September 4th: The Medium is the Message!

Plan for the Day

• David Mervin’s “The News Media and Democracy in the United States” (Last Wednesday)
• Marshal McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message”
• Mark Federman’s “What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?”

Technological Determinism vs. Social Construction of Technology

Make sure you understand the difference between the two concepts below. This class privileges a social construction of technology point of view.

• Technological determinism: the idea that a technology is created in a vacuum devoid of social need; often, a lone inventor or team “discovers” a tool that changes social values.
• Social construction of technology: the idea that society and (usually hegemonic) cultural values drive technological creation; inventors pursue new tools based on their understanding or inspiration from prevailing social ideology.

Although this class privileges social constructions of technology, there is a dialectical relationship to consider. The mobile phone–smart or otherwise–is the latest incarnation of a tool for humans to communicate quickly over vast distances. Humans have pursued communication technologies for millennia. However, these tools do change practices and behaviors, but it’s more complicated than claiming they change values. Our adoption of these tools has changed our expectations: we assume we can get a hold of anyone instantly, we consider the phone a security apparatus, we don’t ask “what are you doing” but “where are you” when the receiver answers, etc. Don’t get me started on people wandering the grocery store (or any store) while glued to their phone…

Lynn White, a proponent of the technological determinism perspective, used this horseshoe nail proverb to introduce a chapter in White, L., Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. The problem, I would argue, is that this assumes that the tools are the reason(s) for victory or defeat; however, there’s more to war and diplomacy than simply technologies. There are social factors that seem to demand things come to be. As mentioned already, you can tell a lot about a culture by “reading” the technologies used.

Marshal McLuhan

I’ve expanded the notes here. There are criticisms of McLuhan–even valid ones–but the goal isn’t to defend or refute the medium is the message; instead, it’s to understand the questions it allows you to ask about media and technology in general.

• p. 7: “the medium is the message. This is merely to say 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.”
• p. 8: “the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”
  • Note on technological determinism vs. social construction of technology.
• Message of the electric light (pp. 8-9): Look to the structure that brings electricity to a household/community. Electric lighting communicates the fact that the society has a system of electric power, a grid. It shows modernization, industrialization, and progress. More importantly, though, electric lights extend or change what we can do in the dark.
  • pp. 8-9: Certain activities, such as “brain surgery or night baseball,” are only possible because of electric lighting; therefore, “‘the medium is the message’ because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.”
  • p. 9: “For electric light and power are separate from their uses, yet they eliminate time and space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone, and TV, creating involvement in depth.”
• p. 11: McLuhan considers General David Sarnoff‘s remark that technologies are neutral as “the voice of current somnambulism.”
  • What’s a somnambulist?
  • The “General” of his title is honorific, and he was an early employee of the Marconi Wireless Company.
• p. 15: “For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary. Prediction and control consist in avoiding this subliminal state of Narcissus trance. But the greatest aid to this end is simply in knowing that the spell can occur immediately upon contact, as in the first bars of a melody.”
  • Here’s a discussion about selfies and McLuhan’s definition of narcissim being an extension of oneself as opposed to simply being vainity.
  • Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” (1972)
    “You had one eye in the mirror, as you watched yourself gavotte”
• p. 16-17: Our concept of literacy is socially constructed. We (members of a culture) have biases towards conventional ways of doing things. The norm in culture is seen as truth, and those not conforming are seen as lesser or weird. They don’t understand the “grammar” of the system; they don’t fit our patterns (e.g. a person without a cell phone is a pariah).
• p. 18: The enemy is invisible…
  • “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”
  • McLuhan has detractors, but most of them aren’t versed in Science Technology Studies, specifically, the Rhetoric of Technology, so they think coming up with a quip (e.g., The Medium is (not) The Message) is enough to discredit all of McLuhan’s argument.
• p. 18: The artist’s perception…”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 without impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.”
  • Yeah, it’s unfortunate older writers didn’t use non-binary language. There weren’t just male artists back then.
• Fixed charges regarding commodities (p. 21): Societies have commodities that are, for lack of a better term, givens. The community accepts (it doesn’t have to be conscious) these commodities as givens, which “create the unique cultural flavor of any society.”{i.e. NASCAR is a given in Charlottean culture…pasta is a given in Italian culture…oil, cable TV, mobile phones are givens in American culture}
• Jung quote image: Keith Herring’s Free South Africa drawing.

Here’s a good 2-page explanation of McLuhan’s theory.

Locating American Values

Because this course is a theoretical exploration of how we can locate a society’s values by “reading” its technologies, we ought to think about what those values are. This page asks you to think about American values–it’s from a different class, so don’t get too attached. The goal of this next exercise is to identify values that we might be able to “read” in technologies from American society.

Keep up With the Reading

Next week, the readings on Canvas start to get longer, so stay on top of them. Also, make sure you respond to Weekly Discussion Post #3 before Friday, 9/6, 11:00pm. These are easy grades to get, so don’t skip them.