The Medium of Morality

So, some follow-up on my last post on McLuhan and Morality, a question was raised about whether we can consider morality to be a medium.  If you know me at all, you'd know that my answer to that question is yes.  From my point of view, the concept of medium is a general one, much like the concept of system.  You might say that the medium is the system, in the sense that the terms really refer to the same underlying phenomena, and just provide slightly different perspectives and points of emphasis.  But this is getting very abstract, I know.

So, yes, morality is a medium.  And that being the case, what then is the message of the medium of morality?  That is, what is the message of morality as a medium?  Or, what is the message of the morality-medium?

It's not the content, which would be specific moral and ethical systems embraced and employed by various groups of people. Any system is going to be subject to human fallibility.  

Given the near infinite specific possibilities that might exist in reality, a system of morality has to be the product of abstracting from those infinite possibilities, to put it in Korzybski's terms.  A system of morality has to involve generalizing across specifics, and in doing so, invariably simplifying the situation.  Because of the non-identity between moral principle and actual event, some form of interpretation and evaluation must be made, some form of judgment.  And since that interpretation, evaluation, judgment comes from human beings, mistakes will be made, fallibility will be a factor.  

Even if the moral system is the product of divine will, once it is transferred to human hands, error comes into play. And even if there is a divine judge involved, human beings are not privy to whatever evaluations might be made from on high.

So, a particular moral system would involve messages on the content level, whereas the medium is the metamessage, that is, the medium involves messages on the level of relationships.  On that meta level, we can consider the message of morality in general, across various specific systems, and beyond their specifics.  

So what is the metamessage of morality?  It's that there ought to be limits on human behavior, that there are actions that we ought not to take, that we should not give in to every impulse and drive, but take control of our own behavior.  In this sense, morality is about consciousness-raising, about being aware of how we act, about self-control and self-mastery.  From certain points of view, it's about actualizing our potential to be truly human.  And in terms of relationship, that involves entering into what Martin Buber called I-You relationships.

The metamessage of morality is also about rules, it's a rules-governed approach to human behavior.  You might say it's about supplying a structure for deliberate action, a grammar for human life.  It makes sense that human beings, having a relatively unique capacity for symbolic communication and language, and therefore for grammar, also have morality where other forms of life are amoral.  And I think Freud would come into play here as well, with something about civilization and its dis-contents, which suggests that morality, rather than being only content, is in fact the medium of civilization.  (This also shows that Freud was a media ecologist, after all.)

Some years ago this all occurred to me in a more specific context.  It was during a Sabbath service at Congregation Adas Emuno, where the Torah reading had to do with the Kosher laws, and there was a discussion of what the kosher laws mean to us as Reform Jews living in the modern world.  Most of us don't adhere to them, seeing them as having made sense in the past for reasons of health and sanitation, but no longer necessary, although we may still have a sense of them as a cultural or aesthetic preference (for example, I have no problem eating a cheeseburger, but the thought of doing so with a glass of milk I find gross, and I have no problem with bacon, but tend not to order ham or pork, or shellfish, and we never eat that stuff at home).  Some Reform Jews reinterpret the Kosher laws in a contemporary way to justify or encourage a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle.

But all of that is on the content level, and what occurred to me at the time was that the metamessage of the kosher laws is to be mindful of what you eat, think about what you're putting into your body, that you can't just eat anything you desire or anything that's available.  Again, it's the idea of limits, that you can't just do whatever you want.  And it's the idea of rules, of a grammar that gives meaning to the things in our world, the events that occur, and the actions that we take.  And it's certainly about the idea of clean vs. unclean, order vs. chaos, and given these binary oppositions, Bob Blechman would certainly want me to mention Claude Lévi-Strauss who, as a media ecologist, wrote about the underlying structure and grammar of cultural expression, morality being, in some sense, one type of cultural expression.

Understanding morality as a medium suggests, to me, that there is some aspect of morality that can be considered universal, in some sense.  By universal, I don't mean absolute, because anything pushed to its extreme reverses into its opposite, too much love is suffocating or oppressive, too much life can be torture (an idea explored in the new "Miracle Day" Torchwood series on Starz). Morality is relative, but relativity is not itself relative, something that many non-scientists misunderstand about Einstein's theories.  Relationship is the key to universal morality.

Universal doesn't mean universally accepted either, or else there'd be no need to ever talk about morality.  I think we can say that some actions are immoral, and that some persons, by reason of their actions, are themselves immoral.  And some cultures, some societies, are as well, such as Nazi Germany, and the Aztecs with their widespread practice of human sacrifice.  You might say I'm being romantic or naive, but I think something like the ethical principle from medicine, primum non nocere, first, do no harm, is universal, albeit in relative terms.

My personal bias is with the Pirkei Avot, but I would offer the following from my own tradition:

Micah:  "He has told you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you?  Only to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."

Hillel:  "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn."

These statements originate from a specific culture and belief-system, with reference to monotheism and the Torah as a divine covenant between God and the Jewish people, but they speak to some universal moral principles, justice, mercy, humility, and do no harm.  And learning!

I do think that in understanding morality as a medium, the medium of morality helps us to understand the morality of morality.

