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1994 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the first printing of Marshall McLuhan's book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Ironically, it has also taken us about this long before we have begun to truly understand the relevancy of this book. McLuhan was a proponent of the artist's role in society, since he believed that only artists had the sense-awareness necessary to pick up the effects of media on the psyche. It is difficult to read Understanding Media today without thinking of our present-day technology and how McLuhan's predictions and ideas are relevant to what we are now facing in the new digital age.
When McLuhan declared "the medium is the message", he strove to make a distinction between the content of a medium and its corresponding social effect:
"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 watch-dog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as "content". The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The "content" of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech."
AND
"The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception."
McLuhan believed that the effect of a medium on the human psyche was more difficult to detect because it altered sense ratios that only artists were adept at perceiving. The issue therefore becomes not how a medium or technology is used, but the effect on human perception, since its mere presence will implicitly change the rhythm of all previous perceptions and our lives as well. It would be too simplistic to label various technologies as "good" or "evil" based on their creators' intent; therefore, the tendency to view the merits of technologies by their use does not withstand critical evaluation.
Take the example of guns, for instance. Not many people would say that a gun is a good technology, because its ultimate purpose -- its content -- is the destruction of life. But even if a gun were never used for its ultimate purpose, its mere presence in society changes the way we look at our world. In short, the gun itself, the medium, is the message. It alters sensibilities and perceptions of our society. The same is true for all other technologies as well.
Hindsight being 20/20, we are now able as a society to speculate on the ways our sense ratios have changed with the kind of technologies we have embraced over the last century. Photography, television, film, and computer graphics have increased our sense of "visuality" in our culture, to the point where we now believe that sight is the most privileged of all the senses. Many believe that it is the natural evolution of the human to become a more visual creature without considering the role that our new electric media may have played.
Technology has also changed people's relationships to each other as well as to their world. In industrialized nations, for example, courting rituals went through radical changes with the inventions of the telephone and the automobile. The former placed a new emphasis on the spoken word, while the latter allowed teenagers a taste of freedom from authority for a few blissful moments. The telephone's early role in romance can be looked at as the predecessor to phone sex and even cybersex. Both use forms of fantasy as their driver, and both are ultimately as artificial as the substitute of latex for skin. Likewise, it could be argued that the automobile was a key element that helped prepare the ground for the sexual revolution. In the 1950s, the freedom to drive away with one's girlfriend to a remote location for the purpose of sex contributed to a rebellion in the minds and lives of those teenagers who were brought up in what was otherwise a comparitively conservative society. Cars were also appealing in the image they projected: fast, naughty, slick, cool. Although we can continue to speculate how the car and the telephone changed the way people related to each other, at the very least we must acknowledge the role they played in the changing of people's perceptions about each other and their environment. This occurred regardless of the technology's intended function or ultimate use.
McLuhan also sought to make a distinction between what he called hot and cool media:
"A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition" High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A cartoon is "low definition" simply because very little visual information is provided. Speech is a cool medium of low definition simply because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation and cool media are high in participation, or completion by the audience."
To grasp this definition of hot and cool requires a slight shift in our usual presumptions of the terms. We would tend to think of video as a hot medium because of the enormous complexity and rate of images that come charging at us through networks like MuchMusic and MTV; furthermore, the term "cool" is most often applied to things that are laid-back, easy going. But television by McLuhan's terminology is still a cool medium because of its low level of visual information: individual pixels are large enough to be detected by the naked eye. This requires the viewer to mentally fill-in the visual blanks, and is therefore in a certain sense participating in the television event.
This participation factor in video viewing tends to contradict today's widely-held belief that watching television requires passive, not active, participation. In television, one is being acted upon, not with. Television advertisers depend on this notion to sell products, since the chance of persuading a consumer is greater when they are passively watching the images on the screen. Advertising is a form of persuasion, not education as ad executives profess, and the likelihood of succeeding in that persuasion is better with a passive audience than an active one, or as McLuhan himself puts it, "The product matters less as the audience participation increases". Perhaps McLuhan is talking about two different levels of participation. At any rate, the participation factor in television viewing is still very much an open question.
By the same notion, does the increasing trend towards interactivity in all media suggest a universal "cooling off"? The computer has restored the two-way relationship between agent and medium that many believe was taken away with hot medium of motion picture. Through the computer, this new drift in first-person participational media is making its way through virtually every facet of entertainment and business media:
Since participation was one of McLuhan's key factors in determining the coolness of a medium, we could speculate that the computer's new emphasis in interactivity have promoted a cooling off of other media that up until now have been hot. This makes sense when one considers that another of McLuhan's principles was that media are also hot and cold in relation to each other:
"The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born."
