Digital McLuhan

A Guide to the Information Millennium

Paul Levinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134738816
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

Marshall McLuhan died on the last day of 1980, on the doorstep of the personal computer revolution. Yet McLuhan's ideas anticipated a world of media in motion, and its impact on our lives on the dawn of the new millennium.
Paul Levinson examines why McLuhan's theories about media are more important to us today than when they were first written, and why the Wired generation is now turning to McLuhan's work to understand the global village in the digital age.

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INTRODUCTION

Coinciding realms

Digital McLuhan is actually two intertwining books: one presents McLuhan’s ideas about media and their impact upon our lives, the other presents my ideas about how McLuhan’s ideas can help us make sense of our new digital age. I likely would have written a book like this in any case. But McLuhan could not, because he died on the last day of 1980, almost literally on the doorstep of the personal computer revolution that would change so much of our world, yet be so explicable via insights and comparisons McLuhan had earlier made.

Those insights showed us a world of media in motion, in which television was triumphing over books, newspapers, radio, and motion pictures for crucial segments of our attention, and consequently was exerting profound influence on politics, business, entertainment, education, and the general conduct of our lives. This Bayeux Tapestry of media in competition for our patronage—for our souls, according to some—quite naturally led McLuhan to consider the ways that media differed in their engagement of our mentalities. How and why, for example, does seeing a movie on television differ from seeing it in a motion picture theater, how is reading the news different from hearing it on radio, and how is that in turn different from watching it on TV? In raising and attempting to answer such questions, McLuhan in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s developed an intricate taxonomy of media and their effects, one which reached back to the origin of our species for comparisons—as in its recognition of similarities between pre-literate and electronic communication—and left openings aplenty for media to come. How is selecting the news we want to read, hear about, and watch on the Internet different from its presentation via newspapers, radio, and television?

The handwriting for coming to terms with our digital age was on the wall of McLuhan’s books.

But that writing could be useful only to the extent that it was comprehensible—navigational clues, outlines of environments, in a language we do not clearly understand can serve to frustrate as much as educate. To the degree that McLuhan’s taxonomy of media was cast in such a language, it was also a wall in the unintended sense of being an obstacle to understanding. McLuhan sought to call attention to the pre-eminent and overlooked role of the medium in communication—the difference between reading news in a newspaper and watching it on TV—with his famous aphorism, “the medium is the message.” His critics and casual readers mistook that for a claim that the content—what it is we read in newspapers or watch on TV—is totally unimportant. He used provocative analogies to dramatize the differences between television and its competitors—cool versus hot, light-through versus light-on, acoustic versus visual space. But such metaphors often performed in ways precisely contrary to the reason that metaphors are employed: rather than elucidating a lesserknown area by relating it to an area that we know well, hot and cool and light-through and light-on were far more arcane than the media effects they sought to illuminate. When McLuhan was called upon to explain, he said his intention was not to explain, but to explore.

But this difficulty with McLuhan’s presentation—with his medium of expression—in no way diminishes the importance of its content. It was there to see all along for those willing to learn the language, to see what was right with his game, as Wittgenstein advised we do about any novel ideas we may come across, in addition to subjecting them to criticism. Tom Wolfe asked in 1965, “What if he is right?” Might McLuhan be “the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov?” Although Wolfe surprisingly included Pavlov on that list, he was asking the right question. And the perspective of Digital McLuhan is that the answer is yes, at least insofar as a framework for understanding the human relationship with technology and therein the world and the cosmos is as important as frameworks for understanding the human psyche, life, and the cosmos in a physical sense.

Others came to the same conclusion. Critical anthologies such as Stearn’s McLuhan: Hot & Cool (1967) and Rosenthal’s McLuhan: Pro and Con (1968) contained as much admiration as denunciation of McLuhan (his language was so vivid, its claims so bold even when misunderstood, that inattention was rarely the first response). His biographers Philip Marchand (1989) and W. Terrence Gordon (1997) describe the caliber of protest at the University of Toronto’s plan to close McLuhan’s Centre for Culture and Technology in 1980, after he had been incapacitated by a stroke. Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Woody Allen, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, and Jerry Brown were among the hundreds who called or wrote letters of support. The Centre was closed then nonetheless, but a recognition of McLuhan’s importance was amply demonstrated at pinnacles of scholarly, cultural, and even political discourse.

