Media Literacy, or Critical Media Literacy as it’s sometimes called, is a part of the media studies world which tends to focus on critical evaluation of the content of various media, mainly communications technologies.

Google search results yield the following:

“A commonly cited definition of “media literacy” was created at the 1992 Aspen Media Literacy Leadership Institute: Media Literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in a variety of forms.” [criticalmediaproject.org]

“the “critical” in critical media literacy: a focus on identity. Critical Media Project builds upon previous media literacy efforts in several ways. Inspired by the writings of scholars like UCLA’s Douglass Kellner and Jeff Share, the emphasis on “critical” media literacy means that we focus more explicitly on analyzing the “politics of representation” in media.” [criticalmediaproject.org]

“Media literacy is the ability to identify different types of media and understand the messages they’re sending.” [commensensemedia.org]

“Media literacy encompasses the practices that allow people to access, critically evaluate, and create or manipulate media.” [Wikipedia]

“Media are powerful forces in the lives of youth. Music, TV, video games, magazines and other media all have a strong influence on how we see the world, an influence that often begins in infancy. To be engaged and critical media consumers, kids need to develop skills and habits of media literacy. These skills include being able to access media on a basic level, to analyze it in a critical way based on certain key concepts, to evaluate it based on that analysis and, finally, to produce media oneself. This process of learning media literacy skills is media education.” [mediasmarts.ca]

In these examples of what we could call conventional media literacy, the focus is on the content, and specifically on the intent of the creators and purveyors of content. It’s mainly focused on building awareness around propaganda, be it political or commercial, and persuasion.

It’s generally directed toward children.

It’s content analysis, and it’s good work. Vital work, even. Certainly in the world we live in today, so over-saturated with ‘content’ of this kind, it is very important that we be critical, that we teach skills to empower people to be aware of the subtleties at play, that the ‘messages’ being directed at you are often designed to manipulate you into buying products or politics.

But — this is not the ‘message’ Marshall McLuhan was talking about when he said, in 1958, that ‘the medium is the message. This is more like saying ‘the message is the message.’ And, really, that’s fine. It’s more than fine — as I already said, conventional media literacy as it’s commonly understood is an important part of the media puzzle. But it’s not the whole puzzle, and it’s focusing on ‘the message’ at the expense, and the benefit, of ‘the medium.’

“For the “content” [‘the message’] of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” [Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London, England: MIT Press,1964; p.18)]

While people are busy making content — even when they’re busy ‘being critical’ of content, technologies are quite busy rearranging our senses, our brains, and our societies. And they do this regardless of ‘the message’ you’re critically or uncritically occupied with.

“What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the “message” of any medium is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” [Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964, p.8]

“The meaning and effect of a medium is the sum total of all its impact upon psyche and society.” [Marshall McLuhan, letter to Harry Skornia dated July 6, 1964 in ‘Letters of Marshall McLuhan’, 1987 Oxford University Press.]

“It is now perfectly plain to me that all media are environments, all media have the effects that geographers and biologists have associated with environments in the past. … The medium is the message because the environment transforms our perceptions governing the areas of attention and neglect alike.” [Marshall McLuhan, Speech given to the Provincial Committee on the Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario, January 19, 1967. In ‘The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education.’ Stevenson, Stamp, Wilson, ed.’s, 1972]

Marshall McLuhan’s pioneering work in media studies doesn’t fit into the conventional media literacy framework, because it goes beyond that framework. It is a Macro Media Literacy.

I suspect a reason that McLuhan work seems absent from media literacy discussions is that people are not sure how it fits. The simple answer is that it doesn’t really fit. (Now, the ironic part is that Marshall McLuhan was a literary critic and professor for his entire career. He was quite concerned with ‘content criticism’ and his early work, for example ‘The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man’ (1951), a study of advertising before television, could be considered media literacy as it’s popularly understood today.)

Macro media literacy analyzes the effect of technologies, regardless of their content, on humans. It focuses on the wider ‘psychic and social consequences,’ on the cognitive and neurological effects, the reshaping of our senses and the balance among them, and the very ‘wiring’ of our brains. It is in this manipulation that we see the major changes in people individually and collectively.

In McLuhan studies, what a ‘medium’ is or what ‘media’ are is a much broader category than in media literacy in general.

If you think about it, the horse saddle was a technology on a level with the telegraph in terms of its power in reshaping the human and human world. But I have yet to see anything like that addressed in conventional media literacy because the ‘message’ is more subtle: it’s environmental.

“Any new technology, any extension or amplification of human faculties when given material embodiement, tends to create a new environment. This is as true of clothing as of speech, or script, or wheel. … It is in the interplay between the old and the new environment that there is generated an innumerable series of problems and confusions. … As an environment it is imperceptible except in terms of its content. That is, all that’s seen or noticed is the old environment. But the effects of … the environment in altering the entire character of human sensibility and sensory ratios is ignored.” [Marshall McLuhan ‘The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,’ 1965]

I am suggesting that we enlarge what is conventionally considered and taught as media literacy to include both a broader understanding of what constitutes ‘media’ as well as a broader understanding of what their ‘messages’ are to include what happens when you shift attention from the content to the form, from the content creators and purveyors to the effects on the user/receiver beyond intentional persuasion and toward the more profound cognitive, sensory, and societal changes which are generally ‘unintended consequences’ or ‘side effects’ but when added up vastly overpower whatever was intended.

Andrew McLuhan,

Bloomfield

2021

Text of a speech delivered on the occasion of the opening of the
Media Art Centre for Research and Methodology: Moscow,
Director Natalia Fuchs

November 17 2020

©Andrew McLuhan 2020.

Our Cause Is Effect: Practical McLuhan

“Perhaps the largest conceivable revolution in information occurred on October 17, 1957, when Sputnik created a new environment for the planet. For the first time, the natural world was completely enclosed in a man-made container. At the moment that the earth went inside this new artifact, Nature ended and Ecology was born. ‘Ecological’ thinking became inevitable as soon as the planet moved up into the status of a work of art.”

-Marshall McLuhan, ‘At the moment of Sputnik the planet became a global theatre in which there are no spectators but only actors,’ 1973.

First Things:

I am going to talk about Marshall McLuhan, who was my grandfather. I am going to talk about my father and myself as well, and I will do it from my own perspective as son of and grandson of these people. I’ve learned that it’s inescapable, and so I prefer to confront it head-on, and use it as a point of strength, a starting point, a perspective no one else has, which has its own value.

Different people will comment on McLuhan and McLuhan work differently. As has been observed, there are ‘many McLuhans,’ so there are many ways in. I will offer McLuhan as I know it from my lived experience.

I delivered a lecture similar in nature to this two years ago. ‘The Past and the Future of McLuhan Studies’ was delivered in 2018 in Munster, Germany — it was supposed to be my father’s last public engagement. He was going to retire. Travel no longer agreed with him. However, he died rather suddenly while he and I were in Colombia together on what was supposed to be his second-last engagement. The night before he died, he delivered a speech entitled ‘Media Ecology in the 21st Century’ which was, in my opinion, one of his greatest achievements. It is available in print and online should you care to read or watch or listen.

Though I’ve spoken on this subject before, I chose not to review that speech in preparation for this one, and instead start anew. Two years later, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve tried a lot. I’ve refined my approaches. I am grateful for the opportunity to re-present, and thanks are due to Natalia Fuchs for the invitation and also to the Canadian Embassy in Moscow for their support.

McLuhan, Then:

Probably the most succinct phrasing of Marshall McLuhan’s method is as quoted in Life magazine of February 24th 1966:

“I don’t explain, I explore.”

He also said things like ‘I don’t have concepts, only percepts.’ ‘You don’t like that idea? I got others.’ He said that he didn’t see any point in making statements which weren’t controversial. ‘I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.’

He courted controversy, probed poetically, played with paradox. He was accused of many things: being a technological determinist, an agent for the Vatican, an irresponsible or shoddy scholar, drinking too deeply from Joyce’s well, and being just plain wrong.

The funny thing is that, so many years later, we find that he was so often on the money. Instead of being forgotten, as was predicted by many critics, the man and his ideas find relevance today. And why is this? The reason is, that while he was more often than not commenting on his own time (‘I’m very careful,’ he’d say, ‘to only predict things which have already happened’), there was a method to his seeming madness.

Methods age better than prophesies.

Further Back:

If we go back further, we find a young Marshall McLuhan enrolled in the University of Manitoba for Mechanical Engineering. This speaks of a person interested in how things work. The nature of things. Practicality. There’s not a lot of theory in mechanical engineering, or if there is, it takes a backseat to applied knowledge.

Sometime in the late 60s, in a short document titled ‘autobiography,’ he types: “I had begun my University studies as a student of Engineering, because of my interest in structure and design.”

In the summer following his first year in Mechanical Engineering, Marshall worked as ‘rod man’ on a survey crew in the north of Manitoba, the central-Canadian province he was raised in. It is said that he ‘read himself into English’ that summer. I would imagine the mosquitos and black flies played a role as well.

But Marshall was raised in English Literature and the performing arts. His mother, Elsie Hall McLuhan, was an ‘Elocutionist’ who traveled and gave readings and performances. She was well-known and acclaimed in her time, and would read poetry and perform plays, playing all the characters herself.

