I always embrace any discussion of McLuhan if only because it validates the work of a man who wasn't even around to see his post Gutenberg vision of the media landscape manifest itself so fully, so accurately and arguably even quicker then McLuhan would ever have anticipated. It's completely fair if one wishes to split hairs that the medium isn't quite the message. But only in so much as it's equally fair to assert that it's probably larger than the message typified by the noses of children in the 1950's pressed up against the new fangled TV screen to a story such as Avatar which is solely reliant on the movie medium to create it's unique impact. Straight to DVD speaks for itself but my favourite playful discussion asks that if the medium is the message wouldn't logic point towards the message is the medium? OK I'm kidding but you get what I'm saying I'm sure. The room usually goes quiet when I lob that one in but I've always been fond of a bit mischief.
It's arguable that the movie surpasses the message, for without the movie, the message is diminished by it's own narrative constraints (around a campfire, straight to DVD etc) or it is as it is depending on what your interpretation of is, is. A deliberate confluence of both McLuhan and Clinton. My point being that McLuhan as Joyce scholar was very much a stylistic thing as was the comeback kid's legalese.
It is however clear that McLuhan would have had a lot to say about our existing digital topography and where it points. Pity he died in 1980 and that his mystical like status dissolved pretty much overnight, till resurfacing of late as at least a more thoughtful media analysis of where we were rather than we're at (tempus fugit).
Does anybody really know?
One thing I do is that Digital loves a free ride doesn't it? It would have been great to hear an analysis of this in the context of what McLuhan really excelled at which was as a Medievalist. Essentially it's helpful to get a fix on how long language has been around. Let's call it 30 000 years or so because like the dreams which are so lucidly remembered when we awake, they and their mystical meaning so often evaporate in the short few steps to our morning ablutions and we're so unclear about our communications legacy if it wasn't carved in stone. There's a reason for the dream references, but here's not the place to nip back into talk of pineal glands and the traces of Dimethyltryptamine it both creates and breaks the law at the same time. I find that fascinating.
So yeah language. When the male and female of our species emerged from two million years of a quasi arboreal lifestyle encompassing the dual roles of hunter & gatherer arguably cultivating the male traits of silence and stoicism while waiting for the herd to turn up at the drinking pool, alongside the pragmatically chattering advantages of the female of our species exploiting the value of knowing what berries, nuts and mushrooms to pick at what time of the year and where, it's probable that an animalistic version of communication on a level equal to, or more evolved than say dolphins, pigs, octopi and such like, magically manifested itself to an unprecedent level of compelling complexity into the most potent meme system in the history of man. There is no more spreadable media than assigning words for objects and then assigning arbitrary codes such as uncountable nouns after prepositions and definitive articles. Evolved language was definitely a 'holy fucking shit' moment of such grautuitous common sense and spreadability that every ape worth his or her salt picked up on it like the iTablet fetishism of last nights tweetfest, though more durably.
Equally around this time the neo cortex exploded in size while the lower jaw retracted and so began the first experiment with lifestyle along with the crops that required cultivating, the storage thereof that mandated a security-complex along with arguably a paternalistic 'ownership' and monogamy lifestyle along with the usual suspects of religion, mead brewing and hierachical structures related to, but not quite evolved directly from the instinctive and often silently acquired ones earned as great apes. Politics if you will.
Moving forward (or backwards depending on how you read history) the next Bob Beamon Olympic long jump moment of the day was after the evolution of pictographs which aren't much more than an elaboration on cave paintings into the exciting idea of word languages condensed into an alphabet. It's at this moment that McLuhan steps in to guide us towards the next epiphany, the introduction of print and it's disruptive impact on Western society (excluding China's non-moveable type which kept the whole industry from taking off as the Guttenberg moment did).
It's fairly important to appreciate that prior to print, a different set of cognitive skills were used to consume information. McLuhan highlights that the medieval practice of script consumption dictates a different set of skills from print. We have to LOOK at script as opposed to print (digital or otherwise) which requires READING. Once the first fifty types of say the letter E or e have been understood, we then no longer have to look at the letter and switch into a condensed and linear mode of media consumption that is so far removed from the looking demanded of script writing that it's difficult to comprehend unless we take into account such ideas as the notion of a public, which didn't exist prior to the Guttenberg press.
That's because there was no public but as soon as leaflets and the bible became objects for consumption then the idea of manufacturers and consumers of information warranted the introduction of a public. Prior to that the Kings and the Clergy used to just do stuff unannounced and undiscussed (increase taxes, burn witches etc.) and we would marvel at their silent power. That's all changed now as the hoi polloi (that's me) dive in the creation pool too but it's important to remember that there was a time when the first person in history ever was identified as having the ability to read silently in their head before repeating it. Prior to that everybody just read aloud and so emerged the language of lectures in the academic or monastic environment.
I could go on but I think Faris has written a provocative piece covering McLuhan which admits that there is no discussion of the man without knowing that dance, Roman roads and lightbulbs are media. However, more interestingly the notion of a consumption platform is distilling/emerging (a context?) which is a good thing. In a previous life some might have called this a media type but it all starts to bleed in the digital world in such a gratuitous manner it simply is no longer helpful. How an eReader or iPad differ from a Nexus or a Netbook just complicates the hell out of things but it becomes evident that the size of screen and user interface says a lot, and that the surroundings in which the content can be consumed or more accurately HOW they can be consumed defines to a considerable extent what they are. So a phone under the meeting table for reasons of discretion in a boring meeting has just as many consumption variables on what is read and how it is read as say yesterday's trending topic of #thoughtsonthetoilet which arguably speak for themselves, though again, like in the past I urge that the context be fully explored to really help understand what is going on. By context I totally mean the environment in which media variables are created or consumed because otherwise we're back to the Nexus is different from the iPad which points suspiciously towards "The medium is the message". Which was always a more stylistic assertion on McLuhan's part, than a set in stone media law despite it's heavy counter intuitive logic defying truthiness. Or as Wittgenstein would say. It's true enough!
McLuhan was a Joyce Scholar, a convert to Catholicism and a person who turned the whole deconstruction lens of western thought in on the topic of media and arguably of itself, as itself and by itself. You just can't mess with that when it's done well. Nobody did it better than my main man McLuhan.
