On McLuhan’s Message

  Facing the realization, or perhaps re-realization that the content of a given medium does not actually hold the content, only distraction, and rather it is the medium itself that contains the content, and thus the “message” reduced me to a moment of dumbfounded clarity. Doubly interesting is that this theory is presented, and in effect tested in the “cool” medium of the printed word., whereas I am “penning” my response in the uncontrollably “hot” medium of the computer, and interfacing through the light emitting Liquid Crystal Display. These seemingly disparate mediums are actually intrinsically connected as both are rectilinear displays that have the potential to display very similar replicas of documents, but it is in the glow of the LCD display that we see that the computer’s computational complexity allows it to show multiple copies of a given text, and multiple texts on the same screen. It is also in this glow that we see through the image and into the real space of the medium; the not necessarily linear bridging in reverse from the LCD display, to the Television, to Cinema, to the Printed Word, to Hand Written Word, to Speech, and ultimately to thought. Marshall McLuhan in his treatise is ultimately attempting to remove the image consumer from a position of the vitctim, and instead promote a healthy skepticism of what a particular medium’s far ranging social implications entail.

A medium, as McLuhan defines in the first paragraph of Understanding Media, is “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.” (7) This is to say that McLuhan is speaking about the concept of a medium not in the strict sense of common connotation; painting, photography, cinema, television, (subsequently internet/ the web), etc., but rather as the function that allows a person to communicate; to extend, beyond oneself. This means that every medium, be it a traditionally conceptualized one such as the printed word, or McLuhan’s slightly more abstract one of the electric light, ultimately refers back to human thought. The re-realization that the information being passed through these extended mediums is essentially static and lateral to communication, and not “the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” is thus staggering. The “content” (as McLuhan denotes in quotation marks) thus is a mediated form of distraction, a form of distraction that generally is very effective in distracting the consumer of “information” from seeing through this mediation and to the base system of communication; thought and to the implications of the form of the given medium.

It is the glow of the LCD screen, or the brightness of the electric light; it is the Times Square in which one loses all geographic equilibrium and is flooded by the hyper (un)reality and compression of a multitude of mediums, all content-less, attacking at all sides. This Times Square, a seeming unending matrix of light mirrors in a three dimensional physical space the discontinuous “hot” medium of television. It is this rapid switching, from visual, to visual that allows Times Square to function in its present day manner. This is to say, that the human conditioning of how to watch a television, how to channel surf has prepared one most appropriately for a walk through Times Square.

The world, as McLuhan has pointed out has become completely mediated to the point where we as consumers of this mediation, and the objects of our now image driven society have an extremely difficult time recognizing the nuanced shifts in the structures of form, and its ability(ies) to direct and influence the flow of information. Baudelaire in his treatise On Photography from the Salon of 1859 takes the position of the romantic and impassioned Frenchman in one of the earliest published examples of the modern media society’s ability to generalize a medium’s components and functions. In On Photography Baudelaire mourns the death of “art”; the impending doom of painting in the eye of the mechanical precision, and deleterious form of the camera. This is extremely problematic because it automatically rules out the potentialities of the new medium, in the light that this new form of thought is impinging upon the structure of former medium(s).

The miscalculation of thought that Baudelaire made in the implementation of photography as artistic practice is seeing a resurgance recently in the light of the “digital revolution”. This similar attitude is pervading image culture, as photographic “purists” (David Hockney, Clifford Ross, Kodak[dinosaur able to adapt?] ) are promoting the death of photography in the invention of the pixel. In relation to McLuhan, at the elemental level, the pixel is cleary a departure from, photographic grain. As a substrate for capturing light the CMOS chip (How Digital Cameras Work) captures and records light in three separate color channels; red, green, and blue, and following the compression of these elements one is left with an image that can be edited down to the most finite piece of information; the pixel. That is to say a digital image can be constructed, edited, or deconstructed from a completely arbitrary perspective, the only delimiter of the medium is the user’s ability to manipulate this space. This is an extreme shift from the “traditional” photographic process where any changes to the integrity of the image required much more manual technical expertise, and other laborious endeavours (LINKS). Culturally, this new medium has incredible implications as the masses are able to embrace at the beginning at least, only enough of an idea about digital processes to make them dangerous, or more appropriately, doubt the veracity of the photographic image. We are at an integral point in the shifting of our visual culture to employing this new medium, or at least the transitional elements of the new medium, and it will be extremely interesting to see how Mcluhan and his ideas are applied to the development and cultural understanding of this transition.