In fairness to McLuhan’s detractors, however, his work suffered from a problem more fundamental than the dazzle of his metaphors—a problem, moreover, not of McLuhan’s making, and quite beyond anyone’s capacity to redress at the time. In the scientific, and by extension social scientific, community, the surest way of determining to what extent someone’s idea is right or wrong is to gauge the accuracy of its predictions. But there was no good occasion in the three decades McLuhan wrote about the media for either him or his associates to do this. From the publication of The Mechanical Bride, his first book about media, in 1951, to his death on the eve of 1981, television utterly dominated public and private life. This meant that any predictions McLuhan made about television, or were generated by others from his ideas, had elements of the ex post facto, of explanations of an environment already present. Thus, McLuhan observed that JFK’s “cool” style was more appropriate to the medium of television than Nixon’s “hot” arguments in 1960, and Jimmy Carter’s low-key persona similarly made him appealing to voters making decisions on the basis of television sixteen years later. But as intriguing and useful as those connections may have been (and still are), they could not provide the corroboration of McLuhan’s ideas that the arrival of a new medium—as revolutionary and unforeseen in its impact as television—might have bestowed, had the advent of that new medium and its effects been predictable and explicable on the basis of McLuhan’s work.

The digital age now provides such an occasion. Digital McLuhan thus not only seeks to provide a guide to our digital age—the book’s primary purpose—but in so doing provides evidence of the underlying accuracy of McLuhan’s thinking that was unavailable when he was alive.

To accomplish this double task, each chapter of the book will attempt to clarify a key insight, principle, or construct in McLuhan’s work, and then discover what it tells us about tens of millions of people reading the Sunday papers, purchasing birthday presents, and even watching the equivalent of television on the Web, while those not online learn about it anyway in newspapers, magazines, movies, and TV shows.

The Game Plan

We begin in the next chapter with a consideration of McLuhan’s method—his professed preference for exploration over explanation, for demonstration via metaphor rather than logical argument, and his presentation of ideas about media in small packets, often as few as several paragraphs and rarely more than seven or eight pages. Strictly speaking, this is not about an insight into media effects nor a tool or construct McLuhan developed for assessing them. Rather, it is about McLuhan’s way of doing business with his readers—his modus operandus. And yet not coincidentally, this turns out to bear a striking similarity to the way people communicate online, with comments on Usenet lists usually just a few paragraphs in length, and hot-linked titles and phrases on Web pages much like the glosses in bold—hot-links ahead of their medium—we find dispersed throughout the pages of McLuhan’s books. Even in the examination of his method, we find in McLuhan a presaging of our age, an author struggling to communicate in an electronic pattern via the straightjacket of paper—a startling quicksilver mode in some sense consonant with the wheels of our intellect, but not as yet invented then in media.

Next, we turn to the core insight of McLuhan’s entire agenda, also his best known and least understood: the medium is the message. Intended to call attention to the proposition that mere use of a medium is more profound in impact upon society than what individuals may do specifically with the medium—the world successively changed when people began talking on the phone, listening to the radio, watching television, logging on to the Web, not usually because of what they said, heard, and saw—it was roundly mangled into a contention that content is totally unimportant.

A moment’s reflection shows why that cannot be. There is no such thing as a medium without content, for if it had no content, it would not be a medium. McLuhan (1964, pp. 23–4) cites the electric light as a hypothet ical example of “pure information,” or a medium without content, but then aptly notes that its content is what it shines upon and illuminates. In other words, the light bulb becomes meaningful to the extent that it illuminates something. A television with no programs could have no influence upon us as a medium, any more than a computer devoid of its very different kind of programs would be anything other than an interesting piece of junk. This is, indeed, just what became of many early personal computers due to their inability to access the Web, as soon as such access became crucial. They lacked the programs, and thus the content the programs delivered, necessary for the computer to function as a medium in the new environment. Content, in other words, is essential for “media-hood.”

