Descargar APP gratis en APP Store 72434n
Descargar APP gratis en Play Store
Marshall McLuhan's message was imbued with conservatism | Lance Strate j2416
26/07/2011
26/07/2011
Although an icon of the counterculture movement, the man who coined 'the medium is the message'...
Although an icon of the counterculture movement, the man who coined 'the medium is the message' was no pill-popping hipsterMarshall McLuhan is ed by many for his rise to fame as the original "media guru", the subject of a multitude of newspaper and magazine articles and broadcast interviews, not to mention a cameo appearance in Woody Allen's finest film, Annie Hall.Because McLuhan was adopted first by the counterculture movement of the 1960s and, more recently, by web evangelists, people sometimes assume that the man himself was some kind of pill-popping hipster. They couldn't be further from the truth.Far from sharing sympathy for countercultural forms of life, or the forms of media they embraced, McLuhan made a point of withholding judgment, refraining from moral evaluation of the processes he was describing and explaining. If anything, it was the conservative side of McLuhan that sometimes shone through his stance as a scientific observer. He never condemned the Vietnam war, suggesting instead that it was more of a media event than an actual happening. He discussed the possibility of using media as a form of control, "using TV in South Africa … to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio", with no acknowledgement of the Orwellian implications.As a conservative Roman Catholic, he tended to downplay the significance of the printing press in regard to the Protestant Reformation, a point stressed by many other media scholars. But the fact that his insights could be embraced by radicals and reactionaries alike is a testament to their brilliance, and to his ability to transcend his own human frailties and failings.Even though he was later hailed as a prophet, McLuhan insisted that he was only describing what was taking place in the present, while everyone else was fixated on the past (looking "through the rear-view mirror," as he put it). Looking at electricity, electric technology and electronic media such as Samuel Morse's telegraph and Guglielmo Marconi's wireless, he was able to understand television in ways that no one else had, and to glimpse the seeds of new media environments to come. It was because he understood the present, not the future, that his insights remain as valid today as half a century ago.McLuhan's approach is particularly well suited to helping us to understand new technologies as they are being introduced into a culture. His early rise to prominence was mainly due to his ability to explain the novel medium of television and the dramatic social upheavals that it generated. At a time when baby boomers were establishing a new, "cool" youth culture that ran counter to the "hot" outlook of their parents, McLuhan had an explanation. The "cool" cultural style was a product of the television medium, whose low-resolution image required more cognitive processing than the high-definition experience we might get from radio and the motion picture, and that processing, or participation, had a tendency to suck the audience member in, creating a great sense of involvement in the message. "Hot media", by contrast, require less cognitive effort, freeing audiences to act. This understanding led McLuhan to claim that Hitler could not have been successful in a televisual media environment.Moreover, television, in exposing viewers to the world with unprecedented immediacy and intimacy, was creating what he called a "global village", an entirely new form of tribalism that did away with private identity, individualism and the nation state – all products of print culture. The televisual window on the world was giving rise to a transparent society where we all find ourselves too close for comfort, with deep potential for aggression and violence (including, for example, terrorism).McLuhan's famous aphorism, "the medium is the message", goes to the very heart of his way of understanding media, packing together a dozen or more different meanings. First and foremost, it is a wake-up call. McLuhan asks us to pay attention to the medium, rather than being distracted by the content. The content is not without its import, but it pales in comparison to the impact of the medium itself.Instead of focusing solely on the content of television programming, for example, concerning ourselves with the depiction of violence, he argued that we needed to examine how the very presence of television as a medium was changing us, changing our very mode of thought from one that was characteristically linear and sequential (one thing at a time), to one that involved pattern recognition.Is all this really that far out? The bottom line is that the medium is the message because the medium has a great influence on what is communicated, on how it is used. How we go about doing a task has much to do with the way that task turns out. It is simple, commonsense stuff. We say "ask a silly question, get a silly answer" because the questions we ask determine the kinds of answers we obtain.Supposedly more "conservative" thinkers have argued along similar lines. Henry David Thoreau observed that "we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us"; Mark Twain quipped that "when you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail", and Winston Churchill maintained that "we shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us". To this last, McLuhan's colleague, John Culkin, generalised that "we shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us", by way of explaining McLuhan's perspective.The medium is the message also means that the medium is the environment. Our media are extensions of ourselves, they go between ourselves and our environment, and whatever goes between us and our environment becomes our new environment. In this way, every new medium is a new environment, and affects us much as the natural environment shapes us. That is why, to understand our media environments, we need McLuhan's media ecology.TelevisionPhilosophyPhilosophyLance Strateguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds