Marshall McLuhan Position Paper

Terry S. Toney

Several points that were depicted in "Essential McLuhan" were of telling importance to me as an educational technologist. Indeed, it is hard for me to determine which points I would like to address in this paper, knowing as I do, that many more equally salient points will have to be left out due to time and space considerations. Perhaps I should focus mostly on his most often quoted statement, "The media is the message." As simple and confounding as that statement was, I came to realize as I read McLuhan, how vital it was for me as an educational technologist to realize the impact of that statement.

During my reading I realized that "visual space" has held sway in our culture only since the advent of the phonetic alphabet. Indeed, the phonetic alphabet was a tremendous technological advance in its age and there is little doubt that this invention had a lasting and profound effect on civilized society. Before that, McLuhan asserts that "acoustic space" was the mode of communication and held sway over civilizations the entire world over. The introduction of the phonetic alphabet and it's accompanying visual focus, in effect changed society's "sensory" balance, jolting tribal man out of his sensory balance and causing the eye to dominate the senses.

Resulting modifications introduced to make the phonetic alphabet more readily available to the world, such as the moveable type printing press and the telegraph, accelerated this visual dominance over society. McLuhan insisted that technology was now causing society to revert back to "acoustic space", which has few boundaries and happens immediately and without pause. This caused me to rethink computer usage as a purely visual and somewhat alienating type of activity. In essence, computer usage, particularly the use of the Internet and other interactive media, is more in keeping with the idea of "acoustic space", rather than a purely visually dominated medium.

His oft repeated statement, "The media is the message," begins to make sense to the reader. McLuhan means that media is simply an extension of man himself and will make deep and lasting changes to man with or without his knowledge or permission.

By adding in McLuhan's depiction of media as the"massage" as well as the "message" helped clarify exactly how McLuhan felt about the overall influence the medium used to express content had over the unknowing consumer. In truth, at the beginning, I was unsure what he meant by "massage". I thought I understood "media was the message", but the word massage confused me. Media is the massage? What could he mean by that?

Upon reading more of McLuhan, I began to see his point in choosing the word "massage". McLuhan was a linguist. It was obvious that he loved the written and spoken word. His word choices while often times humorous, where never casual. This meant to me that the media used to impart content was actually, almost insidiously, changing the person and society as a whole. It was stunning and incomprehensible to McLuhan that others did not notice the profound changes taking place simply by being exposed to a new type of media.

Separation of content from the medium used just cannot be done. In today's society, it is one and the same. As McLuhan explained in his Playboy interview, (the medium...) "literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio." In effect, it renders the actual content of the medium moot and unimportant particularly when you examine the hold the new medium has over society and the resulting societal changes that occur due to exposure to this new medium. The medium I am concerned with as an educational technologist is of course, the use of computers in the classroom. This medium, above all others in history, will bring a message at lightening speed, thereby forcing a quickened reaction and possibly an unexpected and unintentional change in the subject's perceptual values and eventually in society's perceptual values as a whole.

McLuhan's reference to the "electric light analogy" was particularly helpful in clarifying this issue. The electric light was akin to a medium without a message which means that the content of any medium is always another medium This helped me see that the medium was ignored by people who focused on their perception of the content of the message, not realizing that the medium itself was an integral part of the content. It's subtleness was not seen by the average consumer, but it was an integral and unbreakable part of the content. In a world where we are placing thousands of students in front of a computer for something as innocuous as researching a former American president's life, we should realize that student is being bombarded by unseen, unacknowledged messages that have an intense and personal effect on that student's perception. It is a responsibility that should not be taken lightly, and one that I am ashamed to admit, I was not even conscious of until I read this book.

The basic premise that stuck with me is that a person's sensory life changes in response to the medium used, not just the content of the message. In effect, the media has a life of it's own, separate and distinct from the content of the message. In certain situations, the media chosen is as important or more important than the content. This media influence can cause dramatic paradigmatic shifts in perceptual values. What an idea that is!

I have always thought that the world was shrinking. I also thought that the "computer revolution"- the availability of the Internet and the home personal computer was actually making the world in essence a smaller place, more easily negotiated. No more was it necessary to live in the center of a mega-metropolis to perform routine business transactions. A small farm in Idaho had virtually the same opportunities for information retrieval and sharing that downtown Manhattan had.

It was thought provoking to read McLuhan's comments on what he termed "cybernation" and it's undeniable need to emulate a human's own central nervous system. It made me realize that I was thinking of the Internet and computer usage in a one-dimensional way, rather than trying to understand that it exists and operates and thrives in a three-dimensional world and that it exerts a huge influence, often unknowingly, on the people who use it.

McLuhan stated on in 1966 that "It is one of the mysteries of cybernation that it is forever challenged by the need to simulate consciousness." It is undeniable that people are constantly striving to manipulate computer technology to simulate human consciousness. The entire basis of the Internet or world wide web is to function as a vast cybernetic neural network, combining data and graphics and even perceptions into a huge uni-consciousness that is available for everyone to sift through and plunder at will.