McLuhan and Morality

In a discussion on the ethics and morality of new media, the subject of McLuhan's well known opposition to making moral judgments came up, and I thought I'd adapt my comments for a blog post.  I think this is one of McLuhan's ideas that needs to be taken with a grain of salt, and more importantly needs to be contextualized, rather than made into an extreme of eschewing all judgment.

On a superficial level, McLuhan's stance against moral judgment appears to be in opposition to other media ecologists, notably Neil Postman, certainly Jacques Ellul, also Lewis Mumford, and even Harold Innis.  But I think that McLuhan was not ruling out the possibility of evaluating media and technology, and indeed saw such evaluation as something that was sorely needed, that we have to learn how to contemplate the consequences of our innovations in order to take control back from our technologies, or else what could this quote of his mean?: "there is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening" (from The Medium is the Massage, 1967, p. 25).  

What McLuhan was protesting against was the uncritical rejection and condemnation of media and technology, and the corresponding uncritical acceptance and celebration of media and technology, both the moral indignation of the technological idiot and the narcissus narcosis of the gadget lover, to use McLuhan's words.  His point, I believe, was that we need to withhold judgment until we have made an adequate assessment of the effects of innovations, otherwise our prejudgment would influence, bias, and cloud that assessment.  

And it may be that McLuhan didn't feel that media ecology had progressed far enough back in 60s and 70s to provide a good enough understanding to draw any conclusions, but it certainly has come a long way since then.  I think Postman, Ellul, Mumford, and Innis would all agree that understanding must precede evaluation, even if they felt that they had achieved sufficient understanding to come to certain conclusions.


I also think that McLuhan was looking for scientific validation, even while resisting having his work judged by scientific criteria (for example by objecting to being called a theorist).  Science was the main source of intellectual legitimacy in his day, I believe that McLuhan, Ong, and Postman all had a healthy respect for scientific fact while distancing themselves from scientistic language and perspectives, and McLuhan was claiming a bit of that legitimacy in maintaining his objectivity in regard to the phenomena he was studying (scientists don't make moral judgments about subatomic particles or chemical formulas or biological functions, although scientists do have ethical standards and values concerning knowledge, truthfulness, etc.). 


A further function of McLuhan's position is that it created ambiguity, something he would appreciate as a literary scholar.  It made him a cool medium, and let others fill in the gaps.  By not taking a stand, it became possible for both critics and boosters of media and technology to claim him as their own.


In an essay I wrote for an upcoming issue of Educational Technology magazine on the neutrality of technology (my position being that technology is not and cannot be neutral), I explained that while the question of whether a given technology is good or bad may be problematic, it can be reframed as, can a technology be evaluated within and according to the criteria of a given moral or ethical system?, and the answer to that question is, of course it can!  Within some ethical systems, all violence is bad, so weapons can be evaluated as bad, for example, swords and spears are bad, plowshares and pruning hooks good.  Firearms can be evaluated as bad, and as for nuclear weapons?  Fuhgeddaboudit!  

And apart from morality and ethics, we can also engage in more utilitarian forms of evaluation, and assess whether a technology is functional or dysfunctional for individuals, a given society, humanity, or the biosphere and planet.


To arrive at such conclusions, we do have to weigh the services and disservices, to use McLuhan's terms, that is, the costs and benefits, the positive and the negative consequences.  And that may be a difficult task.  It may be impossible to do so definitively, because there will always be unintended consequences that are also unanticipated, and there are indirect effects, which lead to other indirect effects, which lead to others, etc. But even if we cannot be entirely certain of the outcome of introducing an innovation, we still can retain human agency and exercise judgment, and decide whether we ought or ought not to use the new medium or technology. (That is if we hold aside Ellul's arguments about the technological society.)


On the specific question of teaching about morality and media, I think introducing a course in ethics of new media is commendable, and some consideration of the ethical dimensions of any field or subject ought to be a curricular requirement.  That is, if our educational objectives still have some room left for the goal of producing responsible citizens and well-rounded human persons.

Murdoch on the Orient Express

So, how many of you are filled with glee over Rupert Murdoch's recent troubles?  The Australian-born American citizen--Citizen Murdoch?--is still a mighty media mogul, but he certainly has been taken down a few pegs this year, and his troubles may only be beginning.  

Of course, as a billionaire, he's not likely to experience much in the way of personal suffering, or discomfort.  And as an octogenarian, his days as one of the most powerful individuals in the world, and specifically as the Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, second only to Disney as the world's largest media conglomerate, were numbered anyway.


If you haven't been following the story, Wikipedia can help you out with a general entry on the News Corporation scandal, and a specific one on the News International phone hacking scandal.  I also recommend my friend Marvin Kitman's columns on the Investor Uprising website, five so far on the scandals and Murdoch's questionable entry into the American media landscape.


And the way I see it is, this is a story that broadcast journalists, with the exception of those owned by News Corporation, will not let go, or go easy on.  Simply put, I think most broadcast journalists see Murdoch as single-handedly responsible for lowering the level of discourse on television news, of ruining the ideal of objectivity in reporting, through the "fair and balanced" programming of Fox News.  I can only imagine the anger and resentment that exists in the industry towards the man and the company that so degraded the institution of journalism.


And let's be clear about it, the claim to maintaining objectivity in news has long been subject to criticism as, at best, an impossible ideal, at worst a smokescreen that mystifies the ideologies embedded in the news.  But Murdoch has demonstrated, to the critics, that there is a big difference between well-intentioned, honorable, professional attempts to withhold personal opinions and remain impartial, and deliberate attempts to set the agenda and manipulate public opinion.  

If news always was a form of propaganda in some ways (following Jacques Ellul--see my previous post, Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, and the Technological Society), we can certainly say that some forms are better than others (even Ellul would allow that there is a great deal of difference between western technological societies based on liberal democracy, and those associated with totalitarian governments), and the News Corporation has made broadcast journalism seem more propagandistic than ever before.


The natural response to such a development on the part of the audience is a cynical one.  So, once upon a time Walter Cronkite was the most trusted person in America, a television news anchor who was the epitome of journalistic professionalism.  Now, we put our trust in comedians such as Jon Stewart, and Stewart has quite properly expressed his qualms about that state of affairs.  It is the inevitable result of what Neil Postman pointed to in Amusing Ourselves to Death (as noted in my previous post, Aliteracy Anxiety).  When news becomes a joke, comedians become our most respected journalists.


So, no, I don't think the broadcasters working in the news divisions of CBS, NBC, and ABC, and the cable news professionals at  CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and the rest, are going to want to let this one alone.  At least not as long as their professional ethics suggest that there is something to report on.  No, they're going to want to milk this one for all that it's worth.


As for the title of this blog post, well, just in case you don't get the pun I'm alluding to, here you go:

Murder on the Orient Express really is an excellent Hollywood motion picture, I recommend it if you haven't seen it, and I won't give away the ending, but the story is based on the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and the murder in question is the murder of a murderer.  So now, perhaps, we may witness the media's Murdoching of Murdoch, but there is no mystery involved, only the desire to run the man out of town, and back east, on a (rant and a) rail.

Aliteracy Anxiety

So first of all kudos to my friend and former graduate student Mike Plugh for retrieving and uploading a 15 minute segment from the PBS program Currents featuring an interview with Neil Postman, on the topic of Literacy Lost.  The program begins with a reference to the concept of aliteracy, a term that I believe was coined by the former Librarian of Congress and media ecologist, Daniel J. Boorstin, in a 1984 US Government Report entitled Books in Our Future (which I first learned about from Postman).  The concern, as Boorstin presented it, was not so much that people are unable to read, but that people were choosing not read, and especially not to read books.  That's the difference between illiteracy and aliteracy.  Aliterates know how to read, but just don't.

Part of the problem is that there are two many alternatives.  When I was growing up, reading wasn't only a way to learn, and not just a way to amuse ourselves--it was a way to create some personal space, shut out our parents and anyone else we didn't want to pay attention to, and enter into our own private world of imagination and fantasy.  A book gave us a space of our own.  Now, though, kids can get the same effect from TVs that offer round the clock entertainment geared toward them, and from videogame systems, iPods and many other portable devices, etc.  So, why read a book?

Aliteracy may be the trend of the future.  Reading limited to short bursts.  Street signs.  Restaurant menus.  Headlines.  Status updates and tweets.  Short paragraphs online.  And reading that is limited to the functional, reading for directions, for instructions, for getting tasks done.  As opposed to reading for pleasure.  And as opposed to reading as a cultural activity.

Or maybe aliteracy is the intermediate stage between our former situation of near universal literacy, and our eventual ending as a largely illiterate society?

Well, take a look at the video, and think about whether things have gotten better since the 80s, with the introduction of many forms of electronic text, or whether that was just a temporary countercurrent, whether we are still slouching into an aliterate, and possibly illiterate future.

You might want to take a look at Mike Plugh's discussion of the video over on his blog, in the post entitled, Neil Postman – ‘The TV Guy’. Let me give you a little taste of what he has to say right here, taking a quote on the topic of Sesame Street.

I grew up on Sesame Street (Elmo was my high school graduation speaker in 1989 via Kevin Clash) and remember many of the language lessons and phonics very fondly. I suppose I remember them for the same reason that Jocko Henderson’s students remember his phonics rap and Joan Ganz Cooney’s niece was singing advertising jingles. They’re short, musical, and entertaining. It’s not about learning. It’s about the way we learn, the quality of the learning process, and our relationship to information, so while I enjoyed Sesame Street growing up and get a little twinge when someone criticizes it, that doesn’t make the critique any less valid.

Interestingly, for most of the last decade, Sesame Street has been using a different format, one much less television-oriented, one intended to be similar in structure to the schedules used at day care centers, with which so many children are familiar these days, at least according to my friend Rosemarie Truglio, Vice President of Education and Research for Sesame Workshop.  (On a side note, Rosemarie earned her doctorate through the same program and under the same mentor as Postman, at Teachers College of Columbia University,  with Louis Forsdale, one of Marshall McLuhan's earliest and most influential supporters in the academic world.  Of course, Rosemarie's position on Sesame Street diverges significantly from Postman's.)

And it was about a decade and a half ago, maybe longer, that I was teaching a graduate class at Fordham University, and Amusing Ourselves to Death was one of the books that we read (I do ask my students to read entire books), and I had Postman talk to the class and answer their questions (Neil was always very generous with his time, I should add).  My son was a preschooler then, so I played devil's advocate and mentioned how he was watching Sesame Street and that it was helping him to learn the alphabet, and wasn't that a good thing?  Postman's response was, Well, Lance, you know, the alphabet only has 26 letters, and children were able to memorize them fairly easily for many years before television arrived on the scene...  