Marshall’s father was in real estate and insurance, and is remembered as a man of good humour and conversation.

I brought up Marshall’s initial course of study to illustrate that this was a person interested in doing things. In practicality. Marshall didn’t go in for philosophy.

As a digression, it is personally interesting to note that my father left home to join the US Air Force, but ended up taking up the family business, getting several degrees in English. Myself, I avoided the academic route altogether (except for a very short stint in a community college for print journalism which I quickly dropped out of) but ended up here somehow anyway. I suppose certain things are inescapable, try as one might to avoid it.

So I come at this all a bit from the side, which is I think appropriate given how Marshall came at it himself.

Marshall graduated from the University of Manitoba with a degree in English, and won a scholarship to Cambridge University. He and his longtime friend Tom Easterbrook went together, working their passage across the Atlantic on a cattle boat. You can imagine that was not a pleasant experience, but funds were short and ‘needs must.’

Cambridge was a most significant turning point for Marshall.

Here are some words from Marshall, found in the 1969 collection of his literary criticism as compiled by Eugene McNamara:

“In the summer of 1932 I walked and biked through most of England carrying a copy of Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury.’ … Cambridge was a shock. Richards, Leavis, Eliot and Pound and Joyce in a few weeks opened the doors of perception on the poetic process and its role in adjusting the reader to the contemporary world. My study in media began and remains rooted in the work of these men.”

“When Joyce quipped to a critic, “Some of my puns are trivial and some are quadrivial,” he was being, as always, precise. When my critics imagine I am being vaguely metaphorical, I, too, am trying to be literal and precise.”

“The effects of new media on our sensory lives are similar to the effects of new poetry. They change not our thoughts but the structure of our world.
All this is merely to say that my juvenile devotion to Romantic poetry is closely related to my present concern with the effects of media in our personal and political lives.”

-Marshall McLuhan, 1969, forward to ‘The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943–1962.’ Eugene McNamara, editor.

In the ‘autobiography’ I mentioned before, he also said:

“My study of literature became an aid to the perception that led me to undertake the task of understanding the relation between culture and technology.”

The influence of Eliot, Pound, and Joyce is fairly obvious. Marshall would be known as an expert in ‘the Moderns’ and their poetry, well before he became known as a communication critic, and eventually for being a pioneer of ‘media studies.’

He used their work, and wrote a fair bit on all three. (There’s even a manuscript for a whole book on Eliot which may someday be published.) Soon after getting into Pound’s ‘ABC of Reading,’ someone familiar with McLuhan’s later work will see many connections.

James Joyce is certainly the most influential writer for Marshall. While Marshall McLuhan called his work ‘a footnote to Innis,’ he also called it ‘applied Joyce.’

Indeed, Marshall would have little to say were it not for the many writers and their works which he studied and mined and reimagined and reworked. He did this in the manner of a poet. No author was more consulted and quoted than James Joyce, and a look at almost any of Marshall’s works will bear that out.

In that quote from his introduction to ‘The Interior Landscape’, Marshall also mentions — and, mind you, mentions first — Richards and Leavis. I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis were teachers at Cambridge in the early 1930’s when Marshall was there, and they were responsible for a new type of criticism they called ‘Practical Criticism,’ also referred to as the ‘New Criticism.’ (With Richards publishing the book on it in 1929).

It is hard to imagine now, but Practical Criticism caused quite a stir when it was published. It was scandalous. Richards was looking for ways to evaluate literature and he did so by concentrating on effect. His method, and what caused the controversy, was to take several poems from a mix of well-known and well-regarded authors, and those of lesser reputation and acknowledged value, and he would remove their names and distribute the poems for comment.

The scandal was that people could not agree on which were good or not — even why they were good or not. And the commentators were scholars and professors who ought to have been relied on to have refined judgement and skill in evaluating poetry. Not knowing who the author was, for Richards chose lesser-known works, authors of high reputation were cast down. The book remains worth looking at today.

As a result of his study, Richards came up with four categories for evaluating the worth of poetry, or literature, and his aim was to find a dependable set of criteria which could be used to judge the value of poetry. They were:

Sense (what is being said or presented), Feeling (how we feel about what’s presented), Tone (the speaker’s attitude to the listener), and Intention (the author’s intent, aim, effect they are trying to achieve.)

This emphasis on effect is I think what stayed with Marshall. Marshall took it a step further and removed not only the author from the equation, but the content, in order to evaluate media, because as he said his interest was in structure and design. His interest was in what these things do.

Some years later, in his popular 1964 work ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,’ Marshall put it this way:

“For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”

-Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.’ New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Marshall was, as was his custom, paraphrasing (appropriating?) from another author — in this case T. S. Eliot, who said:

“The chief use of the ‘meaning’ of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be (for here again I am speaking of some kinds of poetry and not all) to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a nice piece of meat for the house-dog. “

-T.S. Eliot, ‘The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.’ Harvard University Press, 1933

You might ask, as I did, just what the distraction was for? What is this work being done? For McLuhan, the medium is the burglar; the ‘message’ is what happens when you’re busy with the content, busy nibbling on that juicy piece of meat while being robbed blind, deaf, and numb. The message is the ‘personal and social consequences.’ The message is total change.

It is interesting to note the difference between Marshall’s take and the reason behind Practical Criticism — to just the value of literature. Marshall McLuhan famously avoided moral judgement, because when you judge whether something is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ you stop exploring what it is, what it does.

As he put it, ‘first diagnosis, then prescription.’

ToC (Theory of Communication):

One other extrapolation from Practical Criticism, perhaps, is a notion which Marshall came up with in determining various people’s ‘Theory of Communication.’ Early on, Marshall set about determining various figures’ ‘theory of communication’ by asking who their intended audience, and what their intended effect was. Audience plus intended effect equals theory of communication.

(Marshall did note that there’s a difference between intended and actual effect. In 1971 he wrote to Ashley Montagu “What a man is saying is far from the effect he may wish to have, or that, in fact, he does have. Personally, I consider the effect the writer wishes to achieve as his theory of communication.”)

This was, in the late 70s, pitched to a publisher, but wasn’t published until 2011, when Eric McLuhan published it through Peter Lang in New York.

‘Theories of Communication’ is a fascinating publication, and to dwell on it here is beyond the scope of this talk or the time allotted, but I wanted to draw your attention to it should you be interested.

For me, the most valuable part of the book is a piece Eric wrote on Marshall McLuhan’s Theory of Communication, which begins:

“As he often said, Marshall McLuhan did not have A Theory of Communication. Of course, he did have definite notions about what constituted communication and what did not. He insisted regularly though that he didn’t have A Theory of Communication, and that he didn’t use theories in his work. Instead, he would aver, he ‘used observation,’ he ‘used probes.’ It is a matter of how you begin. If you begin with theory, then one way or another your research winds up geared to making the case for or against the truth of the theory. Begin with theory, you begin with the answer; begin with observation, you begin with questions. A theory always becomes a scientific point of view, and a way of seeing the job at hand. Begin with observation and your task is to look at things and to look at what happens. To see. That necessitates detachment, and training of critical awareness.”

-Eric McLuhan, ‘Marshall McLuhan’s Theory of Communication: The Yegg,’ in ‘Theories of Communication’ Eric and Marshall McLuhan, 2011

Moving On:

As is always the case, there’s more to say than one can reasonably expect an audience to pay attention to. Especially in today’s circumstances, when we’re either here or there or perhaps everywhere at all.

The theme of this talk is practicality, and that is a word which maybe is not the first people use to associate with Marshall McLuhan and his work.

After all, he was called many things: Oracle of the Information Age, Prophet, Guru, Maestro, not to mention Huckster, Charlatan, and less generous terms. Something he wasn’t often called was ‘practical,’ or ‘methodical.’ But he was both those things. In terms of his own criteria for a ‘theory of communication’ he definitely had an intended effect, and I believe over the years we’ve gotten closer and closer to achieving it though he passed almost 40 years ago now.

When he was 40 years old, just about my age (though I am two years past 40) Marshall wrote to Ezra Pound:

“…I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of goodwill is the enemy of society. Lewis saw that years ago. His “America and Cosmic Man” was an H-bomb let off in the desert. Impact nil. We resent or ignore such intellectual bombs. We prefer to compose human beings into bombs and explode political and social entities. Much more fun. Lewis clears the air of fug. We want to get rid of people entirely. And it is necessary to admire the skill and thoroughness with which we have made our preparations to this.

I am not of the “we” party. I should prefer to de-fuse this gigantic human bomb by starting a dialogue on the side-lines to distract the trigger-men, or to needle the somnambulists. In London 1910 you faced various undesirable states of mind. Since then the word has been used to effect a universal hypnosis. How are words to be used to unweave the spell of print? Of radio commercials and “news”-casts? I am working on *that* problem. The word is now the cheapest and most universal drug.

-McLuhan letter to Ezra Pound, June 22/51.

Just over ten years later, following the release of Understanding Media, he let this slip to a reporter:

“McLuhan said that ‘fame can frame you into a static image,’ and that this was possible with himself because of his book. ‘Perhaps my next step is to create a new image of myself,’ he said.”