It made me realize that perhaps the world was not shrinking. Rather, our very own central nervous systems are in essence expanding to embrace the entire globe. Ideas are exchanged, news is passed, all in a millisecond over fiberoptic networks that extend throughout the globe, from sophisticated cities to satellites miles above the earth. The new global communications networks can be likened to a neural network, very much like our own central nervous system. As McLuhan suggests, nowadays, action and reaction occur almost at the same time. Sure, McLuhan was discussing traditional media, like radio and television, but everything he suggests, it can be extended to include the computer.

The world is not shrinking, but our collective simulation of consciousness, in the form of computer technology and connectivity, is actually expanding to embrace McLuhan's idea of his "global village." One of McLuhan's pithy little comments spoken in 1970 struck me with it's amazingly accurate predictions of computer capabilities. On page 295, McLuhan states, "In terms of say, a computer technology we are headed for a cottage economics where the most important industrial activities can be carried on in any individual little shack anywhere on the globe." The "global village" concept that McLuhan hinted at in the 1960's is very close to coming to fruition today.

In 1999, the most popular American commercial was a depiction of the above vignette that McLuhan spoke about. Federal Express spent millions in an advertising campaign focused on small businesses around the world, connected not just with computers, but with retailers, inventory specialists, pilots and planes to show how small the world had really become in the last few years. The advertising spot showed small businesses all over Europe and even third-world countries opening shop without any wares in the morning, thanks to FedEx.com, seconds later, the shops were filled with their wares, happy shoppers were milling about and money was being made. The "global village" is still viewed as a future goal of the internet and computer technology..a sort of business utopia, whereby "Granny's Pecan Clusters", made in Crowley, Louisiana could successfully compete with "Famous Amos" on an even playing field. In reality, the Internet has not actually leveled the business playing field yet, but the attempt is being made and perhaps a partial victory is not that bad.

Imagine when it took days to receive word from the battle fields- reporters were welcomed along with the troops to document and record information to be sent back to the folks at home to digest and discuss over coffee. Today, in both the Gulf War and our newest war, reporters are banned from the battlefield and even asked to filter the information that is disseminated to them by government officials. This is because the action taking place on the battle field can be transmitted thousands of miles in seconds, then computer enhanced like foot ball games are now done and placed in front of thousands of viewers within minutes of the report. It is no surprise that our own news agencies are being used against us in times of war.

Americans have the best computer technology in the world, a distinct advantage over our enemy, but the enemy has only to turn on his 1960 brand RCA TV to discover all the facts that cost the Americans thousands of dollars to determine. We are in a new era of connectivity and global connectedness in regards to communication technology. It is certainly not approaching a Utopian situation, but it is amazing to think of how close we are coming to actuating McLuhan's "global village"scenario.

Many other comments that McLuhan espoused were salient and deserved study. Some were even a bit painful to examine as an future educational technologist. Many were uncannily correct, even though they were spoken almost thirty years ago. For time and space considerations, I have chosen to address only one of McLuhan's salient and unfortunately, correct, points. In 1973, McLuhan stated, "Computers are still serving mainly as agents to sustain precomputer effects." This reminds me of how education uses computers and technology. The educational paradigm is so ingrained that even the most technologically advanced schools still use technology as a substitute for a textbook, encyclopedia or typewriter, rather than accept and take advantage of the technology's unique and exploitable characteristics. The English teacher accepts word processed essays, while secretly lamenting the fact that the students can now use a spell check program to check for spelling errors. The social studies teacher utilizes the Internet for research on certain presidents or battles, much like a student used to utilize a bound encyclopedia. Teachers still cling to traditional educational methods but since the computer is being utilized by students in their classroom, they can sit smugly in the teacher's lounge, secure in the knowledge that they are technology gurus. Computer and technology can be so much more than mere substitutes for traditional teaching tools, it should be a natural and logical extension of traditional tools but we cling to precomputer teaching techniques, partly or maybe mostly, because the teachers have not been in serviced in the unique capabilities of classroom technology and therefore do not feel comfortable with this new, unique teaching tool. Left to guide themselves, a teacher will fall back on the more comfortable techniques of teaching, ignoring the fact, as McLuhan pointed out in his Playboy interview, that instead of helping youth adapt to the revolutionary new environment they live in- a place where technology is changing the face of it literally second by second, education seeks to impose obsolescent visual values, values that are reactionary rather than proactive and still firmly oriented to past values and past technologies. He even equates current education (and this was in the 1960's and 1970's) as a "intellectual penal institutions".

While I might not go so far as to characterize them as equivalent to penal institutions, it is true that education has not changed with the times. We still do not produce students with the technological and critical thinking abilities that are required to insure that they will be successful in today's job market. Education still seeks to prepare the select few for post secondary education, while ignoring the needs of the masses that file into classrooms every year.

McLuhan was an enjoyment to read, at once humorous and yet strikingly, almost eerily accurate today, particularly given the time in which he was espousing his views. His view of media as both the message and the massage was fascinating and somewhat unsettling. It simply never occurred to me that the influence of medium was something to be studied and taken into effect. I really think that by reading McLuhan I will be more aware of the influence medium has on the recipient. Without Marshall McLuhan, it would have simply never occurred to me that the use of computer media could cause wide and sweeping changes in a person's perceptual values and possibly a change in society's values also.