Media History
Before getting into the specifics of the print and digital media revolutions let's look at media in general: How do we define media? Or more accurately, how do media define us? In what ways are media agents of cultural change? Why do print and digital mediums have different effects, or messages?
Advancements in media technology are now becoming the calibration marks for history's major paradigmatic shifts. "Mediology," even, is a recognized and ever-expanding field of study. French radical theoretician, Regis Debray, for instance, proposes three historical ages of transmission technologies: the logosphere (the age of writing, technology, kingdom, and faith), the graphosphere (the age of print, political ideologies, nations and laws), and the newly born videosphere (the age of multimedia broadcasting, models, individuals, and opinions). Though these temporal strata have not been widely accepted, Debray's work exemplifies the fact that the technologies of transmission have taken on a position in our culture of vertiginous power --- almost omnipotence --- as media now get credit for shaping not only to the information we distribute and consume, but our powers of perception, our political, social and economic systems, and our general constructions of truth.
Media and their wide-ranging effects have been around ever since humanity has been conglomerating into tribes and nations and developing methods of communication --- ways of extending the scope of one's naked voice beyond hearing range, and giving form and substance to one's thoughts. The Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux, in other words, are no less viable (although less ubiquitous) expressions of media than TV shows and magazines of today. But the schematic analysis of media --- the recognition and study of its impact on every aspect of social living, is only a few decades old. Carlyle may have claimed in the 1830s that the printing press destroyed feudalism and created the modern world; Plato, as Derrida emphasizes, may have pointed to the effects of writng 2,500 years ago, but the wide-ranging attention today given to media and their effects is, on the whole, unprecedented. Even more fundamental, the concept of the malleable individual constructed by his "field of cultural production," as Pierre Bordieu called it, has been tossed around for centuries. Back to the days when the actors of the ancient Greek and Roman stage jumped in an out of personalities as quickly as they affixed their various masks, notions of the inconstancy of the human condition have been entertained.
The nineteenth century brought about major ideological change that set the stage for media studies. What with a God dethroned by that mundane insurgent, science, the chaos that seized Western nations around the close of the nineteenth-century seemed unparalleled in history. Darwin had come up with a convincing theory of evolution which smacked God-fearing members of the Victorian Age square in the face. He dismantled on a grand scale the moral, spiritual, and even political, foundations of the Western world--- a world hitherto comfortably centered around the almighty God who bestowed tidy, immutable essences in each one of His human creations. Darwin, along with a heady battalion of progressive philosophers and scientists --- including pioneers of the brand new social sciences: sociology, psychology, anthropology, et al --- quite effectively threw into question the fundamental meaning for human existence. The notion that human beings have malleable personalities largely constructed by the environment in which they develop --- the subjectivity of experience --- began to gain currency and scientific evidence in the late 1800s, and established the foundation on which the grandfather of media theory, Marshall McLuhan, would base his claims half a century later .
McLuhan introduced into the language our present usage of the term media, as well as a number of other concepts, including "the global village," "the medium is the message," and "The Age of Information," that since have become commonplaces. By fall of 1965, his most popular and optimistic book, Undertanding Media: The Extensions of Man, had procured him a position as a faddish social theorist and, to some, a prophet. A review in The New York Herald Tribune, representing a consensus of informed opinion, called him "the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov..." McLuhan's notoriety and credibility faded away by the time of his death, in 1980: he had become increasingly recalcitrant in public, his words, increasingly nonsensical, even absurd, and the print medium, which he had pronounced obsolete, was popular as ever. (There are innumerable examples of McLuhan's often brash effortd to shock the public. My favorite is the announcement in 1971 of s new product tha he created with his nephew, chemist Ross Hall. He called the formula Prohtex, and it removed the semll of urine from underpants without masking the other, more intersting smells, such as perpiration---an iumportant form of communication for preliterate man. He was preparing the world, facetioulsy, for the global village.) But McLuhan was not altogether a harlequin. Today his words resonate with eerie prescience. Critic Gary Wolf writes:
In recent years, the explosion of new media --- particularly the Internet --- has caused new anxieties. Or to put a more McLuhanesque spin on it, the advent of the new digital media has brought the conditions of the old technologies into sharper relief, and made us suddenly conscious of our media environment. In the confusion of the digital revolution, McLuhan is relevant again ("Wisdom of St. Marshall" 124).
