Week 29: The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore (Bantam Books, 1967, paperback)
I picked up this book many years ago while I was researching for my master’s degree. McLulan was one of the rhetorical critics I was studying, although I never actually read this book until this week. One of the reasons I started this reading project was that I presumed it would push me to read books that I’ve always looked past on my bookshelf. This week, while still trying to catch up on my reading, I grabbed this one as I figured it could read it quickly. I actually was able to read this while standing at a small outdoor amphitheatre, waiting for a concert. However, it gave me ideas to ponder, which I’d have missed without reading it.
McLuhan’s argument is fairly basic and can summed up in this line: “The medium or process of our time-electric technology-is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life” (8). There is some resonance to this argument in our current culture of Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. The impact on society of social e-networking cannot be overlooked, impacting nearly all aspects of society.
McLulan’s argument would seem to have some prescience in this aspect. However, as with many other current claims about the ubiquitous impact of digital media, McLuhan overplays its impact. Even now, over 40 years later, the reach of the revolution that McLuhan envisions still hasn’t happened. Most significant to his argument is how electronic technology will expand freedom and simultaneously bring together communities and family. He views the industrial revolution as the great cultural destroyer that electronic communication will rectify.
Clearly, digital technology has impacted aspect of our lives and our communities. However, to only see increased freedom and closer communities is to overlook how this technology allows greater political and legal surveillance; and how online communities can promote greater physical and emotional distance between families and friends.
I recognize that looking back on McLuhan’s argument after decades of digital media does present it in a different context from its original publication, overlooking the coming wave of electronic technology. Certain McLuhan was not a naïve; this book was surely meant to fuel debate and discussion and not necessarily meant as complete prophecy. The irony, though, at the time of how he presented this argument cannot be overlooked. In a book calling for the death of the linear printed page; in a book that criticizes the phonetic alphabet as restrictive of expression and thought; in a book arguing for the importance of the voice; McLuhan still took the step of numbering pages. Why number pages if he’s trying, though visuals and organization and space, to challenge the limitations of outdated print media?
As a part of the much larger and more extensive argument about the socio-cultural impacts of digital media, McLuhan’s book is important in articulating basic utopian ideas and as a cultural relic of early reactions to this expanding medium.
Next week . . . Even Just for Today by Madeleine Delaney and Elizabeth Huntington.