Electronic culture, is ‘paradise regained’ (Duffy 1969). Developing from the invention of telegraphy to television and the computer, this culture promises to short-circuit that of mechanical print and we regain the conditions of an oral culture in acoustic space. We return to a state of sensory grace; to a culture marked by qualities of simultaneity, indivisibility and sensory plenitude. The haptic or tactile senses again come into play, and McLuhan strives hard to show how television is a tactile medium. The terms in which McLuhan described this electric age as a new kind of primitivism, with tribal-like participation in the ‘global village’, resonates with certain strands of New Age media culture.
McLuhan’s all-at-onceness or simultaneity, the involvement of everyone with everyone, electronic media’s supposedly connecting and unifying characteristics, are easy to recognise in (indeed, in some cases have led to) many of the terms now used to characterise new media – connectivity, convergence, the network society, wired culture, and interaction.
Remediation. First, and most uncontentiously because it was an idea that McLuhan and Williams shared, is the idea that all new media ‘remediate’ the content of previous media. This notion, as developed by McLuhan in the 1960s, has become a key idea, extensively worked out in a recent book on new media.
In Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999), Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin briefly revisit the clash between Williams and McLuhan as they set out their own approach to the study of new media. They define a medium as ‘that which remediates’. That is, a new medium ‘appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real’. The inventors, users, and economic backers of a new medium present it as able to represent the world in more realistic and authentic ways than previous media forms, and in the process what is real and authentic is redefined (ibid.). This idea owes something to McLuhan, for whom ‘the “content” of any medium is always another medium’ (1968).
Bolter and Grusin have something interesting to say about Williams and McLuhan which bears directly upon our attempt to get beyond the polarised debates about new media. They agree with Williams’s criticism that McLuhan is a technological determinist who singlemindedly took the view that media technologies act directly to change a society and a culture, but they argue that it is possible to put McLuhan’s ‘determinism’ aside in order to appreciate ‘his analysis of the remediating power of various media’. Bolter and Grusin encourage us to see value in the way that McLuhan ‘notices intricate correspondences involving media and cultural artefacts’ (1999), and they urge us to recognise that his view of media as ‘extensions of the human sensorium’ has been highly influential, prefiguring the concept of the cyborg in late twentieth-century thought on media and cyberculture or techno culture.
Extending the sensorium McLuhan reminds us of the technological dimension of media. He does so by refusing any distinction between a medium and a technology. For him, there is no issue. It is not accidental that he makes his basic case for a medium being ‘any extension of ourselves’ (1968) by using as key examples the electric light (ibid.) and the wheel respectively a system and an artefact which we would ordinarily think of as technologies rather than media. Basically, this is no more than the commonplace idea that a ‘tool’ (a name for a simple technology) is a bodily extension: a hammer is an extension of the arm or a screwdriver is an extension of the hand and wrist.
In The Medium is the Massage (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967) McLuhan drives this point home. We again meet the wheel as ‘an extension of the foot’, while the book is ‘an extension of the eye’, clothing is an extension of the skin, and electric circuitry is an ‘extension of the central nervous system’. In other places he speaks of money (1968) or gunpowder as a medium. In each case, then, an artefact is seen as extending a part of the body, a limb or the nervous system. And, as far as McLuhan is concerned, these are ‘media’.
McLuhan conflates technologies and mediums in this way because he views both as part of a larger class of things; as extensions of the human senses: sight, hearing, touch, and smell. Wheels for instance, especially when driven by automotive power, radically changed the experience of travel and speed, the body’s relationship to its physical environment, and to time and space. The difference between the view we have of the world when slowly walking, open on all sides to a multisensory environment, or when glimpsed as rapid and continuous change through the hermetically sealed and framing window of a high-speed train, is a change in sensory experience which did and continues to have cultural significance.
Its real significance (the message of the medium itself) is the way it changes our perception of the world. McLuhan also asserts (he doesn’t ‘argue’) that such extensions of our bodies, placed in the context of the body’s whole range of senses (the sensorium), change the ‘natural’ relationships between the sensing parts of the body, and affect ‘the whole psychic and social complex’ (1968). In short, he is claiming that such technological extensions of our bodies affect both our minds and our societies.
In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) he expresses the idea of technological extension more carefully when he says, ‘Sense ratios change when any one sense or bodily or mental function is externalised in technological form.’ So, for McLuhan, the importance of a medium (seen as a bodily extension) is not just a matter of a limb or anatomical system being physically extended (as in the hammer as ‘tool’ sense). It is also a matter of altering the ‘ratio’ between the range of human senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell) and this has implications for our ‘mental functions’ (having ideas, perceptions, emotions, experiences, etc.). Media, then, change the relationship of the human body and its sensorium to its environment.
Media generally alter the human being’s sensory relationship to the world, and the specific characteristics of any one medium change that relationship in different ways. This is McLuhan’s broad and uncontestable premiss upon which he spins all manner of theses.
There is also an important reversal of this idea as with industrial mechanisation we come to think of the human body as a mere extension of the machine. An idea powerfully represented by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times and theorised by Marx and Benjamin amongst others.
BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA
BAPRM III - 42686
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