A few days ago I watched Michelangelo Antonioni's classic film Blowup (1966) which consciously addresses the fundamental problem of realism in the arts: the relationship between signs and their meaning. (See my post yesterday for some background.)
I also saw another classic, Network, for the first time since it was released in 1976. Remember? "We're mad as hell, and we're not gonna take it any more!"
This double barrel movie experience brought to mind Marshall McLuhan's famous aphorism, "The medium is the message." How strange but perceptive that man was!
Bear with me; there is a wisp of logic connecting Blowup, Network, McLuhan, and us. But it will take at least two posts to connect the dots. In this first part, I lay a foundation on McLuhan himself and the meaning of the "McLuhan Equation."
Background
For those who don't know about McLuhan (1911-1980), he was a Canadian educator, philosopher, English lit professor, literary critic, rhetorician, and communications guru. He almost single-handedly created the field of media studies, and it is said that he predicted the World Wide Web a quarter century before it was invented. Like many brilliant men he was a little eccentric, from time to time exhibiting characteristics of either genius or lunacy, depending on one's point of view and whether one can decipher his arcane syntax and difficult writing/speaking style.
For example, the following is taken from an interview of McLuhan conducted by NBC newsman Edwin Newman, himself no slouch when it comes to language. McLuhan speaks in response to a question, and his answer has Newman befuddled, for obvious reasons:
Tribal man lives corporately, not privately, in a world of consciousness that includes everything we call subconscious; in the electric age the private man has been scrapped, corporate man is back, and at high speeds the private outlook of the private individual with his personal point of view is scrapped by virtue of the speed-up of electric information which goes totally around him. As electric man goes inside this resonating envelope of information, he joins this subconscious world that had previously been created by ages of private consciousness, and the gap between the private and the collective consciousness ends.
Now, for 100 bonus points, paraphrase what you just read in 25 words or less. (You can hear the hour-long interview, in six parts, beginning at http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=z9Eq3sDgl9o. A few minutes of McLuhan speaking will be enough, I’m sure.)
In the intro to a lengthy interview published in Playboy in 1969, McLuhan’s style was described as follows:
McLuhan’s observations — “probes,” he prefers to call them — are riddled with such flamboyantly undecipherable aphorisms as “The electric light is pure information” and “People don’t actually read newspapers, they get into them every morning like a hot bath.” Of his own work, McLuhan has remarked: “I don’t pretend to understand it. After all, my stuff is very difficult.” (The full interview can be read at: http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/)
The medium influences society
The message is what it does to us
The Playboy interview asserts, “Despite his convoluted syntax, flashy metaphors and word-playful one-liners, ... McLuhan’s basic thesis is relatively simple.” That is true, but to understand the thesis fully, one must be clear on how McLuhan defines the key words of his famous saying:
- "medium"—any extension of ourselves; any agency, substance, tool or innovation through which we accomplish something.
- "message"—the underlying effect, lesson or moral that the medium brings to society.
For example, McLuhan considers a light bulb or an automobile to be a medium. Though neither a light bulb nor a car has content per se, McLuhan says each is full of message. In the case of the light bulb, the message is that we are not obliged to read by candlelight or oil lamp, and our workday can include the nighttime hours. In the case of the automobile, it is that we are freed from dependence on horses and trains and riverboats for our transportation. How the light bulb or automobile changed our environment is the moral of the story, the message to use McLuhan’s term.
At one point during the Newman interview McLuhan comments on the phenomenon of instant replay in football telecasts, a technology that was brand new at the time. He says, “Instant replay creates a totally new form of audience participation in the dynamics of the game; it freezes the action much like a painter or photographer does.”
It's a perfect example of how the medium (instant replay) brought a message (changed viewer expectations) to society. If only McLuhan had lived to see how the Instant Replay Rule ("the previous play is under further review") has further changed the game and the role of the audience, he might have been amazed to see how prescient he was.
Or maybe not. One gets the feeling that McLuhan had few self-doubts and—just as he foresaw the Internet—was divinatory enough to foresee the day when referees and umpires would use TV replays to confirm or reverse their live-action decisions, thus vastly changing the games they officiate and the audiences who watch them.
Looking Ahead
Earlier I said to please bear with me. In Part II of my musings on this subject I will explain how Blowup, Network, McLuhan, and we are all connected, and how “the medium is the message” is affecting our lives in ways we often fail to see. In the meantime, check out some of these other materials on Marshall McLuhan.
Other Sources
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtycdRBAbXk&NR=1 (1:01, a dramatization that is a good place to start.)
http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=faK9HUvH2ck&feature=fvw (a 4-minute montage giving a flavor for McLuhan’s style)
http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF8jej3j5vA&feature=related (McLuhan on the Today Show discussing the Carter/Ford presidential debates)
http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=fgv72SRHdUI&feature=related (McLuhan on Dick Cavett discussing the Nixon/Kennedy debate)
http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=A7GvQdDQv8g&feature=related (a 2:16 clip summarizing McLuhan’s viewpoint. Be sure to change video quality to 240p on the control bar below the video screen for the sound to work.)
http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=x6eJyth8Dvo&feature=related (a 2:34 video example of the "message" carried by various mediums, including The Simpsons. Think of how each of these examples has changed how we interact with each other, how we view events, and how we perceive “news” compared to the pre-television days, for example.)
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