And I forget the rest, but with that short remark he cut through all of the hype and exaggerated claims relating to the educational value of such programming.  And he did it with a wit and a charm that brings a smile to my face to this day.  It was quite memorable, and speaking of memorable, I would not discount the mnemonic value of the rap format, that's a technique that goes back to antiquity, and prehistory.  Even when it comes to literacy, we start by memorizing the alphabet song, relying on rhythm, melody, and rhyme.

Of course, memory works best in face-to-face situations.  That's where a book like Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy comes in, as Mike Plugh notes.  It reminds us of the foundation of all of our media environments.  And sure, there are a few jingles and such that get stuck in our memories after we hear them hundreds of times on TV.  But how many popular songs and the like do we think we know, and then when it comes down to it, we really only know some of the lyrics, and then it's all da da da dum da da dum dum...?  Postman was quite right in arguing in Amusing Ourselves to Death that television makes us feel like we know things, or think we know things, but then are unable to summon up anything specific, hence the saying, I know of it.  Ong says, "you know what you can recall," and truer words have never been spoken (students only realize this at exam time, though).  If you can't summon it up from memory, then in what sense to you know it?

What is knowledge, anyway?  Maybe you don't need books to have knowledge, preserve knowledge, transmit knowledge.  Maybe.  But without them, you don't have much of what could be called knowledge in the first place.  And if you have the books, but no one reads them, then you have knowledge without knowers, and that's hardly different from not having the knowledge in the first place, or having it and having lost or forgotten it.  That's good enough reason for all of that anxiety over aliteracy, after all.

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, and the Technological Society

Here's a bit more fall-out from the discussion that went on over the Media Ecology Association listserv.  I've extracted my comments from the various exchanges that went on, and let them stand alone here.

It began with a discussion of Jacques Ellul.  I made the point that, as a Protestant theologian, Ellul was not opposed to literacy or print media.  He saw scripture as liberating, but also noted that literacy was an important part of 20th century modernization campaigns, and was needed in order to be able to deliver propaganda to the masses.  As a good media ecologist, he was able to see the benefits as well as the costs of print technology.

Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) was no fool!

Ellul argued that literacy and education make an individual vulnerable to propaganda, but that doesn't amount to a criticism of print as a medium, or of literacy.  He stresses this point because literate, well-educated people tend to think they're immune to propaganda, that it only affects the "ignorant" masses, and he wants us literate elites to know that the reverse is true.  Ellul argues that for propaganda to work, the messages have to reach their target, and in the modern world that largely requires literacy.  If you add Ong into the mix, then it follows that the fact that literacy fosters more abstract modes of thought than orality makes literates much more easily propagandized than nonliterates, and no doubt this is what McLuhan had in mind when he talked about literate vulnerability to propaganda (and this doesn't take into account rhetoric as an interface by which literates influence nonliterates, and the amplified possibilities that broadcasting present). 

But Ellul doesn't get into any of that.  For Ellul, it's all about "la technique", the supremacy of efficiency at the heart of the technological society, and how every institution is a part of it, how education and the arts function as sociological propaganda, and how the "current affairs man," the supposedly well-informed news junkie is the most propagandized individual of all.  For Ellul, it's modern communication and information technologies that are the key to propaganda, and as the digerati have succeeded the literati, it's the folks who are online all the time, keeping up with blogs and tweets and the like, who are the most open to propaganda.

Ellul argues that propaganda in a technological society uses all of the means of communication available in a totalizing and concerted fashion.  The only way to avoid being exposed to propaganda is to cut yourself off from the outside world.  Otherwise, access to information is openness to propaganda.  

Literacy and print may be necessary prerequisites for modern propaganda, but as Neil Postman points out in Technopoly, it's industrialism and Taylorism that are directly linked to the technological society.  Unlike Mumford, Ellul was not writing about the history of technology, he was critiquing contemporary society, and his focus was not on specific technologies, but on "la technique," the technological imperative, which is about efficiency over all else.  He identified this as a contemporary phenomenon.   

Again, Postman brought it down in levels of abstraction by referring to it as technopoly, the point at which we have surrendered culture entirely to technopoly.  This was preceded by a period of relative balance between technology and other cultural institutions, a period that Neil identified by the term technocracy.  And that period coincides with the age of typography.  To the extent that Ellul also made reference to historical change, he pointed to an earlier era in which religion held sway, and that of course was made possible by literacy.

Postman, in Technopoly, was presenting an Ellulian perspective.  But Mumford himself became more Ellulian in his postwar writings, especially in The Myth of the Machine.   I believe they all recognized that literacy and typography are necessary prerequisites for modern propaganda.  But necessary prerequisites are not the same as inherent characteristics.  Literacy and print are necessary prerequisites for modern science.  It doesn't follow that they are inherently scientific.  And since modern science is based on honest and open communication and publication, this would lead us into contradiction if these were inherent characteristics and propaganda's manipulative qualities were also inherent characteristics of print media.  But there is no contradiction when you understand that they make both deceptive propaganda and honest and open scientific exchange possible.

And again, in regard to religion, Ellul said that religious institutions in a technological society are turned into vehicles for propaganda, along with all other cultural institutions.  It's the equivalent to Gramsci's hegemony, except that there is no ideology involved, no class stratification or power differential, just the technical imperative given free reign.  And this is in contrast to an earlier era when all cultural institutions were subordinate to religion.  And as a theologian, Ellul also saw contemporary religious institutions, in the form of local congregations, as the main site of resistance to "la technique".  As a counterenvironment where we might try to find a way to hold on to or reclaim our humanity in a technological age.

At this point, I wrapped up my end of the argument, and concluded with the following observation:

In an article I wrote some time ago entitled "Post(modern)man" which is included in my recent book, On the Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on General Semantics and Media Ecology, I discussed the fact that in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman wrote about how the image culture associated with television has supplanted the language-centered culture of the typographic era, how Postman was not so much concerned with the dichotomy between orality and literacy than he was with how the image was upsetting the balance between the two that had been achieved in the print era, leading to what Ellul referred to as the humiliation of the word.  

In a somewhat different vein, however, in Technopoly, Postman wrote about how technology had taken over the entirety of culture as we moved from technocracy to technopoly. And in "Post(modern)man" I tried to reconcile the two critiques by noting that the technological imperative, based on efficiency and manifesting in 19th century Taylorism, amounted to a triumph of quantitative analysis, a victory of numbers. What this means is that the postmodern condition is one in which the word, in both its oral and literate forms, is under assault from two different directions, two extremes, the hyperreality of the image, and the hyperrationalism of the number. And I characterized Postman as a defender of the word (which became the title of the essay I wrote shortly after Neil passed away, which is also included in On the Binding Biases of Time). 

Neil Postman (1931-2003) was the most, man!

Understanding Postman in this way also helps us to reconcile Ellul's argument in books such as The Technological Society, Propaganda, and The Humiliation of the Word.

Postman's defense of the word led him to recommend that we build a bridge to the 18th century, that is, to the Enlightenment. And what's significant about the Enlightenment is not only that it represent the full flowering of typographic culture, but also that it does not represent the descent into the inhumanity of industrialism. The Enlightenment precedes the Industrial Revolution, gives rise to it yes, you might say it's a necessary prerequisite, but this amounts to the kind of reversal or flip that McLuhan pointed to in his laws of media, the light of learning blotted out by the dark haze coming out of smokestacks, the cry for liberty drowned out by the noise of machines in factories, and the word obscured by figures in all their varieties. 

Neil Postman wasn't saying we should return to the 18th century, but that we should look back to it as the most recent time in our history when our media environment wasn't so terribly out of balance. and maybe this is also important as we consider the possibility that our new media might restore a measure of balance to our culture. 

Radio Dazed

 So, I just want to add here, and for my own personal records, that on McLuhan Day, which was last week on July 21st, McLuhan's birthday, I did a series of short radio interviews for 7 local Canadian radio stations, all part of the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  The interviews were done by telephone, occurring between 6:00 and 9:00 AM.   I'm not a morning person, but I got up at 5:30 AM to get enough coffee into me to be coherent at 6. 

The local stations were Quebec City, Sudbury (Ontario), Thunder Bay  (Ontario), Yellowknife (Northwest Territories), Ontario (southern parts, not Toronto), Victoria (British Columbia), and Vancouver (British Columbia).  Some of the interviews were live, some taped, most if not all of them were not archived as podcasts, or rather part of podcasts.  Some may have been, I don't know, but hey, that was never even an option back in the good old days of broadcasting.

It was a strange experience, something of a rapid-fire succession, each asking pretty much the same questions, asking me to explain what "the medium is the message" means, what the "global village" is, and a couple of them asked about McLuhan's conservatism.  It was a funny experience, though, answering the same questions seven times over in short order, although it did give me an opportunity to refine my answers.

So, I can't provide you with a recording or transcript of what I said, but I did tweet my morning activities, so I'll share them with you here, although I warn you that they're a bit prosaic:

 

LanceStrate Lance Strate

getting ready to do the first in a series of 7 short interviews for Canada's CBC radio stations on the Marshall McLuhan centenary

 

LanceStrate Lance Strate

first CBC interview for Quebec City taped. Talked about the meaning of "the medium is the message," and the "global village"

LanceStrate Lance Strate

Two more CBC interviews done in quick succession, for Sudbury & Thunder Bay, & a quick blog post on The McLuhan Century bit.ly/ncoGS7

In between the interviews, there was time to do a blog post, check email, and tweet about someone else's interview:

LanceStrate Lance Strate

and a great article on McLuhan by Joseph Duggan in the American Spectator spectator.org/archives/2011/… Way to go, Joe!

And my friend Octavio Islas's tweet showed up in my Twitter stream:

octavioislas Octavio Islas

by LanceStrate

Todo interesado en #McLuhan hoy debe seguir a @LanceStrate ex presidente de la Media Ecology Association.

 

Thanks for the shout-out, Octavio, which made the morning an affair for both sides of the border, and consequently, I wound up with a whole bunch of new Twitter followers from Mexico.  Anyway, to continue:

LanceStrate Lance Strate

another CBC interview on McLuhan taped, this one for Yellowknife, & the first one to ask about how his conservative views affected his work

 

LanceStrate Lance Strate

just taped another quick interview on McLuhan for CBC's Ontario morning show. 5 down, 2 to go!

