The Medium is the Message
English Revolution (1689)
-A.K.A. The Glorious Revolution and the English Civil War (17th century) -Civil war broke out between those who supported Parliament and those that supported the King -Parliament won and replaced the monarchy with the Commonwealth of England (1649-1653) -Commonwealth: Independent country or community -Limited the power of the monarchy in England -Made Parliament as powerful as the English King Charles I (who was beheaded after trial) -Led to a constitutional monarch and a bill of rights -Medieval institution of Parliament backed the power of the ancient oral traditions -No uniformity or continuity of the new visual print culture could take complete hold -American Revolution had no medieval legal institutions to discard -Typography and print cultures create uniformity and continuity -England rejected this principle, clinging to the dynamic or oral common-law tradition -Hence, discontinuity and unpredictable quality of English culture -Grammar of print construes message of oral and non-written culture and institutions -English aristocracy classified as barbaric because its power and status had nothing to do with literacy or cultural forms of typography
Detribalization
-Act of causing tribal people to abandon their customs and adopt urban ways of living -Loss of cultural traditions and tribal membership -Economic dependency; only farmers and workers -Private ownership; geographic loss of tribal control -Only U.S. citizenship under states/counties -Political "unilateralism" of federal government -Campaign to remake Indians into the image of White American citizens -"Civilized" (white) American people lead sedentary lives on fixed lots of land and practiced Christianity -Part of the allotment and boarding school campaign and relocation termination -Detribalization by literacy had traumatic effects of tribal man -Submerging natives with floods of concepts for which nothing has prepared them -With electric media, Western man himself experiences exactly the same inundation as the remote native -"We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture." (McLuhan, 7)
A Passage to India (E.M. Forster, 1924)
-America headed Eastward -Parable of the Western man in the electric age -Study of the inability of oral and intuitive oriental culture to meet with the rational, visual European patterns of experience -Rational in this case meaning uniform, continuous, and sequential -Confusion of reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology -Dislocation from the typographic trance of the West comes in the Marabar Caves -After the caves, "Life went on as usual, but had no consequences, that is to say, sounds did not echo nor thought develop. Everything seemed cut off at its root and therefore infected with illusion." -Ultimate conflict between sight and sound moderated by understanding the media (understanding stops action) -Written versus oral kinds of perception and organization of existence
Money: Medium of Exchange
-Anything that serves as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value -Assets that people are generally willing to accept in exchange for goods and services or for payment of debts. -Operation of the money medium in 17th century Japan similar to operation of typography in the West -Penetration of the money economy -Caused slow but irresistible revolution -Breakdown of feudal government -Resumption of intercourse with foreign countries after more than two hundred years of seclusion -Money reorganized the sense life of peoples because it is an extension of our sense lives -"This change does not depend upon approval or disapproval of those living in the society." (McLuhan, 9)
Mechanization
-Application of automatic machinery to increase manufacturing, production, and other activities -Among the first processes to be mechanized were the spinning of cotton thread and the weaving of cloth in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century England -Automatic: Device or process working by itself with little or no direct human control -Manufacturing: Made on a large scale using machinery -Paradox of mechanization -Itself the cause of maximal growth and change -Principle of mechanization excludes the very possibility of growth or the understanding of change -Achieved by fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts in a series -No principle of causality in a mere sequence -Nothing follows from following, except change -Greatest of all reversals occurred with electricity -Ended sequence by making things instant -"With instant speed the causes of things began to emerge to awareness again, as they had not done with things in sequence and in concatenation accordingly." (McLuhan, 4) -Concatenation: Series of interconnected things or events; linking things together in a series -Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane -Sudden visibility of sound reflects a pattern a being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance
Film/Movie
-Audiovisual medium that records images on transparent plastic strips by means of photosensitive chemicals -Form of entertainment that enacts a story by a sequence of images giving the illusion of continuous movement -Grew tremendously popular during the Roaring Twenties -Provided escape from depression-era realities -Vividly fragmented/sequential mechanization -Translated humanity beyond mechanism into the world of growth and organic interrelation -Sheer speeding up of the mechanical -From sequence and connections into creative configuration and structure -"The message of the movie medium is that of transition from lineal connections to configurations." (McLuhan, 4) -"'If it works, it's obsolete.'" (McLuhan, 4) -Electric speed takes over from mechanical movie sequences -Clarify lines of force in structures and in media
Conclusion
-Bearings on our own culture -Removal from bias and pressure exerted by any technical form of human expression -Visit a society where that particular form has not been felt, or a historical period in which it was unknown -Changes in human and social psychology -Print created individualism and nationalism in the 16th century -"Program and "content" analysis offer no clues to the magic of these media or to their subliminal charge." (McLuhan, 9) -Whatever is useful to conversation (way of life) is agreeable -"All victual that conduces to nourishment is relishable, whereas other things that cannot be assimilated and be turned into our substance are insipid. A Discourse cannot be pleasant to the Hearer that is not easy to the Speaker; nor can it be easily pronounced unless it be heard with delight." (Bernard Lam) -Equilibrium theory of human diet and expression -Future of modern society and the stability of its inner life dependent on media -Maintenance of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual's own reaction -Failure typical throughout all mankind -"Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users." (McLuhan, 9) -Each of the media is also a powerful weapon with which to clobber other media and other groups -Results in multiple civil wars in the present age -Formative power in the media are the media themselves -Technological media are staples (natural resources), exactly as are coal and cotton and oil -Society whose economy is dependent upon one or two major staples is going to have some obvious social patterns of organization as a result -Extreme instability in the economy but great endurance in the population -"The pathos and humor of the American South are embedded in such an economy of limited staples." (McLuhan, 10) -"Fixed charges" on the entire psychic life of the community -All media are extensions of human senses -Human senses are also fixed charges on our personal energies, configuring the individual awareness and experience -"Every Roman was surrounded by slaves. The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every Roman became inwardly, and of course unwittingly, a slave. Because living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected through the unconscious with their psychology. No one can shield himself from such an influence." (C. G. Jung)
Technological Determinism
-Belief that technology causes certain human behaviors -Developments in technology provide the primary driving force behind social, economic, and cultural change -Industries have only recently become aware of the various kinds of business in which they are engaged -Business of processing and moving information -Ex. IBM; General Electric Company; AT&T
Introduction
-Culture accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control -In operational and practical fact, the medium is the message -Medium: Any extension of ourselves; physical environment in which phenomena occur -Personal and social consequences of any medium result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology
Cubism
-Early 20th century style and movement in art -Perspective with a single viewpoint was abandoned -Use was made of simple geometric shapes, interlocking planes, complex lines, and, later, collage. -Subject matter is portrayed by geometric forms, especially cubes -At this moment of the movie (triumphant illusions and dreams), cubism occurred -Radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture -Substitutes all facets of an object simultaneously for the "point of view" or facet of perspective illusion -Facet: One side of something many-sided -Divergence from specialized illusion of the third dimension on canvas -Interplay of planes -Contradiction or dramatic conflict of patterns, lights, textures -"Drives home the message" by involvement -All sides appear in two dimensions -Drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant total sensory awareness of the whole -Announced that the medium is the message -The moment that sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the structure and of configuration (integral idea) -Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field
Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975)
-English historian of the early 20th century -Educated at Oxford -Believed in cyclic interpretation of history -Used Ibn Khaldun's ideas -Considered the physical environment in which any society lives to be a major determinant of its history and culture -Early voice for both environmental history and globalization -Coined the phrase "Industrial Revolution" -Oriental societies have in our time accepted the industrial technology and its political consequences -Oriental: Of, from, or characteristic of East Asia -"On the cultural plane, however, there is no uniform corresponding tendency." (D. C. Somervell) -Spiritual and cultural reservations of oriental people towards technology will not avail them -Effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts -Alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance -Only the serious artist aware of the changes in sense perception is able to encounter technology with impunity -Impunity: Exemption from punishment or freedom from the injurious consequences of an action
Etherialization
-Evocation of an inspiringly spiritual meaning out of a crassly material one -Facile belief that Western Society could see ahead of it an unbroken vista of progress toward an Earthly Paradise -Arnold Toynbee's theory of progressive simplification and efficiency in any organization or technology -Effect of the challenge of these forms upon the response of our senses -Perspective results from typographic spell -"...we become what we behold." (McLuhan, 9) -Opinions irrelevant to the effect of media and technology in society -"For the man in a literate and homogenized society ceases to be sensitive to the diverse and discontinuous life of forms." (McLuhan, 9) -Narcissus Complex: Condition of extreme self-absorption; narcissism ("private point of view")
Feudalism in Japan (1160-1600 CE)
-Feudalism: A political system in which nobles are granted the use of lands that legally belong to their king, in exchange for their loyalty, military service, and protection of the people who live on the land -Decentralized system of government based on landowners and tenants -Dominant social system in medieval Europe -Nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service -Vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles -Peasants (villeins or serfs) obliged to live on their lord's land and give him homage, labor, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection -Social Hierarchy in Japan: Emperor -> Shogun -> Daimyo -> Samurai -> Peasants -System in Japan in which land is given to Daimyo and Samurai in exchange for military service -Broken down by penetration of the money economy
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
-Highly literate aristocrat, French civil servant, historian, author, liberal leader, political scientist, and politician -Best known for his early work on the American political system (in contrast to England) -Examined the political and social nature of the US from 1831-1833 -First to raise topics of American practicality over theory, the industrial aristocracy, and the conflict between the masses and individuals -Came from France to America in 1831 -Observed democracy in government and society -Noted for his analysis of American institutions -Interest in the American democratic process and appreciation of American civil society -Democracy: System of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives -Control of an organization or group by the majority of its members -Practice or principles of social equality -His two-volume book "Democracy in America" written in two parts in 1835 and 1840 -Discusses the advantages of democracy and consequences of the majority's unlimited power -Described the "exceptionalism" that he saw in America -Wrote that inequalities were less visible in America than France -Provided an outsider's objective view of the Age of Jackson -"First to master the grammar of print and typography" (McLuhan, 5) -Message of coming change in America and France -Easier to acquire clear and precise notions about the American Union than about Great Britain -In America, all laws derive in a sense from the same line of thought -Whole society founded upon a simple fact -Everything springs from a simple principle -Comparison of America to forest pierced by a multitude of straight roads all converging on the same point -Find the center and everything is revealed at a glance -In England, the paths run criss-cross, and it is only by traveling down each one of them that one can build up a picture of the whole -Detached from the values and assumptions of typography, De Tocqueville alone understood the grammar of typography -Only by standing aside from a structure or medium man its principles and lines of force be discerned -Any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary -Prediction and control consist in avoiding this subliminal state of Narcissus trance (may occur immediately upon contact)
Electric Speed
-Increasingly short amount of time between the introductions of new media platforms and the correspondingly shorter amounts of time we need to adapt to them -Reveals the impact of the medium, not just the message -Trains the mind to explore and master complex systems -Revealed the lines of force operating from Western technology -Before the electric speed and total inclusive field, it was not obvious that the medium is the message -Seemed that the message was the "content" -Sense of the whole pattern, of form and function as a unity -Technology demands behaviour in uniform and continuous patterns -Mental breakdown of varying degrees result from the uprooting and inundation of new (patterns of) information -Inundation: Overwhelming abundance -Accelerated media change as a kind of massacre of the innocents -"In our own world as we become more aware of the effects of technology on psychic formation and manifestation, we are losing all confidence in our right to assign guilt." (McLuhan, 7) -Especially the child, the cripple, the woman, and the colored person appear in a world of visual and typographic technology as victims of injustice -I.Q. tests reflect typographical cultural bias -Assumption that uniform and continuous habits are a sign of intelligence (elimination of sound and touch) -Willing ignorance towards warnings one does not wish to hear (encounter with electric technology) -American stake in literacy as a technology or uniform application threatened by electric technology -Invisible and quite unrecognizable enemy
Electric Light
-Invention by Thomas Edison that makes light by passing electricity through a fine wire housed in a bulb -Made possible by economically feasible generating technology of 1870's -Illumination; Pure information -Medium without a message (unless used to spell) -"This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the "content" of any medium is always another medium." (McLuhan, 1) -Ex. The content of writing is speech; Written word is the content of print; Print is the content of the telegraph (content of speech is the nonverbal process of thought) -Escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no "content" -Invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all. -Not noticed as a medium until used to spell words -Then it is not the light, but the "content" (which is really another medium) that is noticed -Its message is totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized -Eliminate time and space factors in human association -Creation of involvement in depth -In the electric age, man seems to the conventional West to become irrational
Automation
-Largely automatic equipment in a system of manufacturing or other production process -Use of technology to ease human labor or to extend the mental or physical capabilities of human -Negatively, the new patterns of human association tend to eliminate jobs -Positively, automation creates roles for people -Depth of involvement in their work and human association that our preceding mechanical technology had destroyed -It was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message -The machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves -Restructuring of human work and association -Technique of fragmentation is the essence of machine technology -The essence of automation technology is the opposite -It is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships
The Medium is the Message
-Marshall McLuhan's idea that new forms of media transform our experience of ourselves and our society -Famous quotation reflecting McLuhan's perspective of technological determinism -The way in which a message is transmitted affects the message's meaning -This influence is ultimately more important than the content of specific messages -Psychic and social consequences of the designs/patterns of new technology as they amplify or accelerate existing processes -The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs -Ex. "The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure." (McLuhan, 1) -The medium is socially the message -Older unawareness of the psychic and social effects of media
Extensions of Man
-McLuhan's idea that media literally extend sight, hearing, and touch through time and space -Greatly influenced by cultural anthropologist Edward Hall -Amputation and extension of ones own being in a new technical form -Shakespeare's intuition of the transforming powers of new media -Psychic and social study of communication -True social and political navigation depend upon anticipating the consequences of innovation -Increasing awareness of the action of media, quite independently of their "content" or programming
French Revolution (1789)
-Period of radical social and political change throughout Europe -Reaction to the oppressive aristocracy -Uprising inspired by America's independence from England and the Enlightenment ideas -Began with rebellion against the king of France -French middle and lower classes overthrew the king -Assertion of power in a violent and bloody revolution -Overthrew the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons and the system of aristocratic privileges -Ended with Napoleon's overthrow of the Directory and seizure of power in 1799 -Cataclysmic event ushered in Neoclassicism to replace Rococo -Printed word, achieving cultural saturation in the eighteenth century, had homogenized the French nation -Homogenize: Make uniform or similar -Typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and linearity had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society -Revolution carried out by new literati and lawyers
Content
-Programming carried by a media channel and produced by a media source or organization -Always edited and "re-presented" by those who control media organizations -Term popularized in the context of multimedia that refers music, movies, television shows, and books -Medium 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 -The "content" of any medium typically blinds us to the character of the medium -Latest approach to media study considers not only the "content" but the medium and the cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates -Matrix: Environment or material in which something develops; a surrounding medium or structure -"Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the "content" of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind." (McLuhan, 8) -Effect of a medium made strong and intense because it is given another medium as "content" -Effect of the form is not related to its content