A
Method in the Madness: A Critical Review of Marshall McLuhan’s
Understanding Media: The Extensions
of Man
by Divine
Agodzo
“Though
this be madness, yet there is method in it.”
Polonius
in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act
2, Scene 2
This
paper examines three key themes in Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, namely, the thesis that media technologies are extensions of human
bodies; the notion of a global village;
and McLuhan’s famous aphorism that the
medium is the message. These will be
addressed in part one. In part two, the
paper will evaluate these ideas in the context of McLuhan’s Catholic faith.
Part 1: Key Themes in Understanding Media
Media
as Extensions of Man
McLuhan
(1964/2003) viewed media as “any extension of ourselves” (p. 19) and the result
of efforts to relieve life’s stresses and burdens. For example, because the foot was unable to
cope with the demands for speed in a growing monetary economy, man invented the
wheel as an extension of the foot. But,
according to McLuhan, humans had to auto-amputate the foot, to replace it with
the wheel. This extension-amputation
principle is echoed by Postman (1993) when he presents the adoption of media as
a Faustian bargain “in which technology giveth and technology taketh away” (p.
16). McLuhan applies his view of
technology as bodily amputation to several media. Thus, “the phone extends our voices,
television extends our eyes and ears, the computer extends our brain, and
electronic media, in general, extend our central nervous system” (Bobbitt,
2011, para. 4).
McLuhan
also believed that new technologies impose a type of narcosis on the user. This is the body’s way of numbing the effects
of the auto-amputation. To illustrate,
McLuhan draws on the myth of Narcissus, whose name originates from the Greek for
narcosis, or numbness. Narcissus fell in love with a reflected image, not
realizing it was his own, because the “extension of himself by mirror numbed
his perceptions” (McLuhan, 1964/2003, p. 63).
Humans, then, tend to “become fascinated with any extension of
themselves” (p. 63).
From
Explosion to Implosion
McLuhan
also contends in Understanding Media
that the world is transitioning from the individualizing effects of print
technologies to a global village in which electric technologies eliminate many of
the barriers separating humanity.
McLuhan (1964/2003, p. 130) avers that “our specialist and fragmented
civilization of centre-margin structure is suddenly experiencing an
instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanized bits into an organic whole”
birthing “the new world of the global village.” To make his case, McLuhan distinguishes
between “hot” media that historically triggered a global explosion
(individualism and fragmentation in society) and “cool” media that are behind
the current implosion (worldwide integration) into a global village. For McLuhan (1964/2003), “a hot medium is one
that extends one single sense in high definition” where “high definition is the
state of being well-filled with data” (p. 39).
Hot media include radio, print, photographs and movies, which in
McLuhan’s view, emit so much data that they limit sensual involvement and are
therefore “low in participation” (p. 39). Cool media, such as the telephone, speech,
cartoons, and television invite sensual engagement because they produce less
high definition data and are consequently “high in participation” (p. 39).
For
McLuhan, this concept of cool and hot media serves as the basis for the
centrifugal and centripetal movement of society under the influence of
different media technologies. The cool
medium of speech is more unifying than latter media and is the means of
communication in man’s original tribal village. However, “the hotting-up of the medium of
writing to repeatable print intensity” (McLuhan, 1964/2003), p. 40) set humanity
on an explosive course, making individuals less dependent on the tribe or
proximity to the village. A reverse
cooling process is triggered when overheated technologies reach a so-called
break boundary point. The world is
experiencing an implosion because “the greatest of all reversals occurred with
electricity, that ended sequence by making all things instant” (p. 24).
The
Medium is the Message
McLuhan
also insists that the impact of technologies owes more to the effects of the
media themselves than to the content of their message. To make this point, McLuhan coined the
enigmatic phrase, the medium is the
message, because the real “message of any medium or technology is the
change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (McLuhan
1964/2003, p. 20). McLuhan held that
what we view as content is simply another medium. Thus, “the content of writing is speech, just
as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the
telegraph” (p. 19), and similarly, “the content of a movie is a novel or a play
or an opera” (p. 31). When one medium is
channeled through another in this way, its effect is intensified, but also made
imperceptible. So, in reality, what we
misperceive as “the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried
by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind” (p. 31).
McLuhan
posits that this distraction by content
has prevented humans from seeing the real impact of various technologies
throughout history. Orality is responsible
for “the sensuous involvement natural to cultures in which literacy is not the
ruling form of experience” (McLuhan 1964/2003, p. 111). Speech does not engender “habits of
individualism and privacy” (p. 112) that increased phonetic with writing. With writing, man became “emotionally free to
separate from the tribe and to become a civilized individual” (p. 118). Even more interestingly, McLuhan suggests
that alphabetization led to violence and militarism in human history. To illustrate his point, McLuhan turns to
another myth, about Cadmus, who is said to have introduced the phonetic
alphabet into Greece. That Cadmus
supposedly “sowed the dragon’s teeth, and they sprang up armed men” (p. 118)
reinforces McLuhan’s claim that “the alphabet meant power and authority and
control of military structures at a distance” (p. 118), because it made
priestly knowledge and power accessible to rising military bureaucracies. Print technology, on the other hand, has had
effects as wide ranging as advancements in mathematical thinking (p. 145-160);
commerce and market economics (p. 179-196); attitudes towards time (p. 207);
and mechanization and industrialism (p. 233; 235). This is not so much because of the content of
print, but because “the linearity, precision, and uniformity of the arrangement
of movable types are inseparable from these great cultural forms and
innovations” (p. 235). Print also bred
nationalism (pp. 238-241) and fostered a literate culture of emotional
“detachment and non-involvement” (p. 235).
McLuhan’s
(1964/2003) speculations on the effects of electronic media—setting aside its
content—are both visionary and startling. He writes that “with the arrival of electric
technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central
nervous system itself” (p. 65). With electric technologies, man has become “an
organism that now wears its brain outside its skull” (p. 86). Electronic media results in the simultaneity
and instantaneity of all things as technological acceleration “approaches the
speed of light” (p. 464) and it turns humans into “nomadic gatherers of
knowledge” (p. 472). But perhaps
McLuhan’s most perplexing claim about electronic technologies is his suggestion
that it might lead to a “Pentecostal condition of universal understanding”
characterized by “general cosmic consciousness” and “a condition of
speechlessness” (p. 114).
Part 2: Understanding Understanding Media
McLuhan’s
assertion that media are extensions of ourselves is an insightful thesis. Viewed another way, McLuhan is suggesting a
fusion of man and machine similarly to Postman’s (1993) claim that computers
have led to a condition in which “human beings are machines…[and] machines are
human beings” (p. 152). While McLuhan’s
concept may seem esoteric, it may have its source in his devout Catholicism,
particular the work of the Catholic philosopher-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
(Heer, 2011; Jacobs, 2011; Schuchardt, 2011; Wolf, 2004). It is also probable that McLuhan may have
derived the idea from the Incarnation—the belief that God, in seeking to
communicate with man, extended the mystical Body in the form and image of
Christ, the Logos (Schuchardt, 2011).
One may even think of the crucifixion as the zenith of this divine
extension and self-amputation, performed as it were, with no numbing of the
senses (Matthew 27:34); an eternal sacrifice that engrafts believers into the
Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:13).
McLuhan’s
global village appears to have
materialized in the World Wide Web, but his claim that it would be characterized
by worldwide devolution of power is disputable.
Winner (1986), for example, criticizes “the faith that the computer is
destined to become a potent equalizer in modern society" (p. 10). Computer technologies “may move the baseline
that defines electronic dimensions of social influence, but it does not
necessarily alter the relative balance of power” (p. 10). The global communication revolution has increased
access to knowledge for the historically marginalized and enabled new opportunities
for expression, but it has provided much greater power to longstanding social,
economic, and political hegemonies (Winner, 1986).
Several
critics have also challenged the basis for McLuhan’s hot-cool media categorizations. Fishman (2006) writes that it “was applied
haphazardly so that it does not provide a sound basis for making meaningful
distinctions” (p. 573). For Jacobs
(2011), “it seems so obviously to be false” (para. 4). But Bobbitt (2011) proposes that McLuhan’s
distinctions can be understood when seen as dynamic analytical concepts, not
static definitions. He argues that
McLuhan’s intent was not to provide consistent meanings of the terms, but
rather a tool for investigating media effects, while acknowledging that the
particularities of a culture and how it uses technology can impact this
cool-hot media dynamic (Bobbitt, 2011).
Even
if it’s difficult to fully resolve the quagmires in McLuhan’s hot/cool media
concept and its links to the global village, it is again interesting to
speculate on how his faith may have informed his conjectures. It is conceivable that McLuhan’s global
village was derived from the biblical metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12:12-26 of the
unified church as the Body of Christ (Schuchardt, 2011). In the same way as the mystical Body is
portrayed by Paul in Scripture as an organic, integrated and interdependent
system, McLuhan invests the electronic age with a sense of unity that mirrors
the ideal of Christian harmony.
McLuhan’s
affirmation that the medium is the message has also been hailed by some as
perceptive and condemned by others as short-sighted. For one, it encouraged researchers to view
content and medium as one unit in mutual interaction, rather than as separate
entities. Yet McLuhan went too far in
downplaying content, in order to bring media analysis to the fore. Certainly,
it matters whether one’s TV time is spent watching a performance of Handel’s
Messiah, or viewing porn. Reading
McLuhan, one might think the difference is inconsequential. There is a rich tradition
of cultivation theory research (Chung, 2014; Morgan & Shanahan, 2010;
Riddle, Potter, Metzger, Nabi, & Linz, 2011), that shows content is at
least as important as the medium. McLuhan’s
error—or exaggeration—is the same as that of Postman (1993), who elevated the
influence of the so-called technological bias of various technologies over
their content.
But
again, it is important to turn to McLuhan’s faith in the quest for some
understanding of his thought. McLuhan’s
position that the medium is the message is a technological parallel to his
theological belief that in Christ, the Logos, the divine medium and the divine
message are one and the same (Griffin, 2012, p. 330; Schuchardt, 2011). As Scripture says, “and the Word was God”
(John 1:1). Jesus was the Messenger as
well as the Message and everything that was unique about Christ’s message had
to do with the fact that it was conveyed by and through the divine Person. Even McLuhan’s yearning for a general cosmic
state of speechlessness, cryptic as it is, may have been inspired by the most
important part of his day—his almost daily attendance of Mass, which was the
holiest of holy moments, characterized by the silent reception of the transubstantiated
wine and broken Body (Jacobs, 2011).
In
conclusion, this paper has discussed the insights and difficulties associated
with three key themes in McLuhan’s Understanding
Media—media as extensions of man; the global
village; and the concept of medium as
message. It makes no claims to have
explicated McLuhan’s ideas, considering McLuhan said of his own work that he
didn’t understand it (The Playboy Interview, 1969). His meandering style and the fact that
McLuhan eschewed logical development of his thoughts make any attempts to make
sense of his work maddening. Yet this
paper has posited that McLuhan’s teachings on technology were intertwined with
the teachings of the Catholic faith to which he was a lifelong devotee. While we may never fully understand McLuhan’s
ideas, we may at least begin to understand its origins if we pay attention to
his faith. It appears McLuhan’s genius owes much to his muse—his beloved Holy
Virgin Mary.
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