According to Marshall McLuhan, the media that we use—“extensions” of ourselves—are powerful influences. The contemporary trend is to see these prostheses as mere tools. As a consequence, we live in a state of “inattention and unawareness of the situation” (92). Technological prostheses alter sense perceptions, restructure human consciousness, shape social norms, and disrupt political and economic patterns. McLuhan encourages us to start seeing again and to understand media in order to gain some control over the way technology arranges human activity and (re)defines what it means to be human. Understanding begins by studying “media hybrids,” or a medium’s absorption or refashioning of another medium:
The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of the Narcissus-narcosis. The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses. (55)
In this passage, McLuhan’s apparent technological determinism is tempered by the hope of breaking the spell of numbness and redeeming human autonomy. Media change thus amounts to a power struggle between humans and their technologies.
The power of media rests in their effects, not in their content or “message.” This point is crucial for anyone who hopes to avert the numbing symptoms of media use, which McLuhan calls “Narcissus-narcosis” in the passage above. In the myth of Narcissus, a youth could only stare, utterly captivated, at his image in the water; he never realized that he had become a “servomechanism” (41) of his own image. According to McLuhan, all media operate in the same way. Once humans adapt to the medium and it becomes transparent (just as Narcissus could only see his image and not the water’s surface), technology has won the reins of power over man. Because of the numbing effects of media, this power is never about content. In fact, it is in the appropriation of one medium by another medium that we realize “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium” (8). As humans adopt and adapt to new technologies, they open themselves up to change, and change is the message McLuhan wants to highlight, rather than any content communicated by media. Fully aware that “it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (9), he exposes critical points on the timeline of technological evolution.
McLuhan views the transition from orality to literacy as a particularly sensitive and important moment of change. He examines “the parallel between two media” (55)—speech and writing—and to pick apart “their structural components and properties” (49). A key conclusion from this examination is that the literate Western man experiences “fragmentation” or a splintered form of “psychic energy” that causes him to see his cognition and identity as separate from other people and to espouse a world view that mimics the visual uniformity and lineality of alphabetic writing (50). Unlike the “eye man,” the “ear man” of oral cultures views the past and present as a discontinuous mosaic of experience and complex emotion. The ear man would find the sequential cause-and-effect structure of Western logic “quite ridiculous” (86), and he perceives his body as “[including] the whole universe” (124).
In analyzing this “moment of the meeting of media,” McLuhan effectively denaturalizes the familiar medium of writing and creates a “moment of freedom” for us to see (or attempt to see) the conflict that is happening within our selves (55). “Since understanding stops action,” McLuhan writes, this moment is an opportunity to pause at the crossroads of two media and observe their effects. The transformative meeting of orality and writing overhauled human activity. McLuhan believes that if we can understand all media as extensions of ourselves, we could finally be attuned to the fact that “they depend upon us for their interplay and their evolution” (49). Granting human agency, McLuhan encourages readers to intervene and make the choice to understand media.
References:
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.
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