The Internet highlights another way in which the content of the medium aids our understanding of media. In McLuhan’s quest to uncover the ordinarily hidden dimensions and effects of media—unnoticed because we focus on content and take the underlying medium for granted—he observed that media suddenly become more visible and attractive as objects of study when they are superseded by newer media, and become their new content. Thus, McLuhan’s early work in literary theory showed him that the narrative structure of the novel jumped into public awareness after motion pictures adopted that structure as its content. By the 1960s, television would have the same effect on cinema, as universities created film schools to examine what was now available as content at all hours of the day in everyone’s home. And in the decade after McLuhan’s death, the VCR transformed the very structure and organization of television into content for the first time, directing the attention of its viewers to the relationship of commercials and programming (commercials could be “fast-forwarded” on the VCR), the subtleties of program timing (the taping could end several minutes before the end of the program, because the rest was taken up by commercials), and other aspects of television uncritically accepted when they were beyond viewer control.

But in the new millennium, the Internet is poised to trump each and every one of these prior “liberations” of media into content, because the Internet is making content of them all. What began as a medium whose content was text, and expanded in the 1990s to include images and sounds, has become at the turn of the new century a medium that offers telephone (Internet Telephone), radio (RealAudio) and television (RealVideo). The evidence and implications of the Internet as this grand medium of media will be among the continuing themes of this book.

Chapters 4 and 5 address McLuhan’s discussions of “acoustic space” and “discarnate man,” and therein consider the impact that the Internet as a whole has on our relationship to the world, and to one another. A prime concern of McLuhan’s was the way the alphabet and the printing press encouraged us to see the world as a series of discrete sources and pieces, from which we could be easily detached, as when closing a book. According to McLuhan, such abstract, sequential vision had replaced an earlier, “acoustic” mode, wherein we perceived the world all at once, all around us, as a permeable extension of ourselves and we of it. Provocatively, McLuhan claimed that television was retrieving this mode—via screens that showed the same thing everywhere we turned. But regarding television as “acoustic” was a difficult feat, no matter how often McLuhan aptly quoted Tony Schwartz (1973) that television treats the eye as an ear.

The advent of cyberspace in the 1990s made it easier.

For the space that the computer screen invites us to join is indeed everywhere, but unlike the space on the television screen, it is potentially of our own making—we create it and remake it by using it—just like the acoustic space of the pre-literate environment. Further, the notion of being in cyberspace is much less counter-intuitive than being in the acoustic space of television. We go from one place to another on the Web and we feel as if we are moving through that space—a sense we do not usually have when jumping from one television station to another. The unmasking of cyberspace as acoustic space thus helps make each more explicable.

Denizens of cyberspace are virtual—meaning, our physical bodies play no role in our interaction with and in that space. McLuhan noted this “discarnate” effect when we talk on the phone, listen to the radio, or watch television, and wondered what impact it had upon our morality. But the experience on the phone is very different from the other two, in that we become discarnate when we talk on the phone—each party to the conversation is “sent,” without accompanying body, in every word that is spoken—but only the viewed, not the viewer, is discarnate on television. The online participant is incorporeal in the same interactive way as the telephone conversationist, and on this key aspect the Internet is more like the telephone than television. Indeed, we will see throughout this book that the digital age has tap-roots in telephones and printing every bit as powerful as those in television, even though the digital age is brought to us on screens first made familiar on TVs.

