A GUIDE TO
SURVIVAL IN THE
21st CENTURY
FROM A
MEDIA STUDENT AND
DISCIPLE OF MARSHALL
MCLUHAN
Man’s consciousness is as powerful as a microscope. It can
grasp
and analyse experience in a way no other animal can
achieve. But
microscopic vision is narrow vision. We need to develop
another
kind of consciousness that is the equivalent of the
telescope.
Colin Wilson
We are all media students. As
practitioners of speech, we have a basic medium that teaches new words and
tactics almost every day. The mass media, whatever their form, offer a
classroom of infinite scope. Every medium teaches – in working the dirt we
learn about the shovel, in turning the page we learn about the author, in
pushing the button we learn about ourselves.
“The medium is the message.” This
pithy statement has many interpretations. I’ve come to the conclusion that it
means exactly what it says and so in the spirit of Ockham’s Razor, which
dictates there’s no excuse for not seeking the simplest explanation, I opt for
synonymity. Here is my rendition of what Marshall McLuhan tells us:
Before we had electricity, a message
was only as fast as the messenger, whether Inca runner or steam train. With the
instant transfer of data, however, this is no longer so. Concepts of distance
and duration are not what they used to be. Perceptions of space and time, those
twin beacons of conventional understanding, have changed dramatically over the
last century, and this coincides with a major shift in the human communication
process.
Before electricity, the faculties of
mind and body were communicated entirely in the physical universe. They were
extended. Today, with but the extension of a finger, the physical parameters
dissolve. Message and messenger become one, whether concert in the livingroom
or overseas conversation, and with this immediacy,
this absence of medium, we enter a new juncture in our evolution. We “implode”.
I submit that such a drastic mutation
in the field of experience and perception requires some way of dealing with it.
We need a philosophy for the Electronic Age.
The professors of wisdom in our
colleges and universities are just beginning to address the relevant issues.
What, for example, is the nature of the television experience? Are we visiting
exotic situations or staring at blue light for hours? Which is the reality? I
suspect that for most people the distinction is altogether too unclear.
Questions
like this need more than classical answers. They need a reorganization of
thought, and if our schools of philosophy fail to realize this they will go the
way of the monastery, whose educational function was subsumed by the printing
press - philosophers making whine as their noble calling drifts to the ad men.
There’s no
easy cure for this predicament, but I’m convinced a prescription lies dormant
in McLuhan’s writings. As the Sage of the Age, there must have been method in
his disarming madness. Sure enough, as one examines his work, a conceptual
pattern does emerge and with it, several recurring themes that highlight an
often confusing network of ideas. I propose to match these themes with
traditional philosophical concepts to show that McLuhan’s dynamic approach to
media studies is not only academically sound, but that it reveals a great deal
about the history of philosophy itself.
What
follows, then, might be seen as a profile of the latest in a legacy of great
thinkers. It might even be seen as a poke at their profession.
But it’s
really a primer for the new electric consciousness.
Pluralism is a bias against any
single philosophy. It grew out of Dualism, the idea that no idea is possible
without an opposing one, and Monism, that only one idea will do. Pluralism
argues that both monistic decisions, which are preordained, and dualistic ones,
which are either-or, ultimately resort to a single criterion for their making
and that this is not quite how the mind works. Judgments tend to overlap, they
can have multiple premises, and more complex thought involves a wide array of
criteria for every decision made. Ask the orchestra conductor.
Pluralism strives for total-field
perception by embracing all philosophies. And while it exposes the divisive
nature of dualistic thought, the Monists are in trouble. It may be comforting to adopt an
all-consuming ideal in some religion, but as Arthur Clarke reminds us, any
technology sufficiently advanced becomes indistinguishable from magic. In this
age of miracles, ideals in all their abundance have become arbitrary and
interchangeable. Ask the politician.
There’s a reason for this. With
McLuhan’s insight it’s easy to see that since the Reformation, organized
religion has become as fragmented and specialized as the civilization that grew
around it: sects, cults, ‘clubs’ – all offshoots of previously held beliefs,
all valid for individual believers, all therefore equally valid. The halls of
academia are no different. Modern philosophy has become as fragmented and
specialized as the sciences and technologies it fostered centuries ago. Fueled
by the church’s anthropocentricism, Descartes taught us that with enough doubt
we could turn to our own devices for knowledge. Doubt was effectively
systemized and, reinforced by mathematics, became for many the measure of all
truth. More energetic skeptics fashioned truths of their own for social arenas.
The clash of consequences has left us with discourse in theology, ontology,
epistemology, philology, scientology, and too many isms to mention.
Like an old oak whose time has come,
the branches of wisdom in all their plenty seem thinner in substance. They have
grown at the expense of the big picture, and it is only by dwelling on more
than one that we can have a notion of what the tree is all about. This is
Pluralism, the belief that no single belief is adequate in explaining the human
condition, which is what philosophers do. So since any theory is but an aspect
of the whole, all theories become arbitrary and interchangeable.
This multifaceted approach to
knowledge is the key to understanding McLuhan’s work and his ‘mosaic’ style.
His prose doesn’t unfurl in a sequential way. It develops, like a film
emulsion. As various lines of thought form a plane of reason, readers must complete the picture with lines of
their own and in this way meanings emerge. This is unlike the single point of
view, where one line of thought scans the picture. Even with many scans the
entire thing is never seen. In the mosaic, details are added to an already full
frame.
Reading McLuhan is highly involving.
Reading our electronic environment is no different. It too requires an
interdisciplinary approach, for just as the walls that physically separate us
become less important, so the boundaries of our belief systems begin to fade.
When this happens, it pays to look for similarities instead of differences.
The earliest known philosophy is
Sophism, identified in ancient Greece by Socrates when he needed somebody for
an argument. His technique, dialectic, was probably discovered when he noticed
how statements changed when extended in a new technology called the alphabet.
The Sophists, of course, were the teachers of the day – the establishment,
whose duty it was to maintain oral tradition through myth, drama and poetry.
They also taught rhetoric, the art of putting words together. Socrates managed
the same thing with entire sentences, confounding the opposition, and he died
for his trouble. But the new medium proved unstoppable. Socrates became its
martyr, Plato its mentor, Aristotle its master.
As for the Sophists, they were
helpless, for they depended on their ears for communication, not the eye that
print required. This is a big difference. Sight is directed whereas sound comes
to you – it is total field and plural, as with the other senses. Sight, by
contrast, is focused and selective. The Sophists’ garden of rhetoric was no match
for the scissors of dialectic. Socrates argued from the seeds of logic and
rationale while all they had was their feelings. The conflict between head and
heart has been around ever since.
It wasn’t until the printing press
changed the meaning of the word ‘audience’
that the garden was allowed to bloom again. But since the art of rhetoric
is incompatible with visual media, there were few Shakespeares. There still
are.
Enter Marshall McLuhan with his
‘probes’ – his readaptation of the rhetorical question. They need no reply as
they’re based on shared presupposition. The only questions they do ask are in
terms of paragraph, and this is deliberate. McLuhan, like the Bard, recognized
the needs of his audience. If his probes and mosaics are annoying for some, the
problem lies in their point of view. Those who understand that the
presuppositions are more important than the presentation (as in poetry) are
enlightened accordingly. They’ve learned that truth needn’t depend on
explicitly linked arguments, and they’ve done this by ignoring the order of
things so as to achieve a more patterned kind of sense.
This is exactly what we do in our
electronic environment. Now that speech travels at the speed of light as well
as sound, distance becomes meaningless and the eyes give way to acoustic space,
where information no longer needs a point of view because it comes to you. This
naturally activates the other senses and we suddenly find ourselves with the
ancient Greeks, who had gods for everything. It was the only way to account for
the multiplicities of life along with their all-at-onceness.
The oral tradition is upon us, and
though it’s no excuse for illiteracy, we must adapt. Not only is it in our
nature to do so, but by “trading an eye for an ear”, an e-mail for a
phonecall, we reach the heart.
When Descartes came up with his
systematic doubt, he was using another system developed by Aristotle long
before him. Aristotle, armed with his Square of Opposition and the dialectic
process around it, managed for the first time to describe things consistently
in terms of what they were not. People in those days were used to explaining
their world with the addition of information, with another example, hardly a
subtractive elimination of options. This is deduction, where one extracts
information from what is already known in an exclusive chain of reason, which
in itself leads to no new knowledge, only precision. For knowledge we turn to
induction. One takes what is available and works with specific details toward a
related whole, thus engendering a fuller (though less exact) understanding than
before. Sherlock Holmes may have had it backwards.
Another popular misconception is that
the more precise the data, the bigger and better the outcome. This is the kind
of thinking that gave us the atomic bomb. Deduction is a device – it is our way
of adapting to the organization of language and, like its macro-model, it is
naturally selective. Induction, however, is innate. It is how we learn,
communicate and grow – by putting relationships in a larger scheme of things.