McLuhan's Message
Calling media "the extensions of man," McLuhan based his theory on the fact that content follows form, and the insurgent technologies give rise to new structures of feeling and thought, new manners of perception. He saw media as "make happen agents" rather than "make-aware" agents, as systems "similar to roads and canals, not as precious art objects or uplifting models of behavior, and he repeatedly reminds his readers that his proposition is best understood as a literary trope, not as scientific theory" ("Wisdom of St. Marshall" 124). Delighting in the power of the pun, he constantly cites as his authorities the modernist idols of the Age of Print and quotes at length from the novels of James Joyce, particularly Finnegans Wake, and the poems of T.S. Eliot and William Blake, and the letters of John Ruskin.
McLuhan riddled his work and his everyday parlance with word-play, and became notorious for firing quips at his opponents such as: "You think my fallacy is all wrong?" According to this relentless deconstructionist, the pun is a "breakdown as breakthrough." The pun breaks down the movement of normal language revealing that something has been repressed. In other words, the pun is a breakthrough to reality when it breaks down some expected movement. McLuhan turns all literary techniques for crossing different kinds of discourse into different ways of grasping reality and uses all of them most effectively as devices to probe media. He applied this poetic alienation of language to his formula for addressing two things that our civilization (especially today) is concerned about --- the alienation of the self and the alienating influence of technology. In a Playboy interview from March, 1969, McLuhan said:
My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. But my books constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition... I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks...
Needless to say, McLuhan, himself, was disturbed by his experience of alienation from new media --- he was alarmed as much as he was intrigued by it. His interest lay, as I said earlier, not in promoting media, but in making the public aware of media's overwhelming effects. And he drew the attentions of a vast audience through his positions as professor, author , and cultural critic. McLuhan's major works included The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, The Medium is the Massage --- his only bestseller, which combines word and image in a way that transformed his readership's expectations of what a book should be --- and his posthmously published work, The Global Village. The lasting themes of his works --- the ones that interest us most today --- revolve around the two quantum leaps in communications technology which I explore in this thesis. As Lewis Lapham explains in his introduction to Understanding Media:
Beginning with the premise that 'we become what we behold," that "we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us,' McLuhan examines the diktats of two technological revolutions that overthrew a settled political and aesthetic order: first, in the mid-fifteenth century, the invention of printing with moveable type, which encouraged people to think in straight lines and to arrange their perception of the world in forms convenient to the visual order of the printed page; second, since the late nineteenth century, the new applications of electricity (telegraph, telephone, television, computers, etc.), which taught people to rearrange their perception of the world in ways convenient to the protocols of cyberspace. (xi-xii)
The Medium is the Message
Perhaps McLuhan is best remembered for his assesment of the subliminal effects of the medium --- its powers of hypnosis. He predicates his claims about the power of media on a belief in the mutability of man. We are the content of our media. therefore our modes of perception are unnatural. McLuhan rejects General David Sarnoff's statement that "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way that they are used that determines their value." According to McLuhan, Sarnoff ignores the fact that the nature of the medium, of any and all media, is to creep inside the participant unnoticed: "in the true Narcissus style, one is hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form... For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary. Prediction and control consist in avoiding this subliminal state of Narcissus trance" (Understanding Media 15).
Simulacra
Some individuals, according to McLuhan, are able to resist media's powers of indoctrination. These are the artists who aspire to uncover truth, to look reality straight in the eyes, getting past all the cultural clutter; the ones who comment on cultural conventions, the mythic creations of media. Marcel Duchamp, for instance, hung a toilet from the ceiling and called it art. Andy Warhol put an everyday can of soup on a canvas, rearranging the context in which that object takes on value. Both made plain the fact that we assume that reality restricts things to a particular purpose, or use value, but then we can bend or reconfigure it. "The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or powers of perception steadily and without any 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" (UM 15) The artist, according to McLuhan, has a particular sensitivity to patterns of perception.
