McLUHAN'S MESSAGE



"we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us"






Marshall McLuhan was an unknown Canadian professor of English until he published Understanding Media in 1964. The book became a best-seller and catapulted him to international prominence as a media analyst. He spent the rest of his life writing and lecturing on his key theme: the effects of technology on human beings.





Media

According to McLuhan, every technology is a medium: it mediates – or stands between – our physical selves and our consciousness of, and interaction with, the world around us. A medium can have material form (like a computer) or it can take the form of an idea or system of thought (like mathematics). Whatever their form, all media produce certain effects in common independent of the intentions of their user.

In a nutshell, McLuhan's thesis is that the principal effect of any medium is not the information it carries – what we usually think of as the "content" or "message" – but rather the new environment that it brings into being. While the content holds our attention, the new environment transforms our perceptions and behaviour without our awareness. The content of the new environment is the old environment that is displaced by the medium. The most profound and long-lasting effect of any medium is the change in scale, speed, or pattern that it causes in human relations and activities.

McLuhan insists that an analysis of media content misses the point since it is the form of the medium which exerts the greatest influence. A story, for example, has different meanings depending upon whether it is related orally, written in a book, acted out on the stage, heard on radio, presented on film, viewed on television, or depicted in a comic book. The form of any medium transforms its message.

Media are not passive conduits for carrying information or communicating ideas but exert great power by creating hidden environments that act abrasively and destructively on older forms of culture. The printing press, the computer, and television are not simply machines which convey information but metaphors through which we conceptualize reality. They classify the world, sequence it, frame it, and shape it, so that through these media metaphors we do not see the world as it is but as our coding systems are.

Media have a gravitational pull on society, affecting even those who don't make use of them and producing changes beyond their immediate application. For example, the introduction of the car not only enabled us to travel great distances very quickly – something we could not do before – but it lead to the construction of highways and the development of suburbs. The car also introduced into our lives: gas stations, car accidents, noise pollution, autoracing, drive-in movies, etc. So the principal effect of the car is not merely the greater travel that it fostered, but the widescale changes to our physical landscape and social organization that it brought into being.

McLuhan claims that every medium enhances or intensifies some human ability or experience:

  • the wheel is an extension of the foot because it accelerates the movement of our feet and legs in physical space

  • clothing is an extension of the skin because it enhances the function of our skin in protecting our internal organs

  • housing is an extension of the body's heat-control mechanism by strengthening our ability to withstand extremes of temperature

  • language is an extension of the grunts and other sounds we make to communicate with others

  • the phone is an extension of the ear and the range of the voice

  • the internet is an extension of the central nervous system and the brain

All media – from the phonetic alphabet to the smartphone – are extensions of ourselves that cause deep and lasting changes in how we experience the world around us. The new environment created by a medium enables us to do something we could not do before but also shields our awareness – "numbing" us – from some of the medium's adverse effects. This numbness protects our psyche when it is suddenly exposed to the new stresses that the medium creates. With the continued use of certain media, a flip occurs and humans become extensions of their technology, and as a result societies come to imitate their technologies.

Because there is equilibrium in sensibility, when one area of experience is heightened or intensified, another area is diminished or dormant. The introduction of a new medium always removes or reduces the role of some other medium or form of experience. The widespread adoption of the car, for example, obsolesced the use of horse-and-buggy. Obsolesced forms do not disappear completely but reappear as art or as a form of nostalgia.

The content of any medium is always an older medium:

  • the content of television is cinema
  • the content of cinema is theatre
  • the content of theatre is narrative
  • the content of narative is language
  • the content of language is speech
  • the content of speech is thought, which ends the chain of media because thought is an unconscious, innate process

All media restore or revive some form of experience that predominated in our past and had been lost. An older, previously obsolesced action or service is brought back into play and becomes an essential part of the new form. For example, the experience of driving a car recalls the knights of old who rode on horses while covered in armour.

McLuhan uses the concept of figure/ground to illustrate how media bring different social elements into focus, allowing others to recede in importance. A figure is any consciously noted element of a structure or situation, while ground is the rest of the structure that goes unnoticed. A figure occupies the foreground of our attention while the ground occupies the background. When a new medium is introduced, the content is a figure, while the new environment is the ground.

The relationship of figure and ground is not static and may "flip" if pushed too far. A medium can "overheat", or reverses into an opposing form, when pushed to its limit. For example, in the technology of industrialization, human industry and commerce is figure and the natural environment/resources is ground. However, when pushed beyond its capacity the model flips: pollution and ecological disaster become the figure while the culture of factory work and consumerism recede into ground.



