and society are very strongly linked together, society is dependent on the media for everything in our lives. Mass media are thought of as sources of news and of entertainment. Media carries messages of persuasion, from what we should think to what items we should buy to where we should travel, mass media influences almost every aspect of society. “McLuhan understood the full dangers of corporate control of technological media but he did not extend this insight into a reflection on the relationship of capitalism and technology” (Kroker 79). Mass media in our everyday lives has changed the family dynamic and our relationships. We used to spend quality time interacting with our families, nowadays our evenings are spent in separate rooms on separate tvs or devices. Instead of building up a family bond, everybody is doing their own thing, the teenage daughter will be in her room watching television while simultaneously surfing social media, the son would be playing video games in his room. The parents would also be in separate rooms, the father reading a book in the kitchen while the mother watches a drama in the sitting room, In ‘Understanding Media’, McLuhan states that: “The TV child expects involvement and doesn’t want a specialist job in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his society”(McLuhan, 1964). The mass media is used to bind communities together by giving messages that become a shared experience. Society is connected to the Global village through our communication technology. “They experience simultaneous pressures to unity and fragmentation” (McNeely, 1996). …