McLuhan sees the electric age as spelling the end for the age of industrialisation and typography, media responsible for what McLuhan calls the 'typographic man' - a culture of endless reproduction and perfect conformity. With the electric age there is a return to 'tribal man', a de-emphasising of the visual culture that has been dominant in the West since the Renaissance and a re-appreciation for the faculty of touch: the involvement of the entire sensorium.
Writing in the 60's, McLuhan envisions a total electric culture occurring within less than a decade: a decentralised, instantaneous world. Yet that has failed to arrive. The old culture of the industrial age continues to coexist alongside the electric culture, we live in a protracted period of transition. And while McLuhan sees electric technology as decentralising, as this being intrinsic to the medium, as the technology matures and becomes entwined in our lives we see more and more a centralising tendency. While the early Internet was characterised by countless Mom-and-Pop shops, the mature face of e-commerce is dominated by a few big players, ditto for search and for social media. And the future seems to be bringing further consolidation as large tech companies expand into the fields of media production, providing software, hardware, programming and infrastructure. At the same time there is ample evidence of tribalism, of the loss of a unified sense of culture, a dissolution of the notion of nationalism and of a demand for more engagement. Consumers are no longer satisfied to be passive and demand interaction with their identified brands and expect responsiveness. So while McLuhan seems to imply a singular direction for the future, the reality has unfolded more messily (as it always does), with bits of the past stubbornly hanging on well past their expiry dates.
There are of course parts of McLuhan's arguments that I take issue with or just plain don't quite understand, and I wanted to lay some of that out here. McLuhan maintains throughout that the medium is the message: that the mode of the media itself is the dominant transformational force on culture and that the content - any specific programming such as news or "funnies" etc. - is not really relevant to that. McLuhan identifies media as either "hot" or "cool", with hot media being those that basically shout at the receiver with little to no interaction and cool media being those that involve the receiver a great deal. Television is a cool medium, as it presents a mosaic of images that require a great deal of audience participation while movies are a hot medium, presenting as it does a linear narrative derived from the visual and typographic culture of literature. Perhaps these distinctions can be maintained, but when one drills down into McLuhan's own reasoning it is not clear that they can be.
McLuhan's own statements on movies in comparison to TV seem to undermine his own philosophy that the medium is the message. The differences he identifies are generally all of a content character. He notes that movies are crass advertisements for capitalism, but this is not an inevitable part of the medium itself as McLuhan even admits the emergence of more ‘TV-like’ programming coming to movies. The "mosaic" tapestry of images that McLuhan attributes to TV are largely due to the low resolution of the televised image in comparison to the crisp image presented in the theatre. In the time since McLuhan's writing this distinction has disappeared (or at least shifted), with TV now able to present extremely crisp high-definition images that don't require squinting one's eyes to perceive. Is the bump in TV resolution part of the medium or part of the content? As anyone who has gone through the switch from standard-definition to high-definition television can attest, it's both. One needs a new TV and the programming needs to be broadcast in the appropriate format. Another aspect of TV - those pesky advertisements - give TV a certain rhythm uncommon to film, and the ability to channel surf further complicates the viewing experience, making it more interactive and personal. But some subscription channels may do away with advertisements entirely (a change in the content), while recording technology enables viewers to skip or do away with ads entirely. And while McLuhan saw that TV-like programming was coming to film, the more recent past has seen film-like programming come to TV, with sophisticated dramas comprised of singular sequential narratives (not unlike a novel) finding a home in the living room as the theatre has become increasingly the haven for a mosaic of bombast and spectacle. Have the media changed so much that they are no longer what they were when McLuhan categorised them? It's interesting that McLuhan can assert a categorical difference between movies and TV without presenting any clear definitions of what he means by each term while in the present day the only distinction seems to be that of convention.
Increasingly the differences between media have blurred, with everything available seemingly everywhere. What’s the difference between a TV show (or a Netflix one) and a movie if both are watched on one's phone while commuting on the tube? For that matter what’s the difference between listening to a podcast and listening to music? The information age has slowly eroded hardware distinctions so that the same device can play movies, television, listen to music or talk shows, be used to read the news or to write a letter or play a game. Further this enables plenty of cross-pollination between these forms, giving rise to all sorts of hybrids. A computer can emulate a television set, or a radio, or a musical keyboard, or just about any other device. What is important seems to be more the content: are you running the 'TV program' (e.g. the Netflix App) or the 'radio program' (e.g. the Podcast App)? Granted this 'content' is at a higher level of abstraction than the programming one downloads for them, and McLuhan might well have identified Apps and other such software packages all as new forms of media. But it gets tricky, with the same programming spanning across multiple 'media', and the proliferation and short life spans of these new media meaning that their specific cultural effects are probably quite difficult to gauge.
McLuhan says we have been blinded by hardware, not realising that it is the information that defines the media. But without distinctions of hardware (how and where and when and with whom one receives media) or content, can there even be said to be more than one kind of media, that of pure information itself? McLuhan himself doesn’t really follow his own advice in ignoring hardware, as he considers whether media is high definition or low definition to be a key part of it (it can change the media’s temperature for example), and this is an aspect that is determined by the content, the hardware (screen resolution and processing power for example) and infrastructure (available bandwidth). And if it is the information that defines the medium, well, isn't that the programming? What information does McLuhan exclude from programming and allow as intrinsic to the medium?
McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media. London: Routledge & K. Paul.
References
McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media. London: Routledge & K. Paul.