The very fact that media, like metaphors, transmit and transform experience limits them to the realm of simulacra. What media depict as reality are only translations of reality. The concept of the simulacrum is central to Jean Baudrillard's analysis of postmodern consumer society, "with its endless networks of media and advertising images that... precede any reality to which they might be said to refer" (Baudrillard 104). Plato's simulacrum is a debased reflection, understood as inferior to the abstraction from which it is derived. It challenges the very notion of a "true copy" or an authentic rendering. Even today, when a multimedia have the capacity to generate such a potent sensory experience, such a comprehensive rendering of reality, authenticity is out of reach. In her essay, "Imprisoning of Reality," Susan Sontag discusses the limitations of media:
Reality has always been interpreted through the report given by the images, and philosophers since Plato have tried to loosen our dependence on images by evoking the standard of an image-free way of apprehending the real... Most contemporary expressions of concern that an image world is replacing the real one continue to echo, as Fuerbach did, the Platonic depreciation of the image: true insofar as it resembles something real, sham because it is no more than a resemblance. (376)
We do well to keep in mind, during this discussion of two quantum leaps in communications technology, that the medium is, by its very nature, a sham.
Repercussions of new media
McLuhan's exploration of media goes as far back as the creation of the alphabet. The media which dominate a particular time period ascribe particular modes of understanding to the culture in which it operates. Each medium reveals, communicates and instills important aspect of reality, of truth. For example, the creation of the alphabet generated a reality based on patterned code. It distinguished more definitively what Ferdinand de Saussure called the signifier and the signified. Writing encouraged an analytical mode of thinking with an emphasis on lineality. McLuhan explains the message of the alphabetic medium: "It is in its power to extend patterns of visual uniformity and continuity that the 'message' of the alphabet is felt by cultures" (UM 170).
The media's effects are not restricted to abstruse notions of reality and manners of perception. Another example of the consequence of media in culture relates to the more physical arena of politics --- the arrangement of governing and economic powers. When an alphabet imposed itself on oral cutter it
meant power and authority and control of military structures at a distance. When combined with papyrus, the alphabet spelled the end of the stationary temple bureaucracies and the priestly monopolies of knowledge and power. Unlike pre-alphabetic writing which with its innumerable signs was difficult to master, the alphabet could be learned in a few hours. The acquisition of so extensive a knowledge and so complex a skill as pre-alphabetic writing represented, when applied to such unwieldy matters as brick and stone, insured for the scribal caste a monopoly of priestly power. The easier alphabet and the light, cheap, transportable papyrus together effected the transfer of power from the priestly to the military class. (UM 174)
Media are therefore invested with the power to structure themodus operandi of both the individual and society at large.
A precursor to the Digital Revolution, the Cubist movement revolted against the rigid, one-sided uniformity on which print and realist painting were contingent. Cubism disregarded the fixed vanishing point --- and with it, the inexorable truth of the artist into which the viewer's gaze obsequiously disintegrated. Cubist painters took full advantage of their medium --- realizing that a two dimensional canvas and a set of paints permit far more than a specialized illusion of the third dimension. Instead, McLuhan explains, "cubism sets up an interplay of planes and contradictions or dramatic conflict of patterns, lights, textures, that 'drives home the message' by involvement... By giving the inside and outside, the top, the bottom, back and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole" (UM 12).
The cubist movement, of course, was limited to a small band of artists, and therefore did not seize the nation with the ubiquity of mass media. But in today's world, where personal computers are fast becoming as common to the household as the phone, the masses (of the Western world) are becoming intimate with the multiplicity of perspectives represented in cubist painting. The space created by the digital medium is hypertextual --- that is, it creates a vast network of interconnected literary, graphic, auditory, and cinematic texts, none of which are privileged over the others, where interpreted meaning is as multifarious and unfixed as the perspective of a cubist painting. Charles Ess argues that "perhaps the most compelling claim made for hypertext systems is that they will democratize access to information and thereby contribute to a greater democratization of society" (246). I will explore this latter relationship later, in further detail, but I include these various examples to demonstrate how different forms of media can promote radically different messages --- and therefore radically different configurations of sensory experience, and, by extension, society. Critic and theologian Ross Snyder calls media "Architects of the consciousness... The media architects alter our conceptions of time and space just as did the architects of the past" (323).
No Medium Becomes Extinct
Just as our city streets are festooned with architecture of a whole range of styles --- some dating centuries back, our modes of perception reflect a compendium of media influences: the dominant one of the time as well as vestiges of its predecessors which may never become obsolete.