AND
"A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace."
In other words, as each cell in an organism somehow affects the condition of the whole, so does each medium affect the hotness or coolness of the other.
The Internet and our current use of CMC (computer-mediated-communication) is by definition a very cool medium. It is highly participational and, as it is mostly text-based, very low in visual definition. Again, this forces the user to mentally fill in the blanks, and fill in the blanks we do. "Cyberspace" could very well be spelled "psyberspace" since the psychological aspects of the relationships we make and sustain in it are highly complex and require a high degree of fantasy in our efforts to fill in the auditory and visual information that it does not currently provide. The sum total of these characteristics go towards the notion of an Internet culture.
Culture? How does a stream of wires and a group of remote technophiles locked to their desktops constitute a culture? Human beings have essentially three voices within themselves: the writing voice, the spoken voice, and the singing voice. Of course there are voices within voices, such as the voice of the inner child, the spirit guide and so on, but ultimately each voice will fall into one of these three categories.
The writing voice is the voice one hears inside their head as they engage in any text-based mode of communication. It is the voice of the letter-writer, the essay-writer, and of the poet. This voice tends to be more formal and structural than either of the other two voices. This structure is determined in part by the mode of communication. McLuhan had this to say:
"Writing tends to be a kind of separate or specialist action in which there is little opportunity or call for reaction. The literate man or society develops the tremendous power of acting in any manner with considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would experience."
In other words, the simple act of writing in a linear pattern on a page facilitates a particular way of thinking which is inherently reflected in what is written. As I write this, I watch a cursor on a computer screen move in a straight line from one end of the screen to another. This invites my thoughts to organize themselves in a similar fashion, hence my thoughts are organized and logical. This is of course not to imply that it need be completely devoid of emotion. Writing love letters can express a great deal of feeling that may not be best suited for casual verbal conversation. Poetry, although still a text-based mode of communication, does not adhere to this logical pattern either, but there is still an inherent structure; indeed, the choice to completely abandon structure is a form of structure in itself. In many ways poetry is actually closer to the speaking voice anyway, since most people feel that poetry is meant to be spoken aloud and not simply read. Point being that most text-based modes of communication provide a basis for the formal writing voice.
The spoken voice, on the other hand, is usually closer to a stream-of-consciousness form of communication than the writing voice. It is less ordered than the writing voice, and therefore breaks down much of that formality. It is the more conversational mode of communication, demanding participation, and therefore interaction.
Think of a letter you recently wrote to a close friend, and what you said in that letter. Now picture yourself speaking the exact contents of that letter while your friend stands in front of you, listening to your words as if it were a typical conversation. Doesn't the content of what you are saying seem grossly out of place for the mode of communication? This is not to imply that one mode of communication is better than another, only to show that different modes require different voices, and to point out the different voices each one of us has.
In cyberspace, although the mode of communication is still text-based, the voice used is much closer to the spoken voice than the writing voice. Why is this? One answer could be that things like email, live chats, and MUDs demand interaction. The high level of participation, making it a cool medium, calls for the speaking voice which is better suited to deal with this level of interaction. When one writes things and sends it off via email, chances are they heard the speaking-voice in their head before proceeding to type it on their keyboard. This hybrid of voices allows for the formality of written communication to be broken down, and the simulation of verbal conversations in cyberspace emerges.
There is another unique aspect to engaging in CMC. When one communicates via cyberspace, all factors are stripped away from the communicating process, save the written word. In getting to know a person only by their written word, what one does not know becomes an important factor in the building of the relationship. Colour, religion, sexual orientation, physical disabilities all disappear. For a brief moment, our natural human prejudices are blinded, and the only thing upon which to build the relationship is the creativity of the mind itself. The emotional aspects of these relationships (the "psyber" in psyberspace) are intimate yet distant; that is, we are simultaneously brought close together and yet kept considerably far apart. This distance allows us to reach out and take risks more easily than we normally would in the real world.
Perhaps by losing our bodies we can regain some of the intimacy that human relationships lost in the wake of mass-media entertainment in which people are put into categories (antagonist, protagonist, victim, etc.), and then reinforced as stereotypes (disabled people, etc.).
The combination of these two factors provides a basis for culture. A Ph.D. thesis at the University of Victoria in B.C. suggested that people in CMC learn from each other by telling their stories: I tell you my story, you tell me yours, and together we learn [Dr. Barry Shell, personal conversation.] Story telling is at the root of oral cultures and is the basis for theatre, literature, art, dance, and music. In this sense, "virtual community" is the perfect phrase to describe the activity in CMC: communities are bound together by the relationships of people who share with each other. When this occurs, a culture has formed.
If CMC continues to become a quickly-growing form of communication, it may also force people to become more literate. They will no longer be able to get by simply on speaking ability and will have to develop their own writing skills as well. Many have received email from people who seemed very intelligent, but their writing did not do their thoughts justice. It is in CMC that the true ambiguities of language emerge, how we see that non-verbal cues assist us, and how essential it is to organize our thoughts efficiently enough that our writing minimizes this ambiguity. And yet all of this is done through the conversational mode. Of course the counter-point to this is that statistically, people who currently use CMC are between the ages of sixteen to thirty-five, middle-class, and educated; people, in other words, whose literacy skills are supposedly already developed. But it will be interesting to see how this changes with the growth of the medium.
This leads us into McLuhan's other theory about language and the detribalization of man. He believed that the spoken word allowed early man to express his own ideas, and that the written word allowed him to claim permanent ownership of those ideas. This separated the man from the rest of society, and he became an "individual". The alphabet also promoted a new emphasis of the visual over the auditory, since the symbols (letters) on a page are only mentally translated into sounds which the brain then interprets into meaning. Says McLuhan:
"This fact has nothing to do with the content of the alphabetized words; it is the result of the sudden breach between the auditory and the visual experience of man. Only the phonetic alphabet makes such a sharp division in experience, giving to its user an eye for an ear, and freeing him from the tribal trance of resonating word magic and the web of kinship."
In other words, the nature of alphabetic language created a society of individuals. It is also fundamentally different from Asian languages which use pictoral symbols as the basic tenet of communication. According to McLuhan, this has allowed them to retain a rich depth of the perception of experience, partly due to its non-linearity [McLuhan, 87]. This is quite true, but it also has economic implications upon which he did not touch. In using pictoral displays in their everyday language, Asian people make use of both sides of their brain: the left, logical, literal side; and the right, non-linear aesthetic side. Literate man, by comparison, uses only his left-brain when engaging in alphabetic language. Since language can facilitate the shaping of thought, it can be argued that Asian cultures have an inherent advantage over literate culture in the way they interact with their world, since they do not separate the logical from the aesthetic. But this also entails an inherent barrier to the global village concept: because of the visual complexity of the language, Asian language can never be accommodated by a standard computer-based translation protocol like ASCII. Although computer technology currently allows the display of Chinese characters on a CRT screen via a keyboard-like device, the likelihood of these characters being converted into an ASCII system is next to impossible, since the complexity of the language is far and above anything based on the alphabet. Electronic communication between the two cultures, therefore, can only exist in three modes: fax (which converts the document to a graphics file), email via manual translation, and telephone/videophone.
Virtual reality, in its attempt to reunify the senses, touches on McLuhan's idea that the development of new electronic media can actually promote a retribalization of man. The separation of the different senses and the rise of the individual go hand-in-hand. As each sense becomes increasingly polarized from the others via literacy, a society develops into nothing more than a large group of individuals. VR is a medium which operates in the sensual realm and which need not include text in its interface. McLuhan predicted this possible reunification when he said:
"This image of a unified ratio among the senses was long held to be the mark of our RATIOnality, and may in the computer age easily become so again. For it is now possible to program ratios among the senses that approach the condition of consciousness. Yet such a condition would necessarily be an extension of our own consciousness as much as wheel is an extension of feet in rotation."
The substitution of visual information for textual, literal information is an intrinsic characteristic of any retribalizing that may occur, since in McLuhanesque, the literal language separates the senses. The reconvergence of the senses is the first step to the reconvergence of the tribe, society. In this respect, the artist is the best qualified person to facilitate this reunification process, since the artist is an expert in sensual communication. McLuhan himself was a strong proponent for the artist's role in society:
"In the past century it has come to be generally acknowledged that, in the words of Wyndham Lewis, 'The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the present.' Knowledge of this simple fact is now needed for human survival."
The master hath spoken.
by Mark J. Jones