 

LanceStrate Lance Strate

Just taped the CBC McLuhan interview for Victoria, which will air around 6:50 AM, for my friends out in BC. Got one more left for Vancouver

 

LanceStrate Lance Strate

about to do a live interview with CBC in Vancouver

 

LanceStrate Lance Strate

and that concludes my McLuhan morning with the CBC. Kind of fitting to be spending it *on* the media, after all...

 

 

But before I go, while I'm still on the subject of McLuhan, and recently mentioned south of the border, here's another point of contact, much further south, brought to my attention by an email from Laura Bertone.  It seems that I was quoted the week before in a rather substantial article  on McLuhan in Argentina's leading newspaper, La Nacion.  I had no idea!  

 

The article showed a very sophisticated understanding of McLuhan's media ecology for a newspaper piece, although it did get things a little mixed up, correctly stating that I have said that Lewis Mumford was a major influence on McLuhan, incorrect in saying that Mumford influenced McLuhan's ideas about sense perception--it was McLuhan's ideas about electricity and electric technology bringing back an organic quality, being decentralizing in nature, and defining a whole new era of human history.

Funny thing is, I think the article's source for what I said was a yet-to-be published essay on McLuhan and new media that I wrote for a special issue on Marshall McLuhan for a major Latin American communication journal, Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias de La Comunicación.  My guess is the author got a copy of the draft, or galleys, but I can't say for sure, and anyway, hey, no problemo!

If you're interested in reading the Spanish language article in La Nacion, here's the link:  Queríamos (y odiábamos) tanto a McLuhan...

 

And that about does it, amigos and amigas, from the great white north to the southern tip of the Americas, and across the pond to that jolly old, it's been quite the McLuhan Day, Week, and Year!

 

 

Standing on Guardian for McLuhan

So, in this centenary year of McLuhan's birth, the Guardian, arguably the leading newspaper in the United Kingdom (and one that is decidedly non-muddied or muddled by Murdoch), ran some material on our favorite media guru with which I, your humble servant, had some involvement.

It began with a podcast, one put together by Benjamen Walker, who also has a radio show over on WFMU, an independent, free form station in Jersey City, New Jersey.  The podcast is part of a "Big Ideas" series, and is presented on the Guardian website as "The Big Ideas podcast: The medium is the message" followed by, "In the first of a series of philosophy podcasts, Benjamen Walker and guests discuss the communication theorist Marshall McLuhan and his most famous line," and if you can't wait to get over there and listen to it, just click here, but do come back after, and if you can wait til later, even better.

So, over on the podcast's web page, which went up last week just before McLuhan's actual birthday, the write-up goes on to say

The writing of the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday this Thursday, has entered popular jargon like that of few other modern intellectuals. Is there another line that has been quoted – and misquoted – as enthusiastically as 'the medium is the message'? McLuhan, of course, was perfectly aware of his status as the thinker du jour of the media age, the man everyone liked to quote over dinner but hadn't bothered to read – for proof, just watch Annie Hall.


But what does "the medium is the message" really mean? In the first episode of our new The Big Ideas series, Benjamen Walker gets to the bottom of the slogan with the help of Canadian novelist and McLuhan-biographer Douglas Coupland, academic Lance Strate, Marshal's son Eric McLuhan, record producer John Simon, and the Guardian's media correspondent Jemima Kiss.

 So hey, I find myself in good company here, how about that?  If you listen to podcast, which I think Benjamen Walker did a really great job on, very impressive Ben, but what I was saying was that if you listen to the podcast, you won't hear me you get towards the end, about the last third.  But hey, I get some good play and good words in, and there's some nice discussion about McLuhan's time at Fordham University worked into the mix.  Oh, and by the way, if you click on my name in the quote up above, I left the links in, it'll take you right back to this blog.  How about that?  Blog Time Passing is linked to on the UK Guardian website!  My, how we have come up in the world!

The write-up ends with the following

Once you've finished listening to the podcast, you might want to re-read the opening of McLuhan classic essay:

The medium, or process of our time – electric technology – is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing – you, your family, your neighbourhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to "the others." And they're changing dramatically.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways. The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media.

The older training of observation has become quite irrelevant in this new time, because it is based on psychological responses and concepts conditioned by the former technology – mechanization.

Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools – with yesterday's concepts.

Youth instinctively understands the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth. This is the reason for the great alienation between generations. Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new environments created by electric informational media.

Marshall McLuhan, 'The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects' (1967). Reproduced with permission by Penguin Books

Over the course of the next week, we will follow up this podcast with a series of blogposts. Please tell us in the thread below what aspect of McLuhan's theory you would like us to explore, and who else you would like to hear from on the subject.

So, this was followed by a blog post by Douglas Coupland entitled, "Why McLuhan's chilling vision still matters today," and if you want to read it, just click here.  I won't bother to go into it, except to say that because he got into the contemporary media environment of blogs and podcasts and Google and Facebook and Twitter, I was asked not to bring that up in the post they had me write for the Guardian website, and consequently we went back and forth through several revisions, with added editorial alterations, before it was posted yesterday.  My preference was to discuss the new media, but instead they asked that I address McLuhan in the context of his times,  and out of that came the emphasis on his conservatism.  It wasn't the emphasis I would have chosen, but if you want to see the article on the Guardian website, click here.  Or read ahead.

The Big Ideas post begins with the headline:  "Marshall McLuhan's message was imbued with conservatism," followed by, "Although an icon of the counterculture movement, the man who coined 'the medium is the message' was no pill-popping hipster," neither of which were my choice, I hasten to add, nor my words exactly.  I wouldn't say his message was imbued with conservatism exactly, and I wouldn't use the phrase "pill-popping hipster," not that I'm opposed to what's being said here.

Anyway, what follows is my byline and photo, which you can see over on the left, and they actually gave me my own page of sorts, if you click on my name over on the post's page, it takes you there, or to see it direct, click here.  That was very nice of them, after all, and what they say about me is, "Lance Strate is professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University in New York City. He is also an author and co-editor of The Legacy of McLuhan."  Anyway, this is followed by a very nice picture of McLuhan, one I don't recall seeing before:

And now for the article itself:

Marshall McLuhan is remembered by many for his rise to fame as the original "media guru", the subject of a multitude of newspaper and magazine articles and broadcast interviews, not to mention a cameo appearance in Woody Allen's finest film, Annie Hall.

Let me interrupt right off the bat and note that I was asked to include the Woody Allen reference at the beginning of the piece so the editor could incorporate the clip from the movie, which didn't happen, although there is a link on the site to the imdb.com page for Annie Hall.  I haven't included that and the other links in this post, though.

Because McLuhan was adopted first by the counterculture movement of the 1960s and, more recently, by web evangelists, people sometimes assume that the man himself was some kind of pill-popping hipster. They couldn't be further from the truth.

Again, "pill-popping hipster," not my words, although I didn't nix them.

Far from sharing sympathy for countercultural forms of life, or the forms of media they embraced, McLuhan made a point of withholding judgment, refraining from moral evaluation of the processes he was describing and explaining. If anything, it was the conservative side of McLuhan that sometimes shone through his stance as a scientific observer. He never condemned the Vietnam war, suggesting instead that it was more of a media event than an actual happening. He discussed the possibility of using media as a form of control, "using TV in South Africa … to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio", with no acknowledgement of the Orwellian implications.

Again, I was asked to write about this, and while it's not what I would have chosen to emphasize, it is certainly true.  I've heard James W. Carey, one of McLuhan's sympathetic critics, talk about how McLuhan not coming out against the war angered him and many other academics.  And the bit about South Africa was one of the most ill-considered statements he ever made, having the unfortunate effect of turning many scholars off to anything else McLuhan had to say.

As a conservative Roman Catholic, he tended to downplay the significance of the printing press in regard to the Protestant Reformation, a point stressed by many other media scholars. But the fact that his insights could be embraced by radicals and reactionaries alike is a testament to their brilliance, and to his ability to transcend his own human frailties and failings.

I haven't heard as much criticism regarding this last point, perhaps because it's more of an intramural one for media ecologists, but it is noticeable, and there has been more general accusations of a hidden agenda related to his Catholicism (which I think absurd).  I just find it funny, myself, not at all offensive.  And the overriding point is the fact that individuals from all different political positions, religious affiliations (and atheists), backgrounds, etc., can see the value and importance of his approach and his insights.  That's what counts.  From here, it's less controversial:

Even though he was later hailed as a prophet, McLuhan insisted that he was only describing what was taking place in the present, while everyone else was fixated on the past (looking "through the rear-view mirror," as he put it). Looking at electricity, electric technology and electronic media such as Samuel Morse's telegraph and Guglielmo Marconi's wireless, he was able to understand television in ways that no one else had, and to glimpse the seeds of new media environments to come. It was because he understood the present, not the future, that his insights remain as valid today as half a century ago.

McLuhan's approach is particularly well suited to helping us to understand new technologies as they are being introduced into a culture. His early rise to prominence was mainly due to his ability to explain the novel medium of television and the dramatic social upheavals that it generated. At a time when baby boomers were establishing a new, "cool" youth culture that ran counter to the "hot" outlook of their parents, McLuhan had an explanation. The "cool" cultural style was a product of the television medium, whose low-resolution image required more cognitive processing than the high-definition experience we might get from radio and the motion picture, and that processing, or participation, had a tendency to suck the audience member in, creating a great sense of involvement in the message. "Hot media", by contrast, require less cognitive effort, freeing audiences to act. This understanding led McLuhan to claim that Hitler could not have been successful in a televisual media environment.

I had just thrown in the quick reference to hot and cool in generational terms, and was asked to provide more explanation of the terms.  And that's fine, but trying to squeeze it into a very short post, that is challenging.  I do hope the ideas got through okay, but I know this is an oversimplification of a complex set of associations.    Anyway, on to more familiar turf:

Moreover, television, in exposing viewers to the world with unprecedented immediacy and intimacy, was creating what he called a "global village", an entirely new form of tribalism that did away with private identity, individualism and the nation state – all products of print culture. The televisual window on the world was giving rise to a transparent society where we all find ourselves too close for comfort, with deep potential for aggression and violence (including, for example, terrorism).

