Reading Response: "The Medium is the Message" by Marshall McLuhan

My initial reaction to McLuhan is to his anonymous stanza (p. 6):

In modern thought, (if not in fact)

Nothing is that doesn't act,

So that is reckoned wisdom which

Describes the scratch but not the itch.

This strikes me particularly vis-à-vis the mainstream news networks which have minimal partisan bias. On the surface, they don't seem aware of their part in the political process even though I would suggest that they are complicit. They don't seem to have self awareness or a high level view of the part they play. This thread plays itself out through the rest of McLuhan's piece, and it seems we all play our part. Later, he notes that "any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary" (p. 8). As noted elsewhere, this calls to mind Daniel Quinn's novel Ishamel series, in which he discusses Mother Culture, which surrounds us and penetrates us, but we are not aware of it. And it is we who are at its mercy, certainly until we become aware of it, but I suppose it can even then be controlled and weaponized. Even awareness does not guarantee freedom; McLuhan notes that "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" (p. 10). So perhaps this is the manifesto of uncompromised artists; to liberate themselves and others from this yoke, as well as they can.

The second big takeaway was McLuhan's observations about cubism (which I admittedly have never studied in any depth). Cubism essentially collapses all points of view into one, dropping "the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole" (p. 7) and announcing that "the medium is the message" (p. 7). This strikes me as similar to accounts of various entheogens which reveal the truth or complete picture about an issue. It makes me wonder about peoples' experiences consuming mainstream media while consuming entheogens (although this seems unhealthy to me), and if this complete picture of the 'message' becomes clearer to them.

It strikes me that the effects of technology could perhaps be examined in a layered model, something like the OSI network model. I think McLuhan would suggest that the message goes all the way down to layer 1 (physical). He writes that it is impossible to be unaware of messages when one is constantly surround by them: "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" (p. 9) This sentence almost conjures the behavior of a virus (much the same as the linguistic virus described in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.) These sentiments are also express by Jacques Ellul in his 1954 book Technological Society, in which he asserts that humans are slaves to their technology (technicians) rather than users of it. Similarly, John Berger wrote in 1972 in Ways of Seeing about how the mode of communication influences the actual message. Excerpts from Ellul and Berger give you a fantastic snapshot of their books.