The Power of Speech

McLuhan Revisite

Mcluhan Revisited

When Marshall Mcluhan wrote his famous treatise on media, there was a mistake in the title. That is the origin of the "Medium is the massage" phrase.  Fifty years later, these words still ring true.  We are massaged into a state of passive complacency in the same way that a lobster is lulled to sleep while being boiled alive in hot water.  The medium is surrounding us with a state of bombarding messages that massage us into believing we are actually disseminating information. 

But we are living in this false bubble of information and if Mcluhan were alive today he would be fascinated and repelled with the internet and you-tube and streaming videos that bombard the viewer.  Witness the recent disclosure that many of our top retired generals were "spinning" the administration and Pentagon versions of events because if they spoke the truth, they were threatened with the loss of access to their sources. And thus, would lose their lucrative deals as network "talking heads" on air.

And remember the excitement of all the network news shows, the supposedly "left leaning" CNN and others as they prepared to "embed" with the troops when they invaded Iraq?  There were no hard questions asked in the lead-up to the Iraq war. And not too many of the top journalists turned down the chance to ride along with the troops as they spun and fabricated their way into the heart of Baghdad. 

In today's terms, some of Mcluhan's most prescient and insightful comments had to do with the public's perception of change.  The internet and the "blog-osphere" are hard to grasp for some people.  The reality of an ever-changing perception in a 24-hour news cycle is out of the realm of understanding for some people.  According to Mcluhan, "We're going into the future while looking backwards in the rear view mirror. We're marching backwards into the future."  It's easier to understand what he means by this when we look at our solutions to the problems associated with international terrorism.  It's like Mark Twain said, "To a man with a hammer, all problems look like nails."

What does it all mean? Well, Mcluhan himself explained it best. Here are some "Applied Mcluhanism's"for the 21st century:

1.When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body, according to Mcluhan. He somehow knew there would be a cyberspace 10 or 20 years before its invention!

2. All advertising advertises advertising.  The fact that most of the time we mute our televisions doesn't stop the people on Madison Avenue. They simply print the words now, and often include music to "lure" us into the commercial!

3. In Understanding Media he put the matter this way: " Since the inception of the telegraph and radio, the globe has contracted, spatially, into a single large village. Tribalism is our only resource since the electro-magnetic discovery. Moving from print to electronic media we have given up an eye for an ear."

. He also said that "People don't actually read the newspapers every morning. They step into them like a hot bath! In other words, they "immerse" themselves in the news of the day. And with the advent of multimedia, we've moved again from ear to eye!

4.Mcluhan: "The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure".  And the same holds true for the world wide web. It is the newest railway of information to navigate or "surf".

A recent study shows that Television is predicted to be the future of media information with large growth expected in developing countries like China. The future media may contain a sophisticated mix of computer tech combined with the entertainment of television and the instantaneous appeal of "texting"!  We can only guess how far the global village will take us in the next 50 years.

The question is how humans will respond to the idea of "instantaneous connections" and the overflow of information sources we can "google"?  At this stage, young people (under 30) don't look at digital clock faces to read the time. They carry their phones and see it displayed.  They also have a hard time making change in today's currency.  Certain functions of 20th century life will be obsolete in twenty years. The big question is what will they be?

Newspapers and how people will comprehend news is another unknown. If advertising and "product placement" continues on its inevitable path, we will have embedded advertisement in most TV  shows and movies.  They will continue to "pop-up" to be drilled into our psyche.  Madison Avenue is in a way, much more insidious and harmful to our well-being than the oil companies.  That's because the oil big-wigs want only money in their determination to continue the path of promoting our dependence on fossil fuels.

But the Madison Avenue executives are much more harmful to our psyches. How we perceive the flow of information and our perceptions of reality can become intertwined with the way information is mapped out and sold to the viewer/citizen. For instance, we have found that the government laid out their plans to sell wars and market invasions based on the marketing dictates and stratagems employed by Madison Avenue.

5  Here's another Mcluhanism: "Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions" - This is tied in the "solutions" that candidates routinely trot out to the public every 4 years in the midst of a Presidential election.  All candidates feverishly scramble to offer the public another brand and market themselves to voters as "new and improved". 

One only has to watch the great film about the manifest destiny of the American war machine, "The Fog of War" to realize that the American public has long been cannon-fodder for corporations and the military-industrial complex as it's explained by Robert McNamara in the film. The casualty rates have been statistically broken down and analyzed from World War II through the present day and this includes automobile deaths, health care and war.

We are truly marching into the future wearing blinkers from the last 100 years of enterprise. We need look no further than our recent past to realize the genius of Marshall Mcluhan as he tried to enlighten us about the impending problems associated with mass media and the mass marketing of civilization within the global village.