McLuhan's famous aphorism, "the medium is the message", goes to the very heart of his way of understanding media, packing together a dozen or more different meanings. First and foremost, it is a wake-up call. McLuhan asks us to pay attention to the medium, rather than being distracted by the content. The content is not without its import, but it pales in comparison to the impact of the medium itself.

Instead of focusing solely on the content of television programming, for example, concerning ourselves with the depiction of violence, he argued that we needed to examine how the very presence of television as a medium was changing us, changing our very mode of thought from one that was characteristically linear and sequential (one thing at a time), to one that involved pattern recognition.

So, that's pretty standard Understanding Media stuff there, but this originally started with the request that I explain what "the medium is the message" is all about, so that's what I get into here at the end.  And no, I didn't write, "far out" (did you think I did?).
 

Is all this really that far out? The bottom line is that the medium is the message because the medium has a great influence on what is communicated, on how it is used. How we go about doing a task has much to do with the way that task turns out. It is simple, commonsense stuff. We say "ask a silly question, get a silly answer" because the questions we ask determine the kinds of answers we obtain.

Supposedly more "conservative" thinkers have argued along similar lines. Henry David Thoreau observed that "we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us"; Mark Twain quipped that "when you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail", and Winston Churchill maintained that "we shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us". To this last, McLuhan's colleague, John Culkin, generalised that "we shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us", by way of explaining McLuhan's perspective.

And I didn't write the bit about "more 'conservative' thinkers either, I don't really think of Thoreau or Twain as conservative, although I suppose you could say they were.  I know Churchill was, of course, but I figure the Guardian being a British paper, they'd appreciate the reference.  As for Culkin, he was the Jesuit who brought McLuhan to Fordham University, so probably more conservative than some, but relatively liberal I'd say.  Anyway, on to my closing statement:

The medium is the message also means that the medium is the environment. Our media are extensions of ourselves, they go between ourselves and our environment, and whatever goes between us and our environment becomes our new environment. In this way, every new medium is a new environment, and affects us much as the natural environment shapes us. That is why, to understand our media environments, we need McLuhan's media ecology.

So, at least I got my bit about media ecology in at the end.  And all's well that end's well, at least, that's what some Brit said.  But just as an fyi, here is some of the other stuff I wrote that wound up on the cutting room floor:

McLuhan rose from relative obscurity as a Canadian academic with a doctorate from Cambridge, teaching literary criticism at schools such as Saint Louis University and the University of Toronto, and reached the peak of his celebrity in 1967, the year he came to the media capital of New York City, as Fordham University's Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities, the same year that his bestselling book, The Medium is the Massage, was published.  It was also the year he made the news for undergoing what had been the longest continuous brain surgery ever attempted, to remove a benign brain tumor.  He returned to Toronto in 1968, where he spent the remainder of his career, until his death in 1980, eighteen months after suffering a debilitating stroke. 

McLuhan's brain was as unorthodox as his thought processes, so that many found him difficult to understand, and had trouble recognizing him as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century.  Moreover, his brilliance and originality were denied by many, some out of jealousy for his success, some out of dislike for his subject matter, some for ideological motives, some out of religious prejudice, some for personal reasons.  This convergence of forces resulted in a deliberate effort to suppress his work, starting in the seventies.  The cause for the current revival of interest in his work is quite clear, as it began in the nineties just as the internet became a popular phenomenon. 

McLuhan's media ecology approach is particularly well suited for helping us to understand new technologies as they are being introduced into a culture, and his early rise to prominence was due to his ability to explain the new medium of television, and the dramatic social upheavals that it generated.  Likewise, over the past two decades, we have experienced a deluge of innovations, including e-mail, chat, text messaging, websites, search engines, mp3s, blogs, tweets, social networking, mobile telephony, iPods and iPads, etc., and McLuhan's method is therefore especially relevant to the present day.  His insights remain valid because he studied the electronic media, and while many of their characteristics were only nascent or still in potential during the sixties, they have since come into their own.  For example, when he argued that television, in exposing viewers to the world with unprecedented immediacy and intimacy, was creating what he called a "global village," it was harder to relate that idea to watching I Love Lucy than it is now to the experience of internet interconnectivity, to following Facebook  updates, Twitter streams, and Google search results.

And from another draft:

McLuhan's brain was as unorthodox as his thought processes, so that many found him difficult to understand, and had trouble recognizing him as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century.  Moreover, his brilliance and originality were denied by many, some out of jealousy for his success, some out of dislike for his subject matter, some for ideological motives, some out of religious prejudice, some for personal reasons.  This convergence of forces resulted in a deliberate effort to suppress his work, starting in the seventies.  If his name came up at all, it was to dismiss him as a technological determinist, and throw out lines such as, "of course, the medium is not the message," evincing no effort to understand McLuhan's arguments or approach, and often enough no effort to actually read his major works, such as Understanding Media, and The Gutenberg Galaxy.  It was not until the nineties, when the internet became a popular phenomenon, that there was a widespread revival of interest in his work, which continues to this day.

So, thank goodness for blogs, where I can set the record straight, sort of, and where I can find a home for these poor, wayward sentences of mine.  Get along, little doggies, get along...