Media as the Unrelenting Mental Colonizer

Reflections on McLuhan's 'The Medium is the Message'

The personal and social consequences of a new medium come from the medium itself, not the way it is used. The arrival of any new technical form already contains within it every possible way it could be used. Therefore, it must be evaluated based on all of its possible consequences, rather than on one or another particular use. Similar to how Leibniz describes the monad. The monad already contains all of its potential with itself. It sees into the future, it brings with it the past. Media is like hot metal liquid poured into the cast. It does not matter if you pour it in from the left, from the right, or while doing a handstand. As long as the metal is poured into the cast, it will fill out all available space. Media is the same way. Each new medium will manifest all its potentialities. Evaluation of each new technology must be made with this understanding. It is not about this or the use of a new technology. We must judge based on the totality of consequences. "Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message,” Marshall McLuhan states in the first chapter of Understanding Media: The Extension of Man.¹

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McLuhan states that electric light is illuminating for us to understand this connection - light is pure information, but if electric light is used to spell out words in a sign, that is another medium: the written word. The content of a medium is always another medium. "The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph".² New media may enlarge the scale of previous media. The locomotive increased the reach and scale of the wheel. The airplane, however, dissolves the wheel, achieving the same means (travel) without the same method (wheels).

With light, it doesn't matter what it is used for. The medium shapes the form of human association, not the content. Light is not given sufficient attention as a medium, and McLuhan argues that this is illustrative of how no one today studies media properly. "The latest approach to media study," McLuhan states, "considers not only the “content” but the medium and the cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates. The older unawareness of the psychic and social effects of media can be illustrated from almost any of the conventional pronouncements".³

Unfortunately, it seems as though the latest approach McLuhan spoke about has receded into the background. Instead of seeking an understanding of the broader context and systemic implications of each new form of media, many today are more concerned with media literacy. The self-described media literates are merely using shorthand to signal that they are extremely susceptible to propaganda.

Media literacy is even worse than focusing on the specific content as the prime area of study. These buffoons do not even do that. Rather, they restrict their study to only understanding the content as the creator intended it. Unless it is Fallout - then the author is wrong.

McLuhan pulls no punches going after the dunces who repeat the adage that X is not good or bad, it all depends on how someone uses it!

Suppose we were to say, “Apple pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value.” Or, “The smallpox virus is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value.” Again, “Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.” That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good. If the TV tube fires the right ammunition at the right people it is good. I am not being perverse. There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form.⁴

Technology can only add itself. It only proliferates. McLuhan paradoxically states that mechanization is the cause of growth and change, while at the same time, it eliminates the possibility of growth and the ability to understand change. He draws on Hume, arguing that because mechanization merely consists of ordering fragmented parts in a series, we cannot deduce causality. Hume excludes the principle of causality from mere sequence. "Nothing follows from following, except change."⁵ Electricity reversed this paradox of change by making everything instant, allowing us to once again understand causality.

Does this make no sense to you? McLuhan uses sound as an example to demonstrate. As an airplane breaks the sound barrier, the sound waves become visible as they roll over the wings of the plane. McLuhan states "The sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends is an apt instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance".⁶ The advent of movies transforms perception once again, taking us away from the world of mechanization and into the world of creative configuration and structure. With movies comes Cubism, the total dropping of perspective, and emphasis on total 2D representation. The movie screen is not like the eye. The eye has a focal point in the very center, where perception has the highest resolution. The resolution of perception drops off as attention is drawn away from the pupil in any direction. The periphery has a far lower resolution than the center. The movie screen, on the other hand, has uniform resolution. Each corner of the screen has the same resolution as the center. The movie, along with cubism, is emblematic of simultaneous perception. Simultaneous stimulation has pervaded physics, painting, poetry, and communication.

Electric speed and total field allow us to see that the medium is the message:

The message, it seemed, was the “content,” as people used to ask what a painting was about. Yet they never thought to ask what a melody was about, nor what a house or a dress was about. In such matters, people retained some sense of the whole pattern, of form and function as a unity. But in the electric age this integral idea of structure and configuration has become so prevalent that educational theory has taken up the matter. Instead of working with specialized “problems” in arithmetic, the structural approach now follows the line of force in the field of number and has small children meditating about number theory and “sets."⁷

Grammar, or structure, does not only apply to language written and spoken. Cardinal Newman said that Napoleon understood the grammar of gunpowder. That is to say, he understood the structure and rules of war, the background mechanics that allowed him to traverse the structure with ease as long as he made no errors. Tocqueville explained how the printed word homogenized French society into a single coherent structure. Grammar has a homogenizing tendency. Homogenization of French culture through the dissemination of print enabled the literati to dominate the structure and foment revolution. McLuhan points out that Tocqueville believed that the diversity and specificity of the English common law tradition prevented a French-style revolution in England. There was no homogenized grammar of society to grab the reigns of. The Americans, on the other hand, did not have these English institutions to root out, so they were able to create something new. England clung to an oral common-law tradition, whereas America created a new system.

