In the mainstream of media studies and much cultural studies the part played by the technological element that any medium has is always strongly qualified. Any idea that a medium can be reduced to a technology, or that the technological element which is admitted to be a part of any media process should be central to its study, is strongly resisted. The grounds for this view are to be found in a number of seminal essays by Raymond Williams (1974; 1977; 1983), which, at least in part, responded critically to the ‘potent observations’ (Hall, 1975: 81) of the Canadian literary and media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Williams’s arguments against McLuhan subsequently became touchstones for media studies’ rejection of any kind of technological determinism.
Yet, and here we meet one of the main sources of the present clash of discourses around the significance of new media, McLuhan’s ideas have undergone a renaissance – literally a rebirth or rediscovery – in the hands of contemporary commentators, both popular and academic, on new media. The McLuhanite insistence on the need for new non-linear (‘mosaic’ is his term) ways of thinking about new media, which escape the intellectual protocols, procedures and habits of a linear print culture, has been taken up as something of a war cry against the academic media analyst.
The charge that the neo-McLuhan cybertheorists make about media studies is made at this fundamental, epistemological level; that they simply fail to realise that its viewpoints (something, in fact, that McLuhan would claim we can no longer have) and methodologies have been hopelessly outstripped by events. As an early critic of McLuhan realised, to disagree with McLuhanite thinking is likely to be seen as the product of ‘an outmoded insistence on the logical, ABCD minded, causality mad, one-thing-at-a-time method that the electronic age and its prophet have rendered obsolete’ (Duffy 1969: 31). Both Williams and McLuhan carried out their influential work in the 1960s and 1970s.
Williams was one of the founding figures of British media and cultural studies. His rich, if at times abstract, historical and sociological formulations about cultural production and society provided some of the master templates for what has become mainstream media studies. Countless detailed studies of all kinds of media are guided and informed by his careful and penetrating outlines for a theory of media as a form of cultural production. His work is so deeply assimilated within the media studies discipline that he is seldom explicitly cited; he has become an invisible presence. Wherever we consider, in this book, new media as subject to control and direction by human institutions, skill, creativity and intention, we are building upon such a Williamsite emphasis. On the other hand, McLuhan, the provoking, contentious figure who gained almost pop status in the 1960s, was discredited for his untenable pronouncements and was swatted away like an irritating fly by the critiques of Williams and others (Miller, 1971).
However, as Williams foresaw (1974: 128), McLuhan has found highly influential followers. Many of his ideas have been taken up and developed by a whole range of theorists with an interest in new media: Baudrillard, Virilio, Poster, Kroker, De Kerckhove. The work of McLuhan and his followers has great appeal for those who see new media as bringing about radical cultural change or have some special interest in celebrating its potential. For the electronic counterculture he is an oppositional figure and for corporate business a source of propaganda his aphorisms, ‘the global village’ and ‘the medium is the message’, ‘function as globally recognised jingles’ for multinational trade in digital commodities (Genosko, 1998). The magazine Wired has adopted him as its ‘patron saint’ (Wired, January 1996). Williams’s insights, embedded in a grounded and systematic theory, have been a major, shaping contribution to the constitution of an academic discipline.
McLuhan’s elliptical, unsystematic, contradictory and playful insights have fired the thought, the distinctive stance, and the methodological strategies of diverse but influential theorists of new media. We might say that Williams’s thought is structured into media studies while, with respect to this discipline, McLuhan and those who have developed his ideas stalk its margins, sniping and provoking in ways that ensure they are frequently, if sometimes begrudgingly, referenced. Even cautious media academics allow McLuhan a little nowadays. He is seen as a theoretically unsubtle and inconsistent thinker who provokes others to think (Silverstone, 1999). It matters if he is wrong. One or another of his insights is often the jumping-off point for a contemporary study.
McLuhan’s major publications appeared in the 1960s, some two decades before the effective emergence of the PC as a technology for communications and media production. It is a shift from a 500-year-old print culture to one of ‘electric’ media, by which he mainly means radio and television, that McLuhan considers. He only knew computers in the form of the mainframe computers of his day, yet they formed part of his bigger concept of the ‘electric environment’, and he was sharp enough to see the practice of timesharing on these machines as the early signs of their social availability.
By the 1990s, for some, McLuhan’s ideas, when applied to developments in new media, had come to seem not only potent but extraordinarily prescient as well. It is quite easy to imagine a student at work in some future time, who, failing to take note of McLuhan’s dates, is convinced that he is a 1990s writer on cyberculture, a contemporary of Jean Baudrillard or William Gibson. While this may owe something to the way that his ideas have been taken up in the postmodern context of the last two decades of the twentieth century by writers such as Baudrillard, Virilio, De Kerckhove, Kroker, Kelly, and Toffler, this hardly undermines the challenging and deliberately perverse originality of his thought.
The debate between the Williams and McLuhan positions, and Williams’s apparent victory in this debate, left media studies with a legacy. It has had the effect of putting paid to any ‘good-sense’ cultural or media theorist raising the spectre of the technological determinism associated with the thought of McLuhan. It has also had the effect of foreclosing aspects of the way in which cultural and media studies deals with technology by implicitly arguing that technology on its own is incapable of producing change, the view being that whatever is going on around us in terms of rapid technological change there are rational and manipulative interests at work driving the technology in particular directions and it is to these that we should primarily direct our attention. Such is the dismissal of the role of technology in cultural change that, should we wish to confront this situation, we are inevitably faced with our views being reduced to apparent absurdity: ‘What!? Are you suggesting that machines can and do act, cause things to happen on their own? – that a machine caused space flight, rather than the superpowers’ ideological struggle for achievement?’ However, there are good reasons to believe that technology cannot be adequately analysed only within the humanist frame Williams bequeathed cultural and media theorists. Arguments about what causes technological change may not be so straightforward as culturalist accusations of political or theoretical naivety seem to suggest. In this, therefore, people review Williams’s and McLuhan’s arguments about media and technology.
BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA
BAPRM III - 42686
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