Even Aristotle had to arrange his
thoughts before he could deduce anything from them. Seeing them on parchment
must have helped. He figured that induction was an unreliable route to the
truth because it could only be 99% accurate. His alternative, by contrast,
seemed infallible and men have admired it for ages, mainly because it works so
well in space and time. No surprise then, that it’s taken until this century’s
elimination of these two factors for a map of the inductive process to emerge.
Phenomenology is a hybrid of
Existentialism (I am, therefore I think) and Gestalt theory (what you see is
what you get) that goes for truth by common sense. It recognizes that since
individuals decide their own reality they might appreciate a means other than
systematic doubt for dealing with it. Following the tenets of Pluralism, it
rejects ain’ts and oughts in favor of the here and now and meaning in context.
This is achieved by suspending judgment to get at an ‘intentional structure’
for oneself and whatever is perceived through memory, history, and an awareness
that intentions are seldom entirely fulfilled. Put another way, simply condense
what’s perceived into a matrix of essential features and project it to a larger
sphere of operation. Because thoughts are so plastic, the cocoon stays intact
as details change and upon re-entry, as it were, its contents can illuminate
the given situation in new ways.
Sounds like a probe to me. McLuhan is
all induction – the stuff of art and discovery – and in a world of concord by
confrontation he can rightly say “I
want observation, not agreement.” He
noticed human life had one overwhelming aspect: that unless shared, it was
meaningless. Meaning is conveyed by language, but also by sex, conflict,
technology – all generate meaning for the individuals involved by some
extension of consciousness through a physical medium. In other words, if
something makes sense it has meaning. Of course whatever made sense has meaning too, so by applying his media theory to
larger patterns of intercourse in history McLuhan provides a new constellation
of insight into present trends.
For our purposes consider games,
which he calls “extensions of the
social order and body politic”. In the
physical world we get specific rules, limited options, sequential play, eliminative
results – deduction all the way. Now consider video games. Rules are fuzzy,
options customized, play is instantaneous, results are accumulative – this is
total field, a widening of experience rather than a narrowing. There’s no time
to deduce a thing when customary visual orientation collapses like this;
players must use their eyes like ears else they miss a crucial blast. They have
to take in as much of what is going on as possible and there is speculation
that these machines, these replicas of acoustic space, are more than
entertainment, and that the whiz kids who conquer them represent a new breed of
brain that with the power of deduction might achieve things yet unimaginable.
In truth we’ve learned to accept both
forms of thought as somehow balancing each other out, and are inclined to see
them as equal forces in communication. With formal discourse this is fine. But
video games have a more tactile language, as do music, sex and ordinary
conversation. It means that with the return to a personalized reality from the
uniformity and segmentation of the last few millennia, each of us now serves as
a little induction magnet in the total field of our electronic environment.
This is what the age of information
is all about. It demands in us the addition, not subtraction, of the data at
hand. With a potential that virtually surrounds us, it offers new forms of
knowledge. Let’s hope we can use some before its proof blows us up.
Existentialism is widely seen as an
intellectual reaction to the Determinist movement, but I suspect it has more to
do with the advent of the telegraph.
Determinism grew out of Rationalism,
the belief that mathematics and its linguistic application, logic, were the
answer to everything. Logic works with cause and effect – if, then; since,
therefore; why, because – and is strictly deductive. Information is extracted
from what is already known in a chain of reason that has to be seen to be
believed. Another invention of Aristotle’s, logic stretches deduction to the
limit as long as it has a visual medium in which to operate. When extended
vocally it leads to perplexity and yawns as details lose relevance. But in
print it becomes a mighty weapon, since every detail is traceable to a source.
Once transcribed this way, every event has a cause. Once this idea is
transferred to the world at large the same is observable, and this is where the
Determinists took off by reasoning that if the laws of cause and effect
accounted for so much in nature, they could just as well account for human
behavior. Free will was therefore a myth.
The Existentialists said bull. Free
will is all we have. Free will is free choice, and we are destined to choose.
Even by not choosing we have made a choice. It is the fear of choicelessness,
of nothingness, that hurls us toward our existence. And so on.
But there’s another way of looking at
this. Once messages were rendered immediate by the telegraph, it occurred to
many that this left precious little to find a cause in. The wireless proved even more elusive, and with the
transmission of speech it was clear that we are determined by nothing but our
own ingenuity and initiative.
The more our environment turns into
artifact, then, the more we must turn to our own devices as the cause for the
effects we perceive. This of course is the message in any medium of
communication, any extension of ourselves. We are creatures of our own design,
and human freedom is only determined by what humans impose on it.
The laws of cause and effect are laws
of our own making – a tool for explaining and exploiting the environment, a
device for the exercise of logic. The Determinists were like children with a
new toy. They tried it out wherever they could and found no end to the fun. But
they can’t be blamed here. Believers were responding to the order imposed on
their perceptions by rampant technological and scientific growth. It was the
only way to account for their own place in the scheme of things.
Electricity, by releasing humanity
from the bondage of visual order, changed everything. Dormant senses sprang to
life and the heart was awakened while the head lost track. This is why
Existentialist prose is so abstract. I doubt they understood what was going on,
but I’m sure they felt it somehow.
And though their approach is often accused of melodrama, the impact of the
Existentialists on modern thought has been profound, because their desperate
insight left one inescapable conclusion: with choice comes accountability for
action.
If parents wish their children not to
smoke, they best check out their own ashtrays. If our institutions and
corporations are intimidating, look at the laws that give them their power. If
our communities exemplify waste, let’s clean up our act, but don’t forget the
script needs work too.
And if the scars on our planet mean
anything, it’s that our species needs to reassess the fruit of its collective
growth. Only now that we can plug into each other is such a thing possible, now
that message and messenger are one.
The most remarkable thing about
humans is our frontal lobe, the seat of intelligence, an area that somehow
works apart from physical body function. Really? Suppose this extension of gray
matter grew out of necessity when our distant ancestors codified acoustic space
by giving auditory data an exclusive input. There is a mountain of evidence
(but no fossil record) indicating that in our evolution as apes we had an
aquatic phase, likely prolonged, and as media go, this one involves the fact
that sound travels much farther and faster in it, and things like visual and
olfactory impairment, breath control, signal restructuring, dolphins…
Whatever the case, our particular
foreheads are unique in the animal kingdom. Therein lies our capacity for
phonetic language and the fabulous interpretation of the world it gives, and
this is what makes us what we are: conscious agents of the life force itself,
as revealed by her electro-physiological extension, our central nervous system.
Any ideas we have are thus generated by an essentially shared sensorium.
Well almost. The problem with
consciousness is its tendency to become enamored with its own operation, for
this creates the equivalent of a short circuit that, when acted upon, can have
unpredictable and sometimes devastating results.
I’ve left the Idealists until now
because this area of philosophy has guided all the others. Ever since Plato
made men aware that nature had been transferred to world within, they’ve been
inclined to live in it and then in a variety of ways flex their recreations.
Plato said that knowledge had to go beyond mere sense perception and include
this inner realm, but since feelings could fool you and the mind contained
changeless images (mostly mathematical) he reasoned that consciousness depended
on these instead of on what made sense. Is it not strange that women,
who are granted a more intuitive, almost non-cerebral kind of intelligence,
have until recently been denied the privilege of reading? Plato, who loved the
sight of the spoken word, found that the ‘appearance’ of ideas could indeed
produce ‘true forms’ of amazing clarity and continuity. So have subsequent
dialecticians for over two thousand years.
Most of these thinkers misunderstood
(or didn’t care) how ideals actually work. If I say the word “cat”, you will
experience a fleeting glimpse of an image – your gestalt representation of the
perfect cat. We perform this basic idealization for any observable phenomenon
in order to induce a meaning for its communication, and there’s the catch.
Ideals are primarily visual. Dreams,
for example, are full of subconscious ideals. Small wonder ideals work so well
in visual media like geometry and the alphabet. Whether scientific, social or
spiritual, they’ve been driving our historical record from the start, often for
the better. But as projections of reality, they have one drawback. Time and again it’s
been shown that ideals, like their intentions, are only good for 99%
fulfillment. And so in their abundance they clutter the field of reason. Many a
wildflower has sprouted from the garden of rhetoric. The Existentialists, sick
of it all, declared a vacuum.
And they are right, for now that the
artificial environment we have extended has its own timeless current, we become
like the jellyfish, which has no mind of its own, just a direct line to the
outside world. Yet to deny it consciousness is misleading, for it reproduces,
and it’s evolved. We got the first part. Now’s our chance to make good on the
second, now that with our circuits reintegrating we behold the very organism of
the
global
village.
Manfred
Ullman
2006
B.A : Communications
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