Chapters 6 and 7 focus on the geo-political consequences of this revolution. McLuhan suggested that electronic media, television in particular, were turning the world into a “global village.” The logic of this observation is immediately comprehensible and made the global village not only among the most often but also the most appropriately quoted of McLuhan’s metaphors: we can all see the similarity between the world watching the Superbowl on television and villagers enjoying a local football game from their vantage point in a stadium. But there is more to village life than being a passive audience—villagers in a stadium can interact with one another and the players, and indeed the players may be villagers themselves—in contrast to the television audience, which consists for the most part of isolated family units, at irreducible arm’s length from what they watch on the screen. Once again, the Internet helps complete McLuhan’s metaphor, to the point of making it a reality. The online villager, who can live anywhere in the world with a personal computer, a telephone line, and a Web browser, can engage in dialogue, seek out rather than merely receive news stories, and in general exchange information across the globe much like the inhabitants of any village or stadium. Just as D.W. Griffith shattered the shell of the proscenium arch that had kept movie cameras, still under the spell of theater, from approaching the scene too closely, so has the Internet shattered the barrier that kept viewers bottled up with no input on the living-room side of their television screen.

The advent of computer screens not only as receivers but initiators of information in homes and offices around the world is further fulfilling another of McLuhan’s observations about the global village—namely, that its dispersion of information is creating a new power structure whose “centers are everywhere and margins are nowhere.” Radio and television networks began this process by broadcasting the same breaking news into everyone’s homes and offices, and even motel rooms. From the point of view of access to this important information, the room with the best view could just as easily be in a shack off a desolate road in the middle of nowhere as a penthouse or office suite in NewYork City—all that counted was that the room have a television or radio (in a sense, this effect began with national news magazines, although their delivery was not immediate). But the sources of this information were still controlled by a handful of broadcast networks; in the television age, their corporate headquarters were meaningful centers indeed.

In the age of the Internet, in which anyone with a Web page can launch a news story, internationally, the corporate gatekeeping of news is finally beginning to subside. I learned about Princess Diana’s tragic accident in August 1997 via an Associated Press bulletin forwarded by an individual on the Internet. Although some of the cable television stations were quick to pick up the story, an hour or more elapsed before all the major U.S. television networks joined in the coverage. Similarly, the Starr Report on Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky (Office of the Independent Counsel, 1998) was available in its entirety to the world at large on the Internet at a time when only excerpts were quoted on radio and TV, and a day before its publication in newspapers.

The decentralization of our digital age pertains to more than news. Amazon.com became the third largest bookseller in the world within the first three years of its online operation (Nee, 1998). There is of course a centralized corporate structure in Amazon.com, but it is irrelevant in terms of the books that are offered for sale to its customers: unlike even the biggest physical bookstore, which can only shelve a given number of different books, the shelf space on Amazon.com—being virtual—is virtually unlimited.

And in many cases, the power of corporations to influence economic events, much like the power of governments to influence them, is melting in the light of personal computers and their empowerment of individual choice. Microsoft, the biggest corporation in the world, was unable to make its Windows 95 a thorough success, just as it has been struggling for years to attain a majority of the market for its Web browser, Internet Explorer: in both cases, the preferences of individual users, not the plans of the mega-corporation, prevailed. That is why lawsuits by the government to limit the power of Microsoft are unnecessary. The power is already limited by a decentralization, in significant part of Microsoft’s own making, far more profound. Indeed, for anyone who understands McLuhan, the lawsuits are laughable—a quixotic effort by government, eager to demonstrate what little power it has left to regulate commerce, against an alleged monopoly whose very success has had the effect of obsolescing monopolies in the information business. Call it a tilting at Web mills.

McLuhan’s examination of media looked not only at their impact on business, politics, and soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Coinciding realms
• 2. The Reluctant Explicator
• 3. Net Content
• 4. The Song of the Alphabet in Cyberspace
• 5. Online Angels
• 6. From Voyeur to Participant
• 7. The Fate of the Center
• 8. The Mind Behind the Screen
• 9. Way Cool Text
• 10. The Rusted Gatekeeper
• 11. Serfs to Surf
• 12. Beauty Machines
• 13. Balinese at Work Online
• 14. Through a Glass, Brightly
• 15. Spirals of Media Evolution
• Bibliography
• Index