Response: McLuhan

This week I am responding to Understanding Media, the Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan, chapters 1-4, 9, and 31

McLuhan starts out with the idea that media is an extension of self (7). Although he later elaborates on this idea with the Narcissus metaphor, he starts off without defending this idea, as though he felt it were a given. Although I found this to be somewhat annoying, the definition intuitively makes sense to me. McLuhan later goes onto define media as something that “eliminate[s] time and space factors in human association” (9). This makes sense in terms of what Wiener said about humans being the only animal “in whom this desire for communication, or rather this necessity for communication, is the guiding motive of their whole life” (Wiener 3). Communication may be understood as the process of making something known—some idea, concept, emotion, event, etc. Since no two humans have the exact same experience or perception of existence, any act of communication closes the gap, thereby “eliminat[ing] time and space” factors, between the experiences of sender and receiver. So by decreasing the gap between the experience, or self, of sender and receiver, the sender has extended his/herself such that it is closer to the self of the receiver. That got a little rambly, but to sum up what I was trying to say, an act of communication is an attempt to help another person—another self—better understand the self of the communicator, in terms of allowing the receiver to vicariously experience the thoughts, actions, or emotions of the sender. Therefore, the media through which a person him/herself known to another self is, necessarily, an extension of self.

However, McLuhan broadens his definition of media to include things we wouldn’t normally consider to be acts of communication, like tools or cars or clothing (although, in the case of the latter, fashion could be considered the imposing of meaning onto clothing). A tool like a hammer becomes an extension of self in a corporeal rather than metaphysical sense. It extends the hand and magnifies the strength to accomplish a specific task. So while this type of media is not a communicative medium in a person-to-person sense, it is still a medium in that it acts as a channel through which a person interacts with his/her environment. Further, if we think of a “message” in terms of a signal sent to effect a certain end, as Shannon and Weaver defined it, the hammer can be considered to communicate a message between person (sender) and nail (receiver).

Moving on …

Being the language person that I am, I was fascinated by McLuhan’s discussion of how the development of the technology of the phonetic alphabet created the individualist culture of cultures that use such an alphabet. Although I think he is being perhaps a little too categorical in his treatment of the issue—all cultures seem to fit in one box or another for him, without leaving room for grey areas or middle-of-the-road cultures—and he uses very charged terms like “civilized” in a somewhat too nonchalant manner, I think his discussion of how a technology like a phonetic alphabet can revolutionize cultural structure is really interesting. I have always been interested in how the brain uses language to conceptualize the world. Language is both a great tool for making ourselves known to others, and a crutch, in that we begin to rely on it to the extent that it is difficult for us to conceptualize the world outside of the set of grammatical structures and vocabulary presented to us. That’s why, when I read 1984, I found Orwell’s dystopia so terrifying; an effective deconstruction of language such as the Department of Truth was attempting would truly deconstruct people’s ability to even think revolutionary thoughts, because they would have no words for such thoughts.

That was a tangent. Anyway, if language can have such a formative effect on the mind, it makes sense that it should have a similar effect on a culture. The idea that a phonetic alphabet allows for a greater degree of individualization in a culture makes sense because it provides all speakers of the language with the ability to pronounce and look up any word they encounter, even a new one of which they do not know the meaning. Studying Chinese, if I come across a character I have never seen before, there is no way for me to look it up, unless I can input it into an electronic pinyin converter (pinyin being the transