Instead of posting a singular, proprietary response this week, I've made small contributions to several other people's entries. I didn't mark what I added in the text, but it is of course possible to determine it through RecentChanges and revisions. I'm interested in how contemporary "cool" technologies -- like the internet and our wiki which is microcosm and part of it -- can be seen as bearing out (or not) McLuhan's framework. Moreover, especially in light of the fact that the wiki has not spontaneously developed into... something, I want to ask what elements shape our use of technologies, and to what degree we can interpret their effects (like McLuhan seems to) as a transparent function of their particular technical/media form.
This past weekend, I learned how to post pictures with short messages to my blog from my cell phone, and have been doing so daily. This has changed the way I perceive the world, in that I must now parse what aspects of my experience would translate well into cameraphone photos, and what moments in its temporal rhythm are conducive to dashing off a post on the go. It has also obviously changed the way I interface with my favored prosthetic communications technologies. In other words, I can certainly imagine the kind of micro-accommodation that would (or does?) take place in human/machine symbiotic relationships as the technology is constantly in motion. What is not necessarily clear to me is at what point this process becomes the sort of crisis or radical break that McLuhan warns is immanent.
Marc:
In light of what seems an evident but not transparent correlation with postmodernism, it's interesting to note that (as professor Joyrich pointed out in MC44) McLuhan has been taken up as the poster child of both corporate interests (in that he argues that the content of the media is irrelevant) and leftist-intellectual politics. Is this in itself one of his postmodern qualities, or could it be symptomatic of some of the underlying contradictions or failings of his account?
Elan:
It's hard to get around the extreme technological determinism of McLuhan's theory. Up to a point, it sounds like familiar (post)structuralism, with its emphasis on form over content, how things are said rather than what is said. But according to semiotics, signifying conventions are produced by social systems, whereas in McLuhan this relationship is reversed. There's a fundamental (disciplinary? historical?) disconnect that makes it difficult to take his work seriously.
Lucy:
Moreover, if "the medium is the message," in what sense can McLuhan expect his text (notably presented in the print medium) -- or the intellectual understanding of media that is apparently its intended effect -- to interface with the reader in a way that will prepare us for the upcoming crisis in sensory perception? That is, if the vast social consequences of new technologies are fully determined by the essential qualities of the technologies themselves, how could understanding (in book form) intervene? Spencer quite reasonably suggests that McLuhan wants to include his own work in his broad definition of art -- but also raises questions about how this mode of engagement is then conceived.
In light of these problems, I'd like to question more broadly how we can or should read "primary" texts like McLuhan's book. It seems we could engage them in terms of understanding their internal logic, bracketing (at least initially) such reservations as are detailed above. Or we could bring methods of textual criticism to bear on them, revealing some of their underlying contradictions (as Spencer has done. Or we could, like Marc, situate them within their own historical context, in the interest of tracing the development of a kind of intellectual field. As contemporary readers, what can we get out of McLuhan?