Laws of Media

McLuhan summarizes his observations by stating that all media have these effects in common:

  • they extend our bodies, minds, and beings

  • as they extend some human ability they simultaneously obsolesce some other form of experience

  • they retrieve and enhance a sense or skill that was obsolesced earlier and the current media do not stimulate

  • when pushed to their limit they have a reverse effect, producing opposite or complementary forms

These four effects occur simultaneously whenever a new technology is put into use. McLuhan illustrates these "laws" in the form of a visual tetrad of effects:



EXTENSION

A human attribute, ability, or experience that is intensified, amplified, accelerated, or pushed to the forefront

brings the FUTURE
into the PRESENT

FIGURE		 REVERSAL

An opposite or complementary form produced when the medium is pushed to the limit of its potential or beyond its capacity

takes the PRESENT
into the FUTURE

GROUND
RETRIEVAL

A revival, restoration, or reappearance of some tendency, behaviour, or thing from the past that had been lost

brings the PAST
into the PRESENT

FIGURE		 OBSOLESCENCE

A removal, weakening, displacement, or making unnecessary of something

takes the PRESENT
into the PAST

GROUND


Opposing quadrants form a complementary relationship: Extension is to Reversal as Retrieval is to Obsolescence, and Extension is to Retrieval as Reversal is to Obsolescence. Each effect can manifest itself in any number of ways and is not limited to a single, specific form. By applying the laws to any given technology – especially a new technology – we can better understand how to protect ourselves from the power it has over us.



Hot & Cool Media

McLuhan draws a distinction between media that provide a lot of sensory information – labeling them hot – and media that provide comparatively little sensory information – labeling them cool. Hot and cool media differ in the degree to which the user actively participates in decoding the medium's content. Hot media, which usually enhance a single sense in high-definiton ("boiling over" with data), require little involvement on the part of the user. A photograph, for example, provides so much visual data that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of the image.

Cool media, on the other hand, require more effort on the part of the user to determine meaning. Television, for example, requires the viewer to connect the pixels instantaneously to give meaning to the otherwise hazy message. Comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail, are even cooler, requiring a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. Generally speaking, hot media function even better when over-extended while cool media can "overheat" and become less effective under such conditions.



HOT MEDIA COOL MEDIA
usually emphasize one sense over the others in high-definition their low-definition require our eyes to scan what is visible and fill in what is missing to "get the full picture"
low in participation high in participation
usually linear and logical unified, simultaneous, and integral
favour analytical precision, quantitative analysis and sequential ordering require the perception of abstract patterning and simultaneous comprehension of all parts
left hemisphere right hemisphere
can be overheated or overextended, and this intensification can make them more effective overheating usually makes them less effective
Examples:
photograph sketch
movie television
lecture seminar
classical music jazz
language speech
book dialogue
radio telephone
painting cartoon
Blu-ray streaming video




Sense Ratios

The introduction of a new medium alters what McLuhan calls our sense ratios: the relationships among the five physical senses. Human consciousness involves all the senses at once but our individual senses vary in the complexity of the perceptions we get through them. People adapt to their environment through a certain balance of their senses. When media combine, they establish new ratios among themselves, just as they establish new ratios among the senses. The primary medium of the age brings out a particular sense ratio, a reprogramming of social life. What had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent.

Before the advent of the alphabet, communication involved all the senses simultaneously, speaking being accompanied by gestures and requiring both listening and looking. The immediacy and rich complexity of preliterate communication was reduced by the alphabet to an abstract visual code. With the advent of the printed page, reading become the primary means of communication so the sense of sight became intensified in its importance compared to the other senses.

Before writing became widespread, humans lived in what McLuhan terms acoustic space, the environment of the spoken word. The ear favours no particular point of view, forming a seamless web around us. We hear sounds from everywhere, all around us, without ever having to focus. We can't shut out sound automatically, we are simply not equipped with earlids. Acoustic space is boundless, horizonless, and charged with emotion.

The introduction of writing transformed the environment into something bounded, structured, and rational. The written page – with its edges, margins, and sharply defined letters in row after row – brought about the era of visual space. The invention of movable type forced humans to comprehend in a linear, ordered, continuous fashion. Where the world of the ear is a world of simultaneous relationships, visual space is an organized continuum of a uniform, connected kind.

In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence," when electronic media replace visual culture with a new aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind moves from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity with a "tribal base." In the present era, electronic media are the primary means of communication with all the senses fully involved in communication. Ours is a brand new world of simultaneity, a global village in which everyone knows what everyone else is doing.





The world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence... Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

- McLuhan   
















Video clips at Marshall McLuhan Speaks















Global Village





Global Village





The World Is A Global Village





Audience Questions





Australian Television Interview - part 1





Australian Television Interview - part 2





Australian Television Interview - part 3