Is the technology
the message?
Lecture 3, 2009
ARIN2600 Technocultures
Chris Chesher
Digital Cultures
University of Sydney

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7GvQdDQv8g

Marshall McLuhan
• 1911–1980
Mechanical Bride (1951)
Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
Understanding Media (1964)
Medium is the massage (1967)
Laws of Media with
Eric McLuhan (1988)

The Medium
is
the Message

Media determinism
• ‘Civilisations’ change with media change
• Media extend human faculties
• Media and thought are closely bound
• inverts disembodiment of information to
argue that medium is all-pervading
• Switches between figure and ground
• From Communication to Medium

Gutenberg Galaxy:
Oral/Aural culture
• Individuals are connected to their
environment & community
• Magical, emotional
• Empathy and participation
• Rituals and memorisation
• Integration of the senses
• Resistance to change

The spoken word was the first
technology by which man was able to let
go of his environment in order to grasp
it in a new way…

Print culture
• Private individual
• independent of environment
• Possessive individualism
• Uniformity and homogenisation
• Alphabet + uniformity of print
• Specialisation
• Detachment
• fixed point of view

Electric age
• Instantaneity — allatonceness
• Decline in linear thinking
• Instant connections; multi-tasking
• Less specialisation
• Retribalisation
• Aware of others watching

The effects of new media on our sensory
lives are similar to the effects of new
poetry. They change not our thoughts
but the structure of our world.

What is intellectual
work?
• For McLuhan…
• Aphorisms & epigrams
• Hyperbole & epochal generalisations
• pattern recognition not Classification
• probes more than concepts
• Teacher / public intellectual
(academic as media event)

Annie Hall (1977)

New media are new http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbaETHAM0Og
archetypes, at first
disguised as degradations
of older media.
These degradations happen
when new media inevitably
use old media as content.
Using the older ones as
content hastens the tidying
up process by which a
medium becomes an art
form (1964)

Understanding several media
simultaneously is the best way of
approaching any one of them.
Any study of one medium helps us to
understand all others

The tetrad
ENHANCE OBSOLESCE
RETRIEVE REVERSE

The tetrad
\"What does the artifact ENHANCE or
intensify or make possible or \"If some aspect of a situation is
accelerate? This can be asked enlarged or enhanced,
ENHANCE OBSOLESCE
concerning a wastebasket, a simultaneously the old condition or
painting, a steamroller, or a zipper, unenhanced situation is displaced
as well as about a proposition in thereby. What is pushed aside or
Euclid or a law of physics. It can be OBSOLESCED by the new 'organ'?\"
asked about any word or phrase in
any language.\"
\"What recurrence or RETRIEVAL of When pushed to the limits of its
earlier actions and services is potential (another complementary
brought into play simultaneously by action), the new form will tend to
RETRIEVE REVERSE
the new form? What older, reverse what had been its original
previously obsolesced ground is characteristics. What is the
brought back and inheres in the new REVERSAL potential of the new
form?\" form?\"

Video
• McLuhan’s Wake
• directed by Kevin
McMahon.
• narrated by Laurie
Anderson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faK9HUvH2ck

Overall focus of this unit
of study…
1. How do technology and culture relate?
• How does technological change affect
perception / society / reality?
2. How can we study technology and
culture?
• ontology, epistemology
• methodologies
• disciplinary influences
• theoretical abstractions

McLuhan’s influences
and legacies

Innis
• 1894-1952
• Space-binding media
• Empire-building
• Time-binding media
• ‘plea for time’

Paul Levinson
• McLuhan follower
• sees McLuhan’s
work fulfilled in
digital media
• Darwinian theory
of media change
• libertarian politics

Media professor/expert Paul Levinson on new media influence (excerpt_
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqZNGYit3kY

Other branches of thought
influenced by McLuhan
• James Carey
Walter Ong
• + culture
+Orality and
• Baudrillard
literacy
• + political economy
Joshua Meyrowitz
• Wired magazine
+social space
• ‘Patron saint’
Raymond Williams
• critic of McLuhan
& technological
determinism

Limitations of McLuhan
Probes fall apart on close inspection
• Paradoxes or inconsistencies?
Epochal analysis
• Is this really a new oral/aural civilisation?
Technological determinism
• Media change seems to cause everything
What happened to social power?