McLuhan explains, borrowing from the work of Alexis De Tocqueville, the political symptoms of print media in eighteenth-century France and Britain: "[In France] the typographic principles of uniformity, continuity and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society. In England, however, such was the power of the ancient oral traditions of common law, backed by the medieval institution of Parliament, that no uniformity or continuity of the new visual print culture could take complete hold... Hence the discontinuity and unpredictability of English culture" (UM 14). The paradigmatic shift from oral to written culture, did not necessarily render the oral obsolete, as De Tocqueville suggests in his explanation of the discontinuity and unpredictability of English culture.
When new media descend upon a culture they do not eradicate the influence of their antecedents, but reposition and supplement them. McLuhan had faith in the Digital Revolution only with the understanding that we will continue to value the booty reaped from print media:
Those who panic now about the threat of the newer media and about the revolution we are forging, vaster in scope than that of Gutenberg, are obviously lacking in cool visual detachment and gratitude for that most potent gift bestowed on Western man by literacy and typography: his power to act without reaction or involvement. It is this kind of specialization by dissociation that has created Western power and efficiency. Without this dissociation of action from feeling and emotion people are hampered and hesitant. Print taught Western man to say, "damn the torpedoes. Full steam ahead!" (UM 178)
A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. Each medium, if its bias is properly exploited, reveals and communicates a unique aspect of reality, of truth. Each offers a different perspective, a way of seeing an otherwise hidden dimension of reality. It's not a question of one reality being true, the other ones distortions. One allows us to see from here, another from there, a third from still another perspective; taken together they give us a more complete whole, a greater truth . New essentials are brought to the fore, including those made invisible by the "blinders" of old languages. Yet a new language is rarely welcomed by the old. The oral traditions distrusted writing, manuscript culture was contemptuous of printing, book culture hated the press, that slap-dag heap of passions.
The Commodious Space of Digital Media
McLuhan put his faith in Christ and was deeply committed to a holistic sense of "all-at-onceness." Herein lay his optimism about the digital medium: Everything everywhere happens simultaneously. There is no clear order or sequence. This sudden collapse of space into a single unified field dethrones the visual sense. This is what the concept of the global village means to its inventor: "we are all within reach of a single voice or the sound of tribal drums." For McLuhan this future held a profound risk of mass terror and sudden panic but he found great promise in the powers of digital communications and compares the mystical unification of humanity (the global village) to the Christian Pentecost. He saw in digital media the potential to "breakdown and breakthrough" the immuring "lineality" of the printed text, and the detached, hyperrational mind of the reader of print. In Understanding Media he trumpets:
Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as benefits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electronc technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive... No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier. (84)
Although McLuhan saw that this electric speed and interconnectedness could bring all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion --- that an aspiration for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is "a natural adjunct to electronic technology" --- he by no means discounted the advantages of Gutenberg's brainchild.
* * *
Despite McLuhan's insistence that print and digital technologies have such radically different impacts on the user---and on culture in general, I shall examine the evidence that the two mediums had remarkably similar receptions into the public sphere: a mad flurry of literary expression on a widespread, individual level. It's almost impossible for us today, in our world of xerox and fax machines and laser printers --- to imagine how revolutionary the opportunity to duplicate and disseminate one's opinions in a public sphere was in the mid-seventeenth century. The beliefs of a private individual had heretofore been weightless, silent, and for all intensive purposes, nonexistent. We members of the late twentieth century, on the other hand, have been enjoying the liberties of print--- that is, the freedom to duplicate and give substance to our opinions --- for decades, even before the digital medium extended them.
But the liberties of unmitigated pamphlet production were felt only temporarily. Democratized expression could not endure in a society which privileged rational, linear modes of operation. McLuhan's analysis of media not only as translators but sculptors of information --- is especially useful when addressing the fate of certain forms of expression. As we will see with regard to the pamphleteers, the dominant cultural voice perched at the top of a rigid hierarchy eventually reclaimed its authority with the restoration of monarch Charles II to the throne. De Tocqueville explained that British civilization was volatile, prone to destabilization because the influences of oral tradition remained in place even after the impact of print. The desire for the free flow of expression that oral culture accommodated was therefore in place, latent, and probably impatient to achieve fruition. But if the medium is an architect of space --- and print was the dominant architect of the time --- that space will permit only a certain configuration of expression. I will be looking at the space that digital technologies are creating today, and what personal, social, and political configurations this space will permit.
Before getting into the specifics of the print and digital media revolutions let's look at media in general: How do we define media? Or more accurately, how do media define us? In what ways are media agents of cultural change? Why do print and digital mediums have different effects, or messages?
Advancements in media technology are now becoming the calibration marks for history's major paradigmatic shifts. "Mediology," even, is a recognized and ever-expanding field of study. French radical theoretician, Regis Debray, for instance, proposes three historical ages of transmission technologies: the logosphere (the age of writing, technology, kingdom, and faith), the graphosphere (the age of print, political ideologies, nations and laws), and the newly born videosphere (the age of multimedia broadcasting, models, individuals, and opinions). Though these temporal strata have not been widely accepted, Debray's work exemplifies the fact that the technologies of transmission have taken on a position in our culture of vertiginous power --- almost omnipotence --- as media now get credit for shaping not only to the information we distribute and consume, but our powers of perception, our political, social and economic systems, and our general constructions of truth.
Media and their wide-ranging effects have been around ever since humanity has been conglomerating into tribes and nations and developing methods of communication --- ways of extending the scope of one's naked voice beyond hearing range, and giving form and substance to one's thoughts. The Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux, in other words, are no less viable (although less ubiquitous) expressions of media than TV shows and magazines of today. But the schematic analysis of media --- the recognition and study of its impact on every aspect of social living, is only a few decades old. Carlyle may have claimed in the 1830s that the printing press destroyed feudalism and created the modern world; Plato, as Derrida emphasizes, may have pointed to the effects of writng 2,500 years ago, but the wide-ranging attention today given to media and their effects is, on the whole, unprecedented. Even more fundamental, the concept of the malleable individual constructed by his "field of cultural production," as Pierre Bordieu called it, has been tossed around for centuries. Back to the days when the actors of the ancient Greek and Roman stage jumped in an out of personalities as quickly as they affixed their various masks, notions of the inconstancy of the human condition have been entertained.
The nineteenth century brought about major ideological change that set the stage for media studies. What with a God dethroned by that mundane insurgent, science, the chaos that seized Western nations around the close of the nineteenth-century seemed unparalleled in history. Darwin had come up with a convincing theory of evolution which smacked God-fearing members of the Victorian Age square in the face. He dismantled on a grand scale the moral, spiritual, and even political, foundations of the Western world--- a world hitherto comfortably centered around the almighty God who bestowed tidy, immutable essences in each one of His human creations. Darwin, along with a heady battalion of progressive philosophers and scientists --- including pioneers of the brand new social sciences: sociology, psychology, anthropology, et al --- quite effectively threw into question the fundamental meaning for human existence. The notion that human beings have malleable personalities largely constructed by the environment in which they develop --- the subjectivity of experience --- began to gain currency and scientific evidence in the late 1800s, and established the foundation on which the grandfather of media theory, Marshall McLuhan, would base his claims half a century later .
McLuhan introduced into the language our present usage of the term media, as well as a number of other concepts, including "the global village," "the medium is the message," and "The Age of Information," that since have become commonplaces. By fall of 1965, his most popular and optimistic book, Undertanding Media: The Extensions of Man, had procured him a position as a faddish social theorist and, to some, a prophet. A review in The New York Herald Tribune, representing a consensus of informed opinion, called him "the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov..." McLuhan's notoriety and credibility faded away by the time of his death, in 1980: he had become increasingly recalcitrant in public, his words, increasingly nonsensical, even absurd, and the print medium, which he had pronounced obsolete, was popular as ever. (There are innumerable examples of McLuhan's often brash effortd to shock the public. My favorite is the announcement in 1971 of s new product tha he created with his nephew, chemist Ross Hall. He called the formula Prohtex, and it removed the semll of urine from underpants without masking the other, more intersting smells, such as perpiration---an iumportant form of communication for preliterate man. He was preparing the world, facetioulsy, for the global village.) But McLuhan was not altogether a harlequin. Today his words resonate with eerie prescience. Critic Gary Wolf writes:
In recent years, the explosion of new media --- particularly the Internet --- has caused new anxieties. Or to put a more McLuhanesque spin on it, the advent of the new digital media has brought the conditions of the old technologies into sharper relief, and made us suddenly conscious of our media environment. In the confusion of the digital revolution, McLuhan is relevant again ("Wisdom of St. Marshall" 124).
McLuhan's Message
Calling media "the extensions of man," McLuhan based his theory on the fact that content follows form, and the insurgent technologies give rise to new structures of feeling and thought, new manners of perception. He saw media as "make happen agents" rather than "make-aware" agents, as systems "similar to roads and canals, not as precious art objects or uplifting models of behavior, and he repeatedly reminds his readers that his proposition is best understood as a literary trope, not as scientific theory" ("Wisdom of St. Marshall" 124). Delighting in the power of the pun, he constantly cites as his authorities the modernist idols of the Age of Print and quotes at length from the novels of James Joyce, particularly Finnegans Wake, and the poems of T.S. Eliot and William Blake, and the letters of John Ruskin.
McLuhan riddled his work and his everyday parlance with word-play, and became notorious for firing quips at his opponents such as: "You think my fallacy is all wrong?" According to this relentless deconstructionist, the pun is a "breakdown as breakthrough." The pun breaks down the movement of normal language revealing that something has been repressed. In other words, the pun is a breakthrough to reality when it breaks down some expected movement. McLuhan turns all literary techniques for crossing different kinds of discourse into different ways of grasping reality and uses all of them most effectively as devices to probe media. He applied this poetic alienation of language to his formula for addressing two things that our civilization (especially today) is concerned about --- the alienation of the self and the alienating influence of technology. In a Playboy interview from March, 1969, McLuhan said:
My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. But my books constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition... I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks...
Needless to say, McLuhan, himself, was disturbed by his experience of alienation from new media --- he was alarmed as much as he was intrigued by it. His interest lay, as I said earlier, not in promoting media, but in making the public aware of media's overwhelming effects. And he drew the attentions of a vast audience through his positions as professor, author , and cultural critic. McLuhan's major works included The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, The Medium is the Massage --- his only bestseller, which combines word and image in a way that transformed his readership's expectations of what a book should be --- and his posthmously published work, The Global Village. The lasting themes of his works --- the ones that interest us most today --- revolve around the two quantum leaps in communications technology which I explore in this thesis. As Lewis Lapham explains in his introduction to Understanding Media:
Beginning with the premise that 'we become what we behold," that "we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us,' McLuhan examines the diktats of two technological revolutions that overthrew a settled political and aesthetic order: first, in the mid-fifteenth century, the invention of printing with moveable type, which encouraged people to think in straight lines and to arrange their perception of the world in forms convenient to the visual order of the printed page; second, since the late nineteenth century, the new applications of electricity (telegraph, telephone, television, computers, etc.), which taught people to rearrange their perception of the world in ways convenient to the protocols of cyberspace. (xi-xii)
The Medium is the Message
Perhaps McLuhan is best remembered for his assesment of the subliminal effects of the medium --- its powers of hypnosis. He predicates his claims about the power of media on a belief in the mutability of man. We are the content of our media. therefore our modes of perception are unnatural. McLuhan rejects General David Sarnoff's statement that "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way that they are used that determines their value." According to McLuhan, Sarnoff ignores the fact that the nature of the medium, of any and all media, is to creep inside the participant unnoticed: "in the true Narcissus style, one is hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form... For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary. Prediction and control consist in avoiding this subliminal state of Narcissus trance" (Understanding Media 15).
Simulacra
Some individuals, according to McLuhan, are able to resist media's powers of indoctrination. These are the artists who aspire to uncover truth, to look reality straight in the eyes, getting past all the cultural clutter; the ones who comment on cultural conventions, the mythic creations of media. Marcel Duchamp, for instance, hung a toilet from the ceiling and called it art. Andy Warhol put an everyday can of soup on a canvas, rearranging the context in which that object takes on value. Both made plain the fact that we assume that reality restricts things to a particular purpose, or use value, but then we can bend or reconfigure it. "The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or powers of perception steadily and without any 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" (UM 15) The artist, according to McLuhan, has a particular sensitivity to patterns of perception.
The very fact that media, like metaphors, transmit and transform experience limits them to the realm of simulacra. What media depict as reality are only translations of reality. The concept of the simulacrum is central to Jean Baudrillard's analysis of postmodern consumer society, "with its endless networks of media and advertising images that... precede any reality to which they might be said to refer" (Baudrillard 104). Plato's simulacrum is a debased reflection, understood as inferior to the abstraction from which it is derived. It challenges the very notion of a "true copy" or an authentic rendering. Even today, when a multimedia have the capacity to generate such a potent sensory experience, such a comprehensive rendering of reality, authenticity is out of reach. In her essay, "Imprisoning of Reality," Susan Sontag discusses the limitations of media:
Reality has always been interpreted through the report given by the images, and philosophers since Plato have tried to loosen our dependence on images by evoking the standard of an image-free way of apprehending the real... Most contemporary expressions of concern that an image world is replacing the real one continue to echo, as Fuerbach did, the Platonic depreciation of the image: true insofar as it resembles something real, sham because it is no more than a resemblance. (376)
We do well to keep in mind, during this discussion of two quantum leaps in communications technology, that the medium is, by its very nature, a sham.
Repercussions of new media
McLuhan's exploration of media goes as far back as the creation of the alphabet. The media which dominate a particular time period ascribe particular modes of understanding to the culture in which it operates. Each medium reveals, communicates and instills important aspect of reality, of truth. For example, the creation of the alphabet generated a reality based on patterned code. It distinguished more definitively what Ferdinand de Saussure called the signifier and the signified. Writing encouraged an analytical mode of thinking with an emphasis on lineality. McLuhan explains the message of the alphabetic medium: "It is in its power to extend patterns of visual uniformity and continuity that the 'message' of the alphabet is felt by cultures" (UM 170).
The media's effects are not restricted to abstruse notions of reality and manners of perception. Another example of the consequence of media in culture relates to the more physical arena of politics --- the arrangement of governing and economic powers. When an alphabet imposed itself on oral cutter it
meant power and authority and control of military structures at a distance. When combined with papyrus, the alphabet spelled the end of the stationary temple bureaucracies and the priestly monopolies of knowledge and power. Unlike pre-alphabetic writing which with its innumerable signs was difficult to master, the alphabet could be learned in a few hours. The acquisition of so extensive a knowledge and so complex a skill as pre-alphabetic writing represented, when applied to such unwieldy matters as brick and stone, insured for the scribal caste a monopoly of priestly power. The easier alphabet and the light, cheap, transportable papyrus together effected the transfer of power from the priestly to the military class. (UM 174)
Media are therefore invested with the power to structure themodus operandi of both the individual and society at large.
A precursor to the Digital Revolution, the Cubist movement revolted against the rigid, one-sided uniformity on which print and realist painting were contingent. Cubism disregarded the fixed vanishing point --- and with it, the inexorable truth of the artist into which the viewer's gaze obsequiously disintegrated. Cubist painters took full advantage of their medium --- realizing that a two dimensional canvas and a set of paints permit far more than a specialized illusion of the third dimension. Instead, McLuhan explains, "cubism sets up an interplay of planes and contradictions or dramatic conflict of patterns, lights, textures, that 'drives home the message' by involvement... By giving the inside and outside, the top, the bottom, back and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole" (UM 12).
The cubist movement, of course, was limited to a small band of artists, and therefore did not seize the nation with the ubiquity of mass media. But in today's world, where personal computers are fast becoming as common to the household as the phone, the masses (of the Western world) are becoming intimate with the multiplicity of perspectives represented in cubist painting. The space created by the digital medium is hypertextual --- that is, it creates a vast network of interconnected literary, graphic, auditory, and cinematic texts, none of which are privileged over the others, where interpreted meaning is as multifarious and unfixed as the perspective of a cubist painting. Charles Ess argues that "perhaps the most compelling claim made for hypertext systems is that they will democratize access to information and thereby contribute to a greater democratization of society" (246). I will explore this latter relationship later, in further detail, but I include these various examples to demonstrate how different forms of media can promote radically different messages --- and therefore radically different configurations of sensory experience, and, by extension, society. Critic and theologian Ross Snyder calls media "Architects of the consciousness... The media architects alter our conceptions of time and space just as did the architects of the past" (323).
No Medium Becomes Extinct
Just as our city streets are festooned with architecture of a whole range of styles --- some dating centuries back, our modes of perception reflect a compendium of media influences: the dominant one of the time as well as vestiges of its predecessors which may never become obsolete.
McLuhan explains, borrowing from the work of Alexis De Tocqueville, the political symptoms of print media in eighteenth-century France and Britain: "[In France] the typographic principles of uniformity, continuity and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society. In England, however, such was the power of the ancient oral traditions of common law, backed by the medieval institution of Parliament, that no uniformity or continuity of the new visual print culture could take complete hold... Hence the discontinuity and unpredictability of English culture" (UM 14). The paradigmatic shift from oral to written culture, did not necessarily render the oral obsolete, as De Tocqueville suggests in his explanation of the discontinuity and unpredictability of English culture.
When new media descend upon a culture they do not eradicate the influence of their antecedents, but reposition and supplement them. McLuhan had faith in the Digital Revolution only with the understanding that we will continue to value the booty reaped from print media:
Those who panic now about the threat of the newer media and about the revolution we are forging, vaster in scope than that of Gutenberg, are obviously lacking in cool visual detachment and gratitude for that most potent gift bestowed on Western man by literacy and typography: his power to act without reaction or involvement. It is this kind of specialization by dissociation that has created Western power and efficiency. Without this dissociation of action from feeling and emotion people are hampered and hesitant. Print taught Western man to say, "damn the torpedoes. Full steam ahead!" (UM 178)
A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. Each medium, if its bias is properly exploited, reveals and communicates a unique aspect of reality, of truth. Each offers a different perspective, a way of seeing an otherwise hidden dimension of reality. It's not a question of one reality being true, the other ones distortions. One allows us to see from here, another from there, a third from still another perspective; taken together they give us a more complete whole, a greater truth . New essentials are brought to the fore, including those made invisible by the "blinders" of old languages. Yet a new language is rarely welcomed by the old. The oral traditions distrusted writing, manuscript culture was contemptuous of printing, book culture hated the press, that slap-dag heap of passions.
The Commodious Space of Digital Media
McLuhan put his faith in Christ and was deeply committed to a holistic sense of "all-at-onceness." Herein lay his optimism about the digital medium: Everything everywhere happens simultaneously. There is no clear order or sequence. This sudden collapse of space into a single unified field dethrones the visual sense. This is what the concept of the global village means to its inventor: "we are all within reach of a single voice or the sound of tribal drums." For McLuhan this future held a profound risk of mass terror and sudden panic but he found great promise in the powers of digital communications and compares the mystical unification of humanity (the global village) to the Christian Pentecost. He saw in digital media the potential to "breakdown and breakthrough" the immuring "lineality" of the printed text, and the detached, hyperrational mind of the reader of print. In Understanding Media he trumpets:
Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as benefits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electronc technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive... No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier. (84)
Although McLuhan saw that this electric speed and interconnectedness could bring all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion --- that an aspiration for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is "a natural adjunct to electronic technology" --- he by no means discounted the advantages of Gutenberg's brainchild.
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Despite McLuhan's insistence that print and digital technologies have such radically different impacts on the user---and on culture in general, I shall examine the evidence that the two mediums had remarkably similar receptions into the public sphere: a mad flurry of literary expression on a widespread, individual level. It's almost impossible for us today, in our world of xerox and fax machines and laser printers --- to imagine how revolutionary the opportunity to duplicate and disseminate one's opinions in a public sphere was in the mid-seventeenth century. The beliefs of a private individual had heretofore been weightless, silent, and for all intensive purposes, nonexistent. We members of the late twentieth century, on the other hand, have been enjoying the liberties of print--- that is, the freedom to duplicate and give substance to our opinions --- for decades, even before the digital medium extended them.
But the liberties of unmitigated pamphlet production were felt only temporarily. Democratized expression could not endure in a society which privileged rational, linear modes of operation. McLuhan's analysis of media not only as translators but sculptors of information --- is especially useful when addressing the fate of certain forms of expression. As we will see with regard to the pamphleteers, the dominant cultural voice perched at the top of a rigid hierarchy eventually reclaimed its authority with the restoration of monarch Charles II to the throne. De Tocqueville explained that British civilization was volatile, prone to destabilization because the influences of oral tradition remained in place even after the impact of print. The desire for the free flow of expression that oral culture accommodated was therefore in place, latent, and probably impatient to achieve fruition. But if the medium is an architect of space --- and print was the dominant architect of the time --- that space will permit only a certain configuration of expression. I will be looking at the space that digital technologies are creating today, and what personal, social, and political configurations this space will permit.