McLuhan discusses the conflict between sight and sound, "between written and oral kinds of perception and organization of existence".⁸ In the West, rational is understood as uniformity and sequence. Reason and literacy are conflated. Rationalism is assumed to be a certain kind of technology: the written word. Spengler makes a similar critique of the rationalists, who try to understand speech in the confines of a solitary study environment. As I wrote in ‘Grand Enterprise and the Unequal Destiny of Mankind:

The rationalists brought another equally false assessment of language and speech. Spengler paints the rationalist researcher as one undergoing a solitary academic endeavor, locked away in an office reading papers and books. They believe that thought is the object of speaking, and that the sentence at the core expresses a judgment. This understanding is a result of the bias built into their method of research. "They sit at their writing tables, surrounded by books, and research into the minutiae of their own thoughts and writings," Spengler says. The speech they are researching is exclusively monologic. They view speech as oration, lecture, and discourse. The rationalists, with this view of speech, then try to assess speech generally to no avail. They forget that speech is a fundamentally relational phenomenon. The one hearing is as important to the process as the one speaking.

To have cross-cultural communication, we must have an understanding of media and the way it transforms the human experience. Human beings are diverse, and the different media different cultures and civilizations have used throughout the centuries create fundamentally different modes of experiencing the world. Adjusting from one culture, with its many layers of media, to another is no easy task. It is not as simple as a civics class and a citizenship exam. Electricity complicates the matter, though. Western technology, when dropped into an undeveloped area, is a whirlwind for the natives, completely uprooting their understanding of reality. Electricity does this to Westerners and non-Westerners alike. McLuhan states:

We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation. We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture.⁹

Thus we experience a collective mental breakdown. McLuhan is not discussing the internet here directly, but he may as well be. Electricity results in "Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns of information".¹⁰ Electronic media uprooted the literacy-dominant culture in the West. McLuhan warned that society was in no way prepared to cope with the onset of the electric age. Nor was it able to cope with the onset of the digital age. Media proliferates and self-replicates, and the human mind is none the wiser. It is hopeless to try a defensive stance because most do not recognize that the problem even exists:

Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as “content.” The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The “content” of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech... The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns 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.¹¹

Media is phenomenological reshuffling. It dominates our perception of the world and other people without asking for consent. There is no agency involved. Genius or madness discovers the new medium, and then it automatically infects the population. Media is autonomous. To understand the impact that media has had on a population, one only needs to visit a control group, if one exists. But one must understand that the medium enframes reality, as Heidegger explained of technology. McLuhan points to Professor Wilbur Schramm, who sought to understand the impact of television on children. However, his survey questions came from a literary approach. He only sought to understand what content the children understood, rather than how they understood the content. Leonard Doob, on the other hand, described an African man who would listen to the BBC news every night. He could not understand any of the subject matter, but "His attitude to speech was like ours to melody — the resonant intonation was meaning enough."¹²

Pope Pius XII warned that man's inner stability depends on his ability to reach an equilibrium between media and our capacity to react to it. "Failure in this respect has for centuries been typical and total for mankind. Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users."¹³ As a result, mankind is at war. It is a media civil war, with different forms of media at war with each other in our minds and culture. Electronic, virtual, and digital media have certainly taken over, but the various sub-media contained within still battle vigorously.

McLuhan compares media to economic resources to drive the point home:

Technological media are staples or natural resources, exactly as are coal and cotton and oil. Anybody will concede that a society whose economy is dependent upon one or two major staples like cotton, or grain, or lumber, or fish, or cattle is going to have some obvious social patterns of organization as a result. Stress on a few major staples creates extreme instability in the economy but great endurance in the population. The pathos and humor of the American South are embedded in such an economy of limited staples. For a society configured by reliance on a few commodities accepts them as a social bond quite as much as the metropolis does the press. Cotton and oil, like radio and TV, become “fixed charges” on the entire psychic life of the community. And this pervasive fact creates the unique cultural flavor of any society. It pays through the nose and all its other senses for each staple that shapes its life.¹⁴

Jung argued that the average Roman citizen became like a slave due to his constant being surrounded by slaves. We are in the same boat. We become like our computers, smartphones, televisions, cars, medicines, homes, etc. Media is the ubiquitous colonizer of our minds. Without understanding media, we cannot understand our world and how it changes. We have recently begun to experience life with LLM's. They will only take a stronger hold on the world around us as time goes on, regardless of how good or bad they turn out to be. Ozempic and Neuralink also come to mind as new media that is and will transform our culture and reality.

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1. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extension of Man. Berkeley: Gingko Press, 1964. Page 16.

2. Ibid. Page 17.

3. Ibid. Page 19.

4. Ibid. Page 20.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid. Page 21.

7. Ibid. Page 22.

8. Ibid. Page 24.

9. Ibid. Page 25.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid. Page 26-17.

12. Ibid. Page 28.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid. Page 29.