-‘Fame can frame you — McLuhan’ in the Toronto Star, June 9, 1964

Marshall did have an effect he wanted to achieve. He developed methods to do it. I think it’s fair to say he went to extremes. I don’t think many people consider how deliberate he was. He was a very thoughtful person, extremely quick-witted. This is seen or heard in the many hours of interviews and debates available on YouTube. If you haven’t, watch his ‘debate’ with Norman Mailer, easy to find.

But — there are the methods he used to reach his audience — which I would suggest includes us today — and there are the methods he developed to study the effects of technologies.

The former are quite interesting and even worth study, but the latter are where I believe ‘the relevance of McLuhan today’ rests, because a tool is timeless, a sharp tool ever useful. As any craftsperson knows, there’s nothing like the right tool for the job to save you agony and wasted effort, and even an old tool can be dusted off, honed, put to use again.

People marvel that Marshall could see the future — see the world we live in today. Well, for the most part, he didn’t. What he did, and this should cause you to pause and reflect on the implications, and perhaps lose some sleep, is use his tools, his sharpened perceptive faculties, and apply them to his day. That the result should appear to us as prophecy of our present should be disturbing.

As my father used to say, ‘he wasn’t ahead of his time, but ahead of his contemporaries.’

TMI:

In the summer of 2017, I was travelling with my dad as he was speaking at the annual meeting of the Media Ecology Association, that year at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. I was about to turn 40, and was married, had two small children (still small, but getting alarmingly larger) and was trying to figure out what I was doing, if not with my life in general, with my family’s work in particular.

I was getting too old, gathering too many responsibilities, to be playing around at things. I had been getting more involved with the work for the better part of a decade. I’d been travelling with dad, and listening to him speak — having conversations about fascinating things from the time we left home to the time we returned. I had spent over a year exploring, documenting and inventorying my grandfather’s library.

In short, I was hooked, but I also had responsibilities and so I felt I had to come to some sort of decision. Because my father had a hard time. As you might imagine, growing up as Marshall McLuhan’s eldest son was not easy. Going to university as Marshall McLuhan’s eldest son, was not easy. Getting work at a university as Marshall McLuhan’s eldest son proved effectively impossible. He ended up teaching the last part of his career at a private college in Toronto which taught people how to record music and manage artists.

When not doing that, he toiled in his office, ‘the Scriptorium,’ mainly away from a spotlight — which was really fine with him. He poked around and prodded at things. He followed his own interests while also plugging away at unfinished projects left to him by his father. He did some very impressive work. Made, and left behind, a valuable contribution to scholarship and media studies.

By this point I was immersed in the work and my heart knew what I wanted to do, but I didn’t have so much as a bachelor’s degree — how could I do anything?

There, at St. Mary’s College in the early summer of 2017, I decided I’d give it a go. I’d fully commit, put everything I had into it, and if it didn’t work out, at least I’d know I gave it a truly good shot and could (hopefully) move on at peace.

By this point, I’d been active. I’d given many talks on my work with Marshall’s fascinating and quite valuable annotated ‘working library,’ sometimes tacking on a talk of my own when travelling with dad. And I had been teaching as well. I gave workshops on entry McLuhan subjects like understanding ‘the medium is the message;’ the four laws of media, the tetrad of media effects; ‘figure and ground’ I taught to classes from grade five up to undergrad and at the local library.

I was finding my way through the material and finding ways to present it to others, but I didn’t have any sort of organization.

The other thing was that my dad was getting older. His health had always been a bit dodgy — I travelled with him for that reason, and there were a few tricky moments abroad over the years. I knew he wouldn’t be around forever, and there was nothing in place to carry on the work he had carried on all those years.

The McLuhan Institute (TMI) was born. I decided that my focus would be on practicality — what’s useful in the work today and tomorrow. That we don’t need monuments, but methods. Tools.

I’ve realized since that it’s quite in keeping with the work to take what’s useful and set aside the rest — that’s essentially what Marshall did with other people’s work, though he did it with poetry and style. Marshall even stated various places that he was quite willing to scrap any of his methods when they ceased being useful.

And I realized also that not being an academic actually was a fine situation because most of the world isn’t in academia, and we’re all in the same boat when it comes to the effects of technology, we’re all sinking together. I may not have degrees, but I also don’t have the baggage and could maybe speak to people in plainer terms — at least, I try to.

Past Time:

In Marshall and Eric’s work, one gets a sense of urgency. As the scale and pace of innovation exceeds our ability to adjust, it becomes more and more imperative that we get a handle on the effects of our ingenuity. We’ve lost the luxury of time to adjust to things. This situation is only increasing in urgency.

Marshall had hope, and not just as a consequence of his Christian faith. To be sure, he said “our only hope is Apocalypse,” and “I’m neither an optimist or a pessimist — I’m an Apocalyptist.” Let’s face it, he said a lot of things. Deliberately provocative things. Things with which to “needle the somnambulists.”

Now I have hope. When Marshall first said ‘the medium is the message’ back in 1957 people were confused and/or thought he was crazy. Of course, the message is the message. What are you talking about? Today, I can say that technologies create environments that, regardless of what you or I do with them — this could be a speech about how to build a better chicken coop — our world is changed by the introduction of technologies. We are altered in our senses and our brains, in our concepts of self and relations to one another, in the way our society is structured. That it is this environment, this medium, which is the message. And instead of being ridiculous, it’s obvious today.

That’s why I have hope.

I have hope because the more people who understand that the message is anxiety, no attention span, crises of identity of all kinds and the fallout from that, the more people will realize it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way.

There was a time drug companies were largely unregulated. It was within the last century that people revolted and governments said that drugs and foods had to be safe and effective. It’s the ‘side effects’, the ‘unintended consequences’ which get you.

It’s almost a given that our technologies are like drugs, causing changes in our senses, bodies, minds. (Essentially, the definition of ‘drug’.) And yet we regulate frequencies and radiation, and the most surface of things while letting the major changes go unchecked.

Forgive my soap-boxing. I’m almost at my “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore” point.

I am not exaggerating or hyperbolic when I say that the emergency in our technological environment is as existential in nature as that of our physical climate emergency. It’s not much of a stretch.

Where Do We Go From Here?:

As I said, I have hope.

I have hope because I feel that people are waking up. Whether this is from concerted needling or not, I can’t say, but I feel that we are slowly coming to understand the mess we’re in and that we don’t necessarily need to be in it. And maybe we can do something about it. And maybe we should do something about it. Maybe we can consider the effects before we finalize the design and ship it. Maybe getting it right should be prioritized over shipping — and maybe we should figure out what ‘getting it right’ means, like Richards did. Consider the effects beyond capturing attention and maximizing interaction in order to maximize someone’s profits. Make smarter choices.

I think we can. We can sure try.

The physician’s golden rule was ‘first, do no harm.’

Goggle used to say ‘don’t be evil.’ Almost as if they knew they could.

Where is the Greta Thunberg of Media Ecology?

Where McLuhan comes into this is that McLuhan work is full of tools with which to explore the nature and effect of all human innovation. It’s not simply about communication technologies, and it’s not about analyzing the past but anticipating effects of today’s technologies on tomorrow.

We can do this.

Thank you.

Andrew McLuhan

Bloomfield

November 12, 2020.

This means war.

COVID-19 is, in effect, World War III (or later) in terms of the level of innovation we’re seeing. Almost every aspect of society is faced with significant challenges, forced to adjust, to adapt.

We are in a period of change equal to the introduction of smartphones and high speed mobile internet, and the lasting effects will be as great. There will be no return to normal, only new norms. It will surely be a matter of pre- and post-COVID-19.

Wartime is always a period of maximal innovation and growth. In response to extreme threat, governments remove many of the usual barriers, relaxing regulations and throwing money at research and development. The result is a frenzy of activity and innovation across all sectors as, on the one hand, an arms race is on to keep technologically ahead of the enemy, offensively and defensively; and on the other hand, efficiencies are sought to conserve resources. In both cases, we respond with novelty, innovation, as we seek to do new things, to do more with less.

COVID-19 has been declared ‘enemy’ of the world, and global efforts are now underway to meet the threat. This brings the world together in some efforts, while also tending toward isolation in others. The inseparability of economies and cultures today is at once benefit and liability — it makes the pace and scale of contagion, of destruction or solution, almost unimaginably powerful.

When the enemy in this war is a virus, anyone you meet it a potential combatant. This is an enemy without ideology, without a face. Familiarity and trust have no place as your closest people, not to mention strangers, could be carriers — are a threat. The individual and collective psychological reaction to this in the near and long term shouldn’t be neglected.

It seems there is no desirable or safe point of contact in ‘viral space.’ An adjustment of our sense of personal space of this order is no small thing. Its suddenness is sure to have immediate and lasting consequences. I am already seeing and hearing a rise in anxiety from friends who are isolating themselves. In an already anxiety-ridden world, anxieties are going through the roof. Social distancing, a present virtual reality, is now quickly becoming a physical rule of thumb. People try to make light, how they feel their inner introvert is just fine with this. It’s true — we are accustomed to spending so much of our time, place so much of our attention and consciousness online. We already live in this kind of physical social isolation. But there’s a difference between (at least the perception of) choice and enforced necessity. Humans are social and physical creatures. We’ve seen all sorts of psychological changes in the last few years, commensurate with the global rise of mobile technologies. We can expect to see a lot more. What will be the lasting effects of these new shifts in culture?

In short order, it seems everything is shutting down. Cancel culture has gone viral. In many cases, this has not meant a cessation but a shift of activity. This is digital infrastructure and the perceived promise of remote work’s trial by fire. As the days go by and work and study resume as and where possible, things are going to be much different. It will be some time before we can judge the quality of performance in terms of productivity et cetera, but the nature of the activity is much different. More work on one’s own. Collaborative work through virtual communities. Many of these adjustments will become permanent.

“The medium is the message,” (Marshall McLuhan, 1958) is a call to examine the effects of human innovation, activity, from a structural or environmental perspective. The word ‘medium’ itself suggests an environment, a culture, in which things grow.

Where COVID-19 is a suitable subject for media study, is that regardless of its origin, it has quickly had the effect that a major human technology does, impacting and reorganizing human activity of all kinds with corresponding societal, psychological and sensorial impact and response from us.

The advantage is that we aren’t distracted by ‘content’ as such, but forced to reckon with the effects, effects so sudden and wide that they will almost certainly be lasting, game-changing — new norms. As, short of catastrophe, there is no going back to a world without smartphones, so there is no going back to a pre-COVID-19 world.

The global nature of this pandemic demands a global response. In a short time it has had a major impact on the world’s work and social lives, deep changes which will express themselves in novel ways as we go forward and reimagine what it means to work, learn, play, and express ourselves; commune and communicate as humans.

If this is indeed a World War, it is the best kind possible. COVID-19 doesn’t discriminate. It has no religious, ideological, racial bias. It does have one common enemy, us, and it is up to us to come together and meet it with all the considerable force of human compassion and ingenuity.

Andrew McLuhan

[Originally written for American Mind]

Some years ago, when I undertook the inventory and evaluation of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘working library’ of some six thousand items, I made a discovery which, at the time, made me a bit giddy with excitement. I found a note, written by Marshall, showing where and when and why he first said ‘the medium is the message.’

The penciled note reads: “1st used this phrase in June (?) 1958 at Radio broadcasters conference in Vancouver. Was reassuring them that TV could not end radio.”

Finding that note in 2011 was a pretty cool moment. It wasn’t a lot of information, and the question mark raised questions, but still… pretty cool. I made a post about it on the blog I was keeping at the time chronicling my inventory adventures, ‘inscriptorium.’

I did a bit of research to try to find out a date of the ‘radio broadcaster’s conference’ mentioned, but no luck. Given my more recent discovery, I may try again to find out.

The recent discovery happened in a folder marked ‘1975' in the metal filing cabinet containing our McLuhan archives. Started by my father Eric, we try to have a copy of everything written by Marshall McLuhan to match the bibliography-in-progress making note of same. I refer to the bibliography a lot, and hope to someday make it shareable but much work needs to be done first to make it completely accurate and presentable.

I was looking for something else (to do with ‘Laws of Media: The New Science’) when I noticed another mention of where ‘the medium is the message’ came from. This gave the date as 1957, not 1958, but more importantly, it gave more detail to illustrate the reference:

I will spare you the customary (and quite dated) opening jokes and skip ahead to the reference in question.

It’s an 11pp. transcript, purportedly to be published but I have only the transcript, and there’s no mention elsewhere in the bibliography of publication. I did a light internet search without further results.

Here’s the goods:

(5)… “My phrase ‘the medium is the message’ popped up at a radio conference in 1957 when radio broadcasters were concerned about their future as TV entered the home. I had merely wished to reassure the radio people that the unique qualities of their medium would survive any kind of revolution, since the medium is a transforming service which rearranges experiences in unique ways. It is easier to understand this process of interplay between a technology and its effects from the example of the motor car which has a special but ever changing place in our lives. My friend, Joe Foyle of Dublin, is find of explaining to executives that the great enemy of reading ability is car driving. Driving requires a perceptual but peripheral alertness which displaces the tunnel vision necessary for effective coping with the printed page. Many people have pointed out the advantages of reading in a room that is otherwise dark. However, the special place of the motor car in our lives related to a hidden ground, namely our North American need to go outside to be alone. Unlike other communities around the world who go outside to be social, we prefer to find our social lives at home. To North Americans, the motor

(6) car is the ultimate form of privacy, and our cars are designed accordingly. The figure of the car creates a ground of services that are the message, or the social effects. The car requires a surround of highways, factories and oil companies which are, in effect, both the medium and the message of the car. If TV has begun to bring the outside inside the home, then it could well become a factor in the overthrow of the motor car. When a new service goes around an old one, the old one becomes as it were, an art form. When TV went around the movie, the movie was recognized as a serious art form. When our electronic environment goes around the old hardware of the motor car, it too tend to become an art form.”

And there you have it. What more is there to say, really?

Of course, there’s a lot more to say. It’s McLuhan 101. Those five little words sure pack a lot into them. Fortunately, in the just over twenty more years Marshall lived, he repeated those words many times, and went to great lengths to help us understand what they mean. The first, and largest, effort to elaborate on ‘the medium is the message’ was in that first chapter of ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964), but he repeated it in speeches and interviews over the years. Someday I will gather them all together in one place.

Of course, what ‘the medium is the message’ meant in 1957, with television taking over from radio, is vastly different from what it means today, with 5g and quantum computing drifting from the horizon to our hot little hands. And it will change again and again and again — which is why the statement is as true and powerful now as it was and ever will be.

“I don’t explain, I explore” Marshall said in a 1965 interview. Let’s follow his lead.

Andrew McLuhan

From Snake Oil to Silicon

An address to the University of Windsor Law Faulty, October 25th 2019.

To begin, I must state up front that I am (gratefully) in the position of an amateur here, so I won’t represent myself as an expert, certainly not in any areas of law. This hopefully gives me some freedom to explore a topic without having to stay within many boundaries as I do so. A possible disadvantage is that what I discover won’t be taken very seriously — but as I think we might all agree by the end of my time, there may not be much danger of that anyway.

As it happens my grandfather Marshall McLuhan has a few words I can employ in defense of this position:

‘It was during World War II that Operations Research hit upon the strategy of pulling specialists out of their fields. A weapons problem was handed right off to biologists and psychologists, instead of to engineers and physicists. Because it was found that specialists inevitably directed their acquired knowledge at a problem. The non-specialist, knowing nothing of the difficulties involved, could only ask: ‘what would I have to know in order to make sense of this situation?’ In a word, he organized his ignorance, not his knowledge. The result was many break-throughs and solutions that otherwise would not have happened. In retrospect the discoveries seemed obvious. It is not because the beclouding assumptions and unconscious bias from earlier and irrelevant training have disappeared?”

[-McLuhan, Project in Understanding New Media … Sample of Syllabus’ 1960, 8.]

Law is a wonderful thing, when it works. As far as innovations go, it is quite impressive in its complexity and refinement. So many people have spent so much time and effort — and money — tweaking every little miniscule component, the finest Swiss watch is a comparatively minor thing next to the great legal systems of history and of our own time.

The Law, when in place and set to a task, is a force to be reckoned with. There is a truly impressive weight, momentum, inevitability, which one encounters at one’s risk. With the right impetus, events can be set in motion which have enormous consequences for individuals and societies.

In my preparation for this address, my research showed me fascinating examples from fairly recent history which proved the great power of law, a power that seems indifferent in itself. Law is an instrument which can be used to consolidate and grow the power and wealth of the most privileged among us, and it can be used as sword and shield to protect the most vulnerable among us.

From Snake Oil to Silicon — Meat

It is curious how things come about.

In 1906, an American journalist named Upton Sinclair published a book called ‘The Jungle.’ The book highlighted poor working conditions and quality of life for immigrants, and was apparently written to push Sinclair’s socialist agenda. However, what seized the public imagination were passages about unsanitary conditions in meat packing plants of the day, which led to a sizable public outcry. Sinclair is quoted as saying “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

That same year, 1906, the ‘Pure Food and Drug Act’ was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Roosevelt. The ‘Pure Food and Drug Act’ was also known as ‘the Wiley act’ after Dr. Harvey Wiley who had been a leader in the creation of the act, and who became the first director of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), created to enforce the 1938 ‘Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.’

The 1938 Act was precipitated by a mass poisoning in 1937 which caused the deaths of over 100 people in the United States. The disaster was caused by Harold Watkins, chief pharmacist and chemist of the S. E. Massengill Company. He created a preparation of sulfanilamide using diethylene glycol (DEG) as a solvent, called it Elixir Sulfanilamide, and bottled it. The solvent he used was known to be problematic, but not by him. He dissolved the sulfa in DEG, added some raspberry flavour, and the company marketed and sold the product.

At that time there were no regulations for premarket testing of new drugs.

The owner of Massengill is quoted as saying in his defense “We have been supplying a legitimate professional demand and not once could have foreseen the unlooked-for results. I do not feel there was any responsibility on our part.”

Sadly, Harold Watkins, Massengill’s chief pharmacist and chemist is reported to have committed suicide while awaiting trial.

It is from that disaster and other similar incidents that we have the USFDA , whose job it was and is to enforce the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Today, manufacturers have to prove the safety and efficacy of substances prior to their marketing and sale, a process which can take years.

Do you suppose drug manufacturers were thrilled to have regulations imposed on them? Do you suppose they might rather speed up the process and get their products to market faster, before the competition and with considerably reduced expense?

The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the 1938 Food Drug and Cosmetic Act met with considerable resistance.

I found reference to a ‘muckraker’ Samuel Hopkins Adams. ‘Muckrakers’ were early investigative journalists. Adams set his sights on ‘patent medicines’ of dubious efficacy and so-called ‘red clauses’ in newspaper contracts which made it so patent medicine ads, which were a major source of revenue for newspapers in the early 20th century, would be pulled if the paper expressed support for food and drug regulatory legislation.

It’s a familiar story.

It is somewhat of a paradox that when we look at the case for regulation of technologies that things are both overt and subtle. Causation, when it comes to media, is a slippery and non-linear thing. It’s not as simple as a hundred deaths which can be fairly easily attributed to an elixir. But neither is it quite so esoteric as Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect.

People and societies are changing, lives are affected in profound ways and people are dying as a result but we are unable or unwilling to rally around the cause — and we can be sure that nothing substantive will happen without an enormous public outcry.

Looking at the history of big pharma and drug manufacture, and what it takes to get regulations in place, it’s a minor miracle the FDA exists and is effective.

From Snake Oil to Silicon — Media Ecology.

There is a field of study which you may not be aware of, known as ‘media ecology.’ It is popularly defined as ‘the study of media as environments,’ and there is even a ‘media ecology association’ based mostly in the US which has a significant membership, a journal, and an annual conference.

Shortly after publishing ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ in 1964, Marshall McLuhan moved into environmental and ecological considerations of technology. In his 1965 essay ‘The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,’ he states, in the second paragraph:

“Any new technology, any extension or amplification of human faculties when given material embodiement, tends to create a new environment. This is as true of clothing as of speech, or script, or wheel.”
[-McLuhan, 1965,1]

‘Media ecology’ is about as close as we get to approaching scientific language when it comes to the study of the effects of technologies. Perhaps this is part of why it seems to not be taken very seriously — and I would suggest that were it actually taken seriously, we would have legislation by now. We don’t.

A few years ago, I looked into the matter a bit. In the spirit of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘probes’ I crafted a statement and decided to explore it. I posited that:

“There is no difference between environmental science and media study.”

I chose to compare the work of Marshall McLuhan and Rachel Carson as there was some interesting commonalities and divergences to be found.

Here are some of the highlights:

According to Wikipedia: “Environmental science is an interdisciplinary academic field that integrates physical, biological and information sciences (including ecology, biology, physics, chemistry, zoology, mineralogy, oceanology, limnology, soil science, geology, atmospheric sciences, and geodesy) to the study of the environment, and the solution of environmental problems.”

Rachel Carson wrote a book which was at the forefront of this movement. ‘Silent Spring’ (1962) blew the lid of the effects of pesticides and other chemicals used in agricultural and other applications. Her work brought a new environmental awareness to the American public. It also brought her severe backlash from the corporations who manufactured and used chemicals like DDT, which was an amazing pesticide to help control mosquitoes and prevent malaria and typhus but is carcinogenic and almost wiped out Bald Eagles and other birds. Most importantly, Carson’s ground-breaking work led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States of America, new environmental policies, and a ban on DDT.

As shown in Wikipedia, Environmental Science is established as a discipline. It is very clear what it is, where it came from. Media Study, not so much, as a short time spent browsing among the related topics will show.

At around the same time that Rachel Carson was studying the effects of pesticides on the natural world, Marshall McLuhan was studying the effects of technology on people and cultures, and was moving into his ecological approach.

Marshall McLuhan delivered his ‘Report on Understanding New Media’ in 1960. It was commissioned by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters and the US Department of Education, and was meant to be a high-school text. Two years later, the same year McLuhan published ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man,’ Rachel Carson published ‘The Silent Spring.’

With the NAEB ‘Report’ was another text ‘Project in Understanding New Media: Sample of Syllabus’ where Marshall writes in the section on Printing:

“It seems to be inadvisable to approach print in a merely chronological fashion.”

In 1964 he published ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,’ which was essentially a reworking of the NAEB Report and Project into a different style, aimed at a different audience.

‘Understanding Media’ was, and remains, Marshall McLuhan’s major work on the subject of media study — ‘major’ in terms of public reach anyway. The book caused as much stir as it did confusion, and it earned him much backlash as well.

‘Silent Spring’ and ‘Understanding Media’ are comparable in that they both had considerable impact on their release, earning their authors accolades and enemies, and both were addressing environmental concerns; but where Carson was concerned with the state of the natural environment and humanity’s detrimental effect on it, McLuhan was concerned with the effects of technologies in creating, and resulting from, an artificial ecosystem or environment of effects, services and disservices.

McLuhan’s concern was the “personal and social consequences of any new medium…that is introduced into our affairs…by any new technology.”
[McLuhan, 1964]

“It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association. Indeed, it is all too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.” [McLuhan, 1964]

But while Carson’s work led quickly to the EPA and legislation to protect the natural environment, Marshall McLuhan’s work (as well as the work of others in related fields) has yet to lead to a comparable governmental agency or legislation to protect people from undesirable effects of technologies.

From Snake Oil to Silicon — Conclusion

There isn’t nearly enough time today for me to dive as deeply as I’d like into this subject — to do more research into the histories of various types of regulations, to quote and elaborate on the many contributions McLuhan work makes in support of the overall case for regulation of technology — but there is enough time to make at least a modest beginning to a compelling case for a real start to regulating technologies.

Some questions:

When it comes to technology, why is our concept of what constitutes harm limited to the most superficial effects while largely ignoring the larger sensory, psychological, and social?

Why do we thoroughly study and regulate drugs for safety and efficacy but not technologies?

What might safety and efficacy even mean in terms of technologies?

Why will we recognize the ill effects of chemical substances like DDT on the natural environment, and mobilize to make changes, forcing large companies to comply with standards, yet when it comes to the quite profound personal and social consequences of technologies such as internet-enabled smartphones, the prospect of a giant leap with 5G and Quantum computing, all we imagine are the benefits that massive increases of speed and access will bring, and not the very existential changes sure to occur which will be apparent a few years down the road when we pine for good old 2019 when life was so much simpler?

To me, these are important questions. We are literally talking (or not talking) about the shaping of people and civilizations.

A re-evaluation of the meaning of words like ‘benefit’ and ‘progress’ is desperately needed.

We seem to have all but lost the ability and desire to think of the future, to consider long-term impacts, have long-term goals, and I suggest we should attempt to rediscover those abilities.

Possibly the most important question to focus our shrinking attention on is that of our reluctance.

The idea that technologies are as drugs, mind-altering substances, has been around a while now, yet we don’t seem willing to treat them as such.

Why not?

What if we did?

Study upon study have shown and book upon book have demonstrated the incredible power of our technologies to shape societies and ourselves — our minds, our senses, our perceptions, our relationships, our actions — it has been quite a long time since Marshall McLuhan stated in Vancouver in 1958 that ‘the medium is the message,’ and still no fruitful effort has been made to regulate technologies.

Social media companies quite openly and obviously optimize their products to attract and capture our attention and increase their profits while all we do is consume — eat it up. McLuhan employed TS Eliot in ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’, when he wrote: ‘content is the juicy piece of meat used by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.’ In this case, the burglars are wreaking havoc with our nervous systems, profoundly changing our politics and societies: robbing us blind.

What will it take?

In 2018, in ‘Media Ecology in the 21st Century,’ my father Eric McLuhan’s last speech and strongest statement on the subject, a speech which inspired my words today, he said:

“Those engaged in teaching ‘media literacy’ and other media-training causes are actually in the business of peddling toxic and addictive things to näive new users, addicts-to-be. They are de-facto unacknowledged extensions of the marketing arms of the manufacturers of the technologies.”

Fear is usually a great motivator for action but apparently fear is not enough. Enough people seem to be afraid of the prospect of things like ‘the Singularity,’ of the growing power and reach of surveillance states, of the current bad and worsening social and political situation — and for the first time in history it is plain enough for most people to notice and remark on the most obvious causes (if not the less obvious ones).

All of this and still no meaningful result — and no, simple things like mindfulness and media diets on Sundays won’t bring about meaningful change.

As WH Auden said to Marshall McLuhan in conversation in 1971:

“I don’t have a TV, and wouldn’t dream of owning one!”

To which Marshall replied:

“You merely suffer the consequences of TV without enjoying it.”

Marshall McLuhan’s entire career could be said to have been devoted to waking us up to our situation, to the consequences of our technological actions, to the fact that we are the unwitting products of technological environments of our own creation.

I think Marshall would be gratified that so many today seem awake — but disappointed to find that now it’s us, not the burglar, feeding Eliot’s watchdog, even though he saw the shift from consumer to producer. As he wrote at the conclusion of his 1965 essay ‘The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,’

“We have no reason to be grateful to those who juggle the [sensory] thresholds in the name of haphazard innovation.”

It’s hardly haphazard at this point.

Change is happening and much greater change is coming with 5G and Quantum computing here and ready to roll out.

What we need, if we want any agency at all in our present and future, is the courage to act — because while I don’t believe that the many people involved in shaping the technologies which shape us are evil, I also don’t believe many of them have our best interests at heart. As long as there is a free hand to innovate and release into the world such powerful, life-altering technologies without any real oversight, they will continue to do so with little regard to consequences other than monetary gain.

Those who framed the American constitution, setting processes such as the passage of a bill into law; those who founded the FDA and set processes in place to test the safety and efficacy of drugs, knew what they were about.

These things were not designed simply to frustrate and annoy and be the enemy of progress — but they are certainly designed to do something we can hardly today tolerate: slow things down, the specific object being not to deny progress but to aid it.

Two of our great challenges, if not our enemies, are speed and acceleration — or perhaps care and control and the judicious employment of them.

I am not a luddite. I am not against technology. I am not against progress.

I am for smart innovation, and I am for smart regulation.

Thank you.

Andrew McLuhan

University of Windsor

October 25, 2019

I’ve written on this before — how people get ‘the medium is the message’ so wrong because they rely on Wikipedia or other far-removed sources rather than going directly to Marshall McLuhan to find out what it means. In a previous post on the subject, [“The Meaning of ‘Medium’ is the Message”] my goal was to be as brief as possible. Here I am going to dive a little deeper into the topic.

I do understand why people rely on Wikipedia and secondary or tertiary (or…) sources: reading McLuhan is challenging. He makes you work. It’s easier to just take someone else’s word for it. But in this case when you take someone else’s word (‘medium’ means channel or container) rather than McLuhan’s word (‘medium’ means ‘extension of ourselves’ and/or ‘environment’) you have no hope of understanding what ‘the medium is the message’ actually means. I maintain that Wikipedia is a poor substitute for insight and understanding.

Yes, I am aware of the irony of writing that people should go to McLuhan for the best understanding — but hey, I am a McLuhan, and so, well, I think my insights have a great deal of validity. (To risk Alvy Singer’s sock).

Before I go tooooo far on my rant, it should be noted that Marshall McLuhan considered himself an explorer. “I don’t explain, I explore,” he said. “I don’t have concepts, only percepts.” He didn’t care for theories.

“Begin with a theory, you begin with the answer; begin with an observation, you begin with questions.”

-Eric McLuhan
‘Marshall McLuhan’s Theory of Communication’ in ‘Theories of Communication’ by Marshall and Eric McLuhan, 2011 New York: Peter Lang

Marshall routinely said things as experiments to see if there was anything to them — he called them “probes.” You might call them provocations. He would say that the minute one of the probes proved unproductive, he’d toss it. “You don’t like that idea? I’ve got others.”

So in a sense there’s no wrong interpretation of m/m, and I suppose no absolute right one. It’s a paradox, multi-layered. A pun. A probe. Five words which pack a powerful punch. Part of it’s job is to get you to think about the situation. My father Eric would pull out this (apocryphal?) story of Eliot: an admirer had given their interpretation of one of his poems asked if it was right. Eliot replied that not only might it be right, it might be better than what he had intended.

“You know nothing of my work — you mean my whole fallacy’s wrong.”

-Marshall McLuhan in ‘Annie Hall.’

[The following was first posted for the followers and supporters of The McLuhan Institute’s Facebook page.]

In my interview with Clinton Ignatov last week for his ‘Life in the Foam’ podcast, he got me talking about Wikipedia and why I have a low opinion of it.

One of the reasons is the entry on ‘the medium is the message’ and really the best thing I can say about it is that you can use it to tell who’s done their homework because 9/10 articles that reference m/m use the exact or paraphrased wording from it. Ugh.

Some years ago I thought I would improve it, because anyone can edit Wikipedia, right? But even though I only used Marshall’s own words and no one’s interpretations, my edits were quickly discarded. I guess Marshall McLuhan isn’t enough of an authority to explain what he meant when he said ‘the medium is the message.’

I am laughing as I type this because looking at the entry, there’s a header which says: “This article relies too much on references to primary sources. Please improve this by adding secondary or tertiary sources.” Really?! This is what I’m talking about.

At the time of writing this (Monday, April 8, 2019), Wikipedia says: “”The medium is the message” is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan introduced in McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964.”

At least they gave him credit for the phrase, and got the book’s publishing date right. But Marshall had been using the phrase widely for several years by the time UM came out.

In my attempt to edit, I cited my blog (and I think they took issue with that, for citing myself — maybe someone else could try?) ‘inscriptorium’, where in 2011 while inventorying the ‘working library of Marshall McLuhan’ I published my discovery of Marshall’s hand-written account of when and where he first said ‘the medium is the message:

“First used this phrase in June (?) 1958 at Radio Broadcasters conference in Vancouver. Was reassuring them that TV could not end radio.”

Now, not only is that, at least to me, a fascinating piece of history (anyone can view the book at the Fisher Rare Book library at UofT) but his statement about “reassuring them that TV could not end radio” is worth reflection (and beyond the scope of this post).

Not that exactly when he said it first is all that important, but if you’re going to claim that at least make an effort to get it right. It’s not hard to find MM stating m/m pre-1964.

Wikipedia continues: “It means that the nature of a medium (the channel through which a message is transmitted) is more important than the meaning or content of the message. McLuhan tells us that a “message” is “the change of scale or pace or pattern” that a new invention or innovation “introduces into human affairs.””

Here is where they get into trouble, in providing their own, and not Marshall’s definition of ‘medium.’ I am not aware of an instance where Marshall defines ‘medium’ as “the channel through which a message is transmitted,” and I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the way Marshall McLuhan uses the word ‘medium.’ I challenge anyone to show me where Marshall defines or talks about ‘medium’ as ‘channel.’ That’s Shannon/Weaver stuff, ‘content boys’ as Marshall and Eric called them.

A definition of ‘medium’ is in the very title of the book: ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.’ “This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, any extension of ourselves — …”

Marshall (and Eric) McLuhan used the short form ‘EOM’ to signify ‘extensions of man’ in their annotations in books.

Looking at it now for the first time in a while, I see from the entry that they have updated it as of March 23 of this year, and they have changed the language a bit, and for the better even. Now it will be harder to peg the people who regurgitate the Wikipedia wording, but that’s fine. For the longest time it read:

“‘The medium is the message’ means that the form of a medium embeds itself in any message it would transmit or convey, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.”

Again, I would challenge anyone to show me an instance where Marshall McLuhan says anything like that.

The new definition is an improvement — I’ll give them that. And really, if they paired it with an accurate definition of ‘medium’ as Marshall used the word, it would be fine, although I will still urge people to spend a week reading and re-reading the first chapter of ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ which happens to be titled ‘The medium is the message.’

I’ll put my grievance to rest, for the time being anyhow, with some choice cuts of Marshall McLuhan talking about what he means by ‘medium’ and ‘the medium is the message.’

“Any new technology, any extension or amplification of human faculties when given material embodiement, tends to create a new environment. This is as true of clothing as of speech, or script, or wheel. … It is in the interplay between the old and the new environment that there is generated an innumerable series of problems and confusions. … As an environment it is imperceptible except in terms of its content. That is, all that’s seen or noticed is the old environment. But the effects of … the environment in altering the entire character of human sensibility and sensory ratios is ignored.”

-Marshall McLuhan
‘The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,’
1965

“Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.”

-Marshall McLuhan
‘Address at Vision 65.’ Transcript of a talk at the International Center for the Communication Arts and Sciences, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois, October 23, 1965
(numerous reprints)

“The section on “the medium is the message” can, perhaps, be clarified by pointing out that any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment. Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes. … “The medium is the message” means, in terms of the electronic age, that a totally new environment has been created. The “content” of this new environment is the old mechanized environment of the industrial age. The new environment reprocesses the old one as radically as TV is reprocessing the film. For the “content” of TV is the movie. TV is environmental and imperceptible, like all environments. We are aware only of the “content” or the old environment. … Each new technology creates an environment that is itself regarded as corrupt and degrading. Yet the new one turns its predecessor into an art form.”

-Marshall McLuhan
‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’
(introduction to the second edition, pp. viii-ix. Unsure of the actual date the second introduction was written/printed.)

“It is now perfectly plain to me that all media are environments, all media have the effects that geographers and biologists have associated with environments in the past. … The medium is the message because the environment transforms our perceptions governing the areas of attention and neglect alike.‬”

Marshall McLuhan,
Speech given to the Provincial Committee on the Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario.
January 19, 1967.
(In ‘The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education.’ Stevenson, Stamp, Wilson, ed.’s, 1972)

Marshall was told by a publisher and friend that any book can’t be more than 10% new material, that his were more like 60%. At every turn, Marshall challenges his readers, his audience, to dig deeper. Those unwilling will write him off as incomprehensible, a charlatan, the communicator who can’t communicate. But those interested in learning, in exploration, who are willing to meet him on his terms — well, they’re in for a ride.

