Marshall McLuhan: Making Sense of Media
Soon televisions will be saturated with ads and “logically irreconcilable one-liners,” to quote Carl Henry. Many jaded voters will switch the station, but still endure the rhetoric until the post-election aftermath dissipates. Though our attitude toward politics often consists of disdain and distrust, perhaps we overlook the fact that our feelings aren’t based on direct experience, but on indirect, mediated information.
Consider a politician crafting new legislation. The idea may have originated in his mind. Yet it must be articulated, then reviewed and revised by policy wonks, aides, and more lawyers than we’d care to know. It will filter through committees and colleagues. Before making it onto the nightly news, the proposal has been written, edited, condensed, summarized, and often presented in the form of a six-second sound byte (never mind the biases of journalists and news stations!) [1]. Yet we must admit that our response to legislation is often forged on this basis. How then can we be wise citizens with such mediated information?
The field of media ecology helps uncover not simply the substance of the news, but the meaning of our mediums too. Perhaps more than anyone, Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) helps us understand the media, or mediation, and how it shapes our lives. This month marks the 40-year anniversary of McLuhan’s important work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Here we’ll consider his life, thought, and contributions to understanding media.
Biography and Career
Despite his profound influence in America, Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The McLuhans eventually moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba where Marshall earned his bachelors and masters degrees in English Literature from the University of Manitoba. Some biographers describe this as a time in which McLuhan explored his complex relationship to faith. Eventually the influence of G.K. Chesterton’s What’s Wrong with the World? propelled McLuhan from agnosticism to embrace Roman Catholicism. Though McLuhan was hardly a fundamentalist, the left would occasionally criticize him for how religious notions influenced his work.
McLuhan continued his education at Cambridge University where he earned his doctorate. Besides a brief stop at the University of Wisconsin, his first teaching post was at Saint Louis University (though his tenure included one brief interruption to complete his dissertation).
Though he taught at several different institutions, most of McLuhan’s career was spent at the University of Toronto. In 1963 he formed the Centre for Culture and Technology, an aptly-named organization given his interests. He would publish 14 books (two posthumously), among them his influential Understanding Media, The Medium Is the Massage, and The Mechanical Bride.
How did an English professor become the father of what is sometimes called media ecology? Ironically, it was his study at Cambridge under the early proponents of New Criticism (an approach to literary criticism) that prepared him to impact media studies. New Criticism moved beyond the dictionary meaning of words and focused on their effects in a given context [2]. In a similar way, McLuhan would introduce students and scholars alike to how media of various kinds affect the worldviews, sensibilities, and habits of its audience.
Key Ideas, Themes, & Contributions
McLuhan’s career spans an important era in American culture—one which includes the emergence of the middle class, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, as well as television becoming a behemoth in political and social affairs. Such trends left few positioned to criticize technology since many technical advances enhanced the overall quality of life. Needless to say, there were also commercial interests bound up with the progress of electronic media. However, McLuhan contributed his most significant analysis in this environment. The following are a few important themes in McLuhan’s work.
Media = The Extensions of Man
A medium is much more than a microphone or newspaper. The media are a range of artifacts bound up with unique effects, such as clocks, money, or clothing. Through the use of such tools, humans amplify and extend themselves in the world. Sometimes they are expressing a particular value, such as the desire for efficiency. Other times media are considered a solution to a particular problem, such as distance. Given human needs and desires, it’s no surprise that people fashion tools to accomplish certain ends.
However, McLuhan wanted people to understand what mediation does to us as much as what it does for us. Regardless of the intent, media and technologies function like a “huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics” [3]. Drawing on this surgical metaphor, McLuhan explains:
If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be considered. For in operating on society with a new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that is changed [4].
Though media are seen as extensions of the person, they also create a different type of awareness or effect. Consider McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Massage (1967), titled after his adage, “the medium is the message.” Through a typesetter’s error, it came back as “massage” not “message.” McLuhan demanded the error remain as it actually served the point of the book itself!
The Medium Is the Message
This is arguably the most common theme from McLuhan that has endured. Even apart from the content they may convey, mediums have their own built-in effects that are unique to them. Advertising, for instance, is designed to create an effect more than offer a line of reasoning (though many ads may contain some explicit message). Media has the ability to create an effect, which is itself a message.
McLuhan illustrated this principle using the railway. He says,
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. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or northern environment, and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium [5].
Such analysis is one reason why McLuhan’s influence has reached beyond conventional media studies, and has had broader impact on discussions about technology and society.
The Global Village
While there has been some discussion over whether this idea originated with McLuhan, the phrase itself certainly did. Long before email, Google or Skype, McLuhan spoke of the spatial contraction of the globe into a single, large village. He believed that the invention of the telegraph and radio had signaled a profound transition in human life. In his words, “It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner” [6].
These and other themes continue to be utilized or simply assumed in countless professional and academic fields.
Conclusion
McLuhan’s influence late in life and after his death waxed and waned—though the advent of the Internet produced a resurgence of interest. In life he did acquire a peculiar brand of popularity, which included making the cover of several mainstream magazines, and having a cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, which won several Oscars including Best Picture in 1977.
Despite this popularity, many have had difficulty understanding McLuhan’s work. It is no stretch to say that many were suspicious of him. However, given Scripture’s admonitions to vigilance, we should consider McLuhan’s contributions. His thoughts offer a perspective Christians often don’t receive elsewhere.
In short, McLuhan’s perspective may serve as guidance to the church in the form of a general principle, with many secondary implications:
(1) Communication & Proclamation: Historically Christians have adopted many mediums for their proclamation of the Gospel and the promotion of the church. Yet if McLuhan is right, then we should walk wisely as it concerns which tools we embrace. The power of media rests in its subtlety to create new forms of ‘awareness’ in us. Ironically, we are often unaware of this ‘awareness.’ Christians should give careful attention to how the forms that our communication assumes will encode different layers of meaning alongside the substance of our message [7].
(2) Spirituality & Hermeneutics: Mediums create within us newfound expectations that are sometimes quite novel to the Christian experience. For example, Study Bibles can be excellent tools for serious Christians. Yet how do Study Bibles change the way we read and wrestle with understanding and applying Scripture? No doubt the church is a place for instruction and learning, but does a Bible with built-in “answers” to the hard texts cause us to pray, read, search, study, and wait on the Spirit more or less for understanding?
The challenges of media are legion. But guides for the new media frontier come in many shapes and sizes, and Marshall McLuhan can be that for many today who are willing to listen.
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[1] It is important note that the actual process by which policy becomes law is even messier, and more circuitous than this!
[2] Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), 32-34. I was intrigued to learn of McLuhan’s associations with the authors connected to the southern agrarian authors such as Cleanth Brooks.
[3] Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 64.
[4] Ibid., 64.
[5] Ibid., 8.
[6] Ibid., 8.
[7] What message does it send when we slap ‘prayer’ or ‘Jesus’ on the Easy button we often associate with the Staples corporation? The image itself establishes something alongside the text.
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