In what ways does technology shape society? This question was of central importance to Canadian intellectual Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980). Throughout his career, he wrote extensively on technology in its many forms. While technological progress has advanced much since McLuhan’s death, his work is still of vital importance to understanding the world in which we live.
Marshall McLuhan is perhaps best known for coining the phrase “the medium is the message.” By this, he meant quite a lot. In the first chapter of Understanding Media, McLuhan wrote that “the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
In a later work titled The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan explained in his famous phrase in similar yet slightly different terms: “The medium, or process, of our time—electric technology—is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life.”
In other words, technological mediums reshape both society and man according to the respective quirks of each. As he saw it, the very introduction of the television (medium), for example, was of far more significance than whatever was being broadcasted on TV (message) – hence “the medium is the message.”
At first glance this might appear as a questionable take to some. On the right, we love to analyze the themes in mass media: music, television, and movies. As such, our emphasis is on the message, rather than the medium, and thus we lose sight of the ways in which the medium is the message.
If we accept McLuhan’s assertion, then what are the ways in which mediums have changed society? Electrical media – which include radio, television, and the internet, which sadly McLuhan did not live to see – has a unifying effect in McLuhan’s view.
Writes the Canadian intellectual in The Medium is the Massage:
Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of "time" and "space" and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism. The old civic, state, and national groupings have become unworkable. Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than "a place for everything and everything in its place." You can't go home again.
Electric technology, by allowing near-instant communication, effectively brought the world together. McLuhan is entirely correct here. Just consider the extent to which the non-American world pays attention to American political and cultural developments. Through electric technology and digital media, most of the world has become American in one form or another. One can undoubtedly go to the far reaches of the globe and find people who are familiar with Donald Trump, Michael Jackson, Brittney Spears, and other American celebrities.
This electrical unification gave rise to what McLuhan dubbed the global village. In a traditional village, privacy is nonexistent – everyone’s in everyone else’s business. These days, you’re but a few clicks away from discovering a previously unimaginable trove of personal information about other people. If they use social media, chances are they’ve volunteered things about their love lives, hobbies, educational history, employment, and so forth. So in this sense, the digital world is in some ways a return to a more primitive, tribal form of being.
But McLuhan’s global village was no communitarian utopia. Indeed, he was quick to point out that tribal societies are often plagued by violence and strife.
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