Thanks for reading,

Andrew McLuhan
founder, director
The McLuhan Institute
www.themcluhaninstitute.com
+ Facebook
+Instagram
+Twitter

Some excerpts from and comments on Marshall McLuhan’s introduction to the second edition of ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ (1966) with some information about The McLuhan Institute (TMI). Reposted (revised) from TMI FB

Something you may not know about, and I only discovered very recently, is that for the second (paperback) edition of ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ (1966), Marshall McLuhan wrote a short new introduction.

[It was not reprinted in most subsequent editions, but is in the latest Gingko Press edition]

This second introduction is short, only five printed pages, but it is packed with goodies directed toward criticisms and misapprehensions of the original printing, notably ‘media hot and cool,’ and ‘the medium is the message.’

A few examples:

[After several paragraphs on changes in the popular use of the terms ‘hot’ and cool.’]

“The section on “media hot and cold” confused many readers of Understanding Media who were unable to recognize the very large structural changes in human outlook that are occurring today. Slang offers an immediate index to changing perception. Slang is based not on theories but on immediate experience. The student of media will not only value slang as a guide to changing perception, but he will also study media as bringing about new perceptual habits.”
[Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Introduction to the Second Edition, p.viii]

I am struck by how often what Marshall wrote half a century ago holds up today. I am not talking about so-called prophesy or prediction. Marshall wasn’t so much ahead of his time as ahead of contemporaries who were behind their time. As he said ‘I’m very careful to only predict things which have already happened.’

A technique such as this — studying slang as a guide to changing sensibility in individuals and cultures — is still worth employing if one is interested in noting change. This tool is one of many Marshall gives “the student of media” who cares to take it.

“The section on “the medium is the message” can, perhaps, be clarified by pointing out that any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment. Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes. … “The medium is the message” means, in terms of the electronic age, that a totally new environment has been created. The “content” of this new environment is the old mechanized environment of the industrial age. The new environment reprocesses the old one as radically as TV is reprocessing the film. For the “content” of TV is the movie. TV is environmental and imperceptible, like all environments. We are aware only of the “content” or the old environment. … Each new technology creates an environment that is itself regarded as corrupt and degrading. Yet the new one turns its predecessor into an art form.”
[Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Introduction to the Second Edition, pp. viii-ix]

Substitute terms and we could say today: “The new environment reprocesses the old one as radically as Netflix is reprocessing TV.”

In the class I gave recently at Carleton University, I answered the question “Why study media?” with “because the medium is the message.” In the 90 minutes between the question and the answer, I led the class through the definitions of ‘medium’ (singular) and ‘media’ (plural) as 1) instrument, technology, ‘figure’, and 2) environment, ‘ground.’ We then chose the smartphone as our ‘figure’ and as a group, with myself at the chalkboard, mapped out the environment or ground. It became clear very fast how the medium, or environment, is much more important than the content. More important to study, pay attention to.

As Marshall patiently said in an interview a decade later, when asked whether the message wasn’t really the message: “Where would you look for the message in an electric light?”

The message is in the psychic, sensory, and social effects of technologies.

“As our proliferating technologies have created a whole series of new environments, men have become aware of the arts as “anti-environments” or “counter-environments” that provide us with the means of perceiving the environment itself. For, as Edward T. Hall has explained in ‘The Silent Language,’ men are never aware of the ground rules of their environmental systems or cultures. Today, technologies and their consequent environments succeed each other so rapidly that one environment makes us aware of the next. Technologies begin to perform the function of art in making us aware of the psychic and social consequences of technology.

Art as anti-environment becomes more than ever a means of training perception and judgement. Art offered as a consumer commodity rather than as a means of training perception is as ludicrous and snobbish as always.

Media study at once opens the doors to perception. And here it is that the young can do top-level research work. The teacher has only to invite the student to do as complete an inventory as possible. Any child can list the effects of the telephone or the radio or the motor car in shaping the life and work of his friends and his society. An inclusive list of media effects opens many unexpected avenues of awareness and investigation.”
[Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Introduction to the Second Edition, pp. ix-x]

That last paragraph, which I isolated from its original longer paragraph, encapsulates the ‘figure/ground’ exercise I teach — rather lead as a participatory workshop — to people as young as grades 5/6, and most recently to a 4th year class at Carleton University. It takes a complicated subject and makes it both fun and dead simple.

Typical of his work, Marshall appropriated the terms ‘figure’ and ground’ from Edgar Rubin and Gestalt psychology, used to “assist the study of structure in visible phenomena.” [‘City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media;’ Marshall McLuhan, Kathryn Hutchon, Eric McLuhan; The Book Society of Canada Limited, 1977] and repurposed them to assist the study of structure in invisible phenomena — the artificial environments which are the consequence of human technologies.

A last note, on the arts:

“The power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments, by a generation and more, has long been recognized. In this century, Ezra Pound called the artist “the antennae of the race.” Art as radar acts as “an early alarm system,” as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them. This concept of the arts as prophetic, contrasts with the popular idea of them as being mere self-expression. If art is an “early warning system,” to use the phrase from World War II, when radar was new, art has the utmost relevance not only to media study but to the development of media controls.

… Art as a radar environment takes on the function of the indispensable perceptual training rather than the role of a privileged diet for the elite. While the arts as radar feedback provide a dynamic and changing corporate image, their purpose may be not to enable us to change but rather to maintain an even course toward permanent goals, even amidst the most disrupting innovations. We have already discovered the futility of changing our goals as often as we change our technologies.”
[Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Introduction to the Second Edition, p. xi]

With that, the short on words but long on ideas 1966 introduction to the second edition of UM closes, and opens several doors.

Marshall McLuhan’s work is riddled with references to the practical utility of the arts in the study of media. And though he doesn’t explicitly self-identify as such, he fits his definition of the ideal artist as radar: one who perceives the invisible environments, a person who made a concerted and deliberate effort to wake up the world to what we are doing to ourselves. [tip: keep that in mind when you read his work, watch interviews or recordings.]

He was constantly nudging us, “needling the somnambulists,” and he left us several tools like ‘figure and ground’ analysis, the tetrad, ways of studying art and popular culture, (and many more) to help us on our way.

This is why I am building The McLuhan Institute — to carry on this work by gathering and learning, exploring, teaching, and otherwise making available these tools. Preserving and making available the work already done, while using McLuhan methods to take us forward in an attempt to keep the goal in sight — taking some control of our innovations rather than just coping with the effects.

This last section on the arts as radar is the reason why a large part of The McLuhan Institute will involve permanent artist’s residencies. TMI is dedicated to studying the effects of technologies, and will support artists whose work pushes the frontier and boundaries of perception. Our definition of ‘arts’ goes well beyond traditional categories of visual and audio arts, and includes design, engineering, science — essentially anyone with a contribution to make in the study of the effects of technologies.

Put a little more simply, TMI is being built to continue McLuhan Studies in the McLuhan Tradition. [Albeit at times by non-traditional means.]

Your interest in, and support of, my work on TMI is both greatly appreciated, and vital. I can’t do it without you. Thank you who support me and TMI with your interest, purchase of things from the shop, and Patreon support. There is a long way to go to see my vision for a McLuhan Institute in Picton, but we’re on the road! Help spread the word if you know of others who may be interested in helping support this journey.

Thanks for reading, for being here with me.

Andrew McLuhan
https://www.patreon.com/mcluhan

ME21 — Introduction

Asked to travel to Bogotá, Colombia, to give an opening address at the Universidad de la Sabana’s launch of their doctorate program in communication, Eric McLuhan used the opportunity to make some comments regarding what he felt needed immediate (and overdue) attention in the area of media ecology, and to offer some advice to people wading into that field of study. He felt that those just starting out, especially as they are in Colombia, removed from what now constitutes a tradition in North America, have a great opportunity to make a fresh start; to avoid some of the pitfalls and mistakes; to begin again.

Eric McLuhan was there when the idea of media ecology was born. Indeed, he maintained that he came up with the term while in New York City in 1967–68 helping his father Marshall McLuhan as he taught at Fordham, and that Neil Postman “ran with it.”

In the McLuhan school of media ecology, it is not simply an area of study, but an area of action, and this is what Eric wanted to get across in his speech. We have to be more than observers, we have to be agents of change. It’s been more than 50 years. Enough talk, time to act.

This activist stance, taken seriously — as it is meant to be taken — is not popular. It’s radical. It requires great changes in various cultures’ attitudes and habits, and it means significant reduction of profits for technology companies and their shareholders. That is some of what we’re up against.

In a letter dated May 6, 1969, Marshall McLuhan wrote to Jacques Maritain:

“There is a deep-seated repugnance in the human breast against understanding the processes in which we are involved. Such understanding involves far too much responsibility for our actions. … Since we are doing these things to ourselves, there is no earthly reason for submitting to them unconsciously or irrationally.”[1]

My father was becoming bold in his statements. A devout and life-long Catholic, he was more willing to speak in public about his faith, especially as it related to his work. He had, in the last year or two since the publication of The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia and the Soul (BPS Books, 2015) spoken publicly a few times about his ideas for a ‘Catholic theory of communication,’ particularly when we traveled to Saskatoon where he gave the Keenan lecture at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatoon, in November 2017.[2]

I had been traveling with my father for the last ten years or so. Because of his at-times fragile health, he needed someone with him who could assist in an emergency. It was during these trips that I began to get interested in ‘the family business,’ as it were. Hearing him talk, and in our own conversations during travel, I began to get an understanding of what it was all about. Understanding is addictive. My interest was cemented when I spent almost two years documenting and inventorying Marshall McLuhan’s personal library prior to its relocation to the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.[3]

Because of Eric’s advancing age and increasing difficulty with travel — he was 76 years old, and I had started to wheel him through airports in a wheelchair because he couldn’t walk very long distances — we had decided he would retire from traveling to speak in 2018. We had already committed to two engagements this year, Colombia and Germany[4], and decided to keep them.

In the tragedy and shock of my father’s death On Friday, May 18th while we were in Colombia, there was a surprising amount of beauty.

As Marshall tended to teach at Catholic institutions, so my father seemed to get invited to speak at Catholic institutions. Our last three trips were to St. Mary’s College in California (Keynote address to the Media Ecology Association’s annual conference), St. Thomas More College in Saskatoon (The 29th Michael Keenan Memorial Lecture), and La Universidad de la Sabana in Chia just outside of Bogotá, Colombia.

Eric took the opportunity to pray in the university’s two chapels, and had been remarking on an abundance of roses, a sign he related to St. Theresa de Lisieux, who he had a particular fondness for.

It is a comfort to his family that Eric died while in the bosom of his faith; practising it with his characteristic devotion, feeling its real presence around him.

It is fitting that his last public address would be about looking forward to media ecology in the 21st century, entreating us to be bold, have courage, blaze new trails.

He went out with style, and grace.

I will miss his presence, his wit, his obsession with all forms of puns, his humour. I will miss his instruction, his patience in answering my every question with their often-obvious answers. The world is poorer for the loss of his knowledge and skill. I will wish I paid closer attention. I will have to be content with what I was able to learn, and trust that it prepared me to go forward. I will treasure it all as well, and I am glad he left behind much on the record, for us all.

‘Media Ecology in the 21st Century’ is more than a wonderful speech; it is a map, a way forward.

The short and emotionally charged conclusion to the speech was written by hand while Eric waited to go on stage. He urges us to be bold, dares us to be radical, fortifies us with courage.

Let’s go — there’s little time to waste.

Andrew McLuhan
Picton
June 2, 2018.

[1] The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, edited by Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (Stoddart, 1999)

[2] Eric McLuhan’s lecture ‘Catholicism and Communication: The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia and the Soul’ was recorded and is available on The McLuhan Institute’s YouTube channel.

[3] Marshall McLuhan’s library has recently been added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World registry.

[4] Our last trip together was to be in Germany this November (2018) at the Munster School of Design. A conference loosely organized around the 30th anniversary of the publication of Laws of Media: The New Science.

That would be really something — were it true.

The Quote:

“The next medium, whatever it is — it may be the extension of consciousness — will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”

This quote is generally cited as coming from Marshall McLuhan in his 1962 work on the effects of the printing press ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy.’

However, while it is (sort of) from Marshall McLuhan, it is neither from 1962 nor The Gutenberg Galaxy.

Two Sentences, Two Separate Quotes.

The first part of the quote comes from a journal called ‘Perspecta’, published by MIT:

“The next medium, whatever it is — it may be the extension of consciousness — will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form.”
-Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion.’ Perspecta, Vol. 11 (1967) pp. 162–167. Published by the MIT Press.

The second part of the quote is the tip off, because it is a complete tetrad on The Computer. [A tetrad is a tool developed by Marshall and Eric McLuhan in 1973 for examining the effects of technology, and consists of four questions.]

“A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance
retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individuals
encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored
data of a saleable kind.”
-A dialogue between Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers called “Angels to Robots: From Euclidean Space to Einsteinian Space,” in ‘The Global Village’ by Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers, 1989.

What more is there to say?

Plenty. But to say more goes beyond the scope of this essay, beyond the idea of brevity or civility. I would love to know who came up with this thing. I tracked it back to a biography of Marshall McLuhan published in 2009, but I don’t think it started there.

It’s also a cautionary tale to anyone who writes and publishes. The number of times this quote is published and cited as GG/’62 is amazing. Equally amazing is the number of people who have done it who should know better.

Thank you:

To Paolo Granata and to Amanda Sevilla for their assistance in tracking down actual sources. Yes, I double-checked with hard copies, but don’t let that stop you.

And thanks to you for reading. Always happy to chat.

Andrew McLuhan
andrew@umeom.com

There is no difference between environmental science and media study.

“Environmental science is an interdisciplinary academic field that integrates physical, biological and information sciences (including ecology, biology, physics, chemistry, zoology, mineralogy, oceanology, limnology, soil science, geology, atmospheric science, and geodesy) to the study of the environment, and the solution of environmental problems.” -Wikipedia

“Environmental Science is the scientific study of the environment and the effects of humans on environmental systems.” -York University

Environmental science developed in part to classify and organize, make sense of our natural environment. Later, in the afterglow of the industrial revolution, the second half of the 20th century, a movement arose from a growing sense of a degrading natural environment and a feeling that the natural environment should be protected and rehabilitated. ‘Ecology’, which at its most basic means ‘the study of environments’, became an umbrella term for the politicized movement to protect and preserve Mother Nature.

Rachel Carson wrote a book which was at the forefront of this movement. ‘Silent Spring’ (1962) blew the lid of the effects of pesticides and other chemicals used in agricultural and other applications. Her work brought a new environmental awareness to the American public. It also brought her severe backlash from the corporations who manufactured and used chemicals like DDT, which was an amazing pesticide to help control mosquitoes and prevent malaria and typhus but is carcinogenic and almost wiped out Bald Eagles and other birds. Most importantly, Carson’s ground-breaking work led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States of America, new environmental policies, and a ban on DDT.

As shown in Wikipedia, Environmental Science is established as a discipline. It is very clear what it is, where it came from. Media Study, not so much, as a short time spent browsing among the related topics will show.

Media Science doesn’t exist on Wikipedia. The study of media, as a science, is still not taken very seriously; it is, at best, theory. This is plain just about anywhere you look, but it is obvious by having a look at entries on Wikipedia, where the information offered is poorly handled — laughably by anyone who has studied it. Unfortunately, people turn to it for knowledge, and are led astray.

For example, at the time of writing, this is the end of the second paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for Media Ecology: “Additionally, McLuhan, with his son Eric McLuhan, expanded the theory in 1988 by offering the tetrad laws of media as an organized concept that allows people to know the nba2k17”.

Carson and McLuhan

At around the same time that Rachel Carson was studying the effects of pesticides on the natural world, Marshall McLuhan was studying the effects of technology on people and cultures.

Marshall McLuhan published ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ in 1964, around the same time Carson published ‘Silent Spring’. Understanding Media was an adaptation of his ‘Report on the Project in Understanding New Media’ (1960), which was the result of a commission by the National Association of Public Broadcasters (1925–1981) to develop a high school curriculum for media study.

‘Understanding Media’ was, and remains, Marshall McLuhan’s major work on the subject of media study — ‘major’ in terms of public reach anyway. The book caused as much stir as it did confusion, and it earned him much backlash as well.

‘Silent Spring’ and ‘Understanding Media’ are comparable in that they both had considerable impact on their release, earning their authors accolades and enemies, and both were addressing environmental concerns; but where Carson was concerned with the state of the natural environment and humanity’s detrimental effect on it, McLuhan was concerned with the effects of technologies in creating, and resulting from, an artificial ecosystem or environment of effects, services and disservices.

McLuhan’s concern was the “personal and social consequences of any new medium…that is introduced into our affairs…by any new technology.” “It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as the are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association. Indeed, it is all too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.” (Understanding Media, Ch.1: ‘The medium is the message’)

McLuhan would later clarify his thinking and use of the word ‘medium’ to mean not simply any given technology, but that artificial environment.

But where Carson’s work led to the EPA and legislation to protect the natural environment, Marshall McLuhan’s work (as well as the work of others in related fields) has yet to lead to a comparable governmental agency or legislation to protect people from the effects of technologies — despite mounting evidence that technologies have the ability to affect not only the direction of civilizations, but the human brains and senses. That this is the case is a continuing source of wonder, frustration, and woe for some.

Are We There Yet?

So, while we are far from ‘there yet’, we have made progress. Though it’s not taken seriously, Media Studies are undertaken and taught in Universities and elsewhere. The more daring, in terms of studying form rather than content, effects rather than simply uses, are generally found under the heading Media Ecology (a clumsy, somewhat redundant term when you define ‘medium’ as ‘environment’. I prefer Artificial Ecology at the moment.)

The idea of effects of technologies being a complex ecosystem resulting from technologies, and giving rise to still more, is to be found in surprising places, if you read between the lines and listen carefully. People use the word ‘environment’ in interesting ways. I feel like we are, if not ‘there yet’, almost there.

For a lot of people, the idea of an EPA or FDA for technology is laughable, or crazy — or dangerous, if you happen to be a tech company. But if we ever want to take the reins and have some sort of agency over our bodies and societies, it’s well worth considering getting ahead of the effects.

Thanks for reading. I always welcome comments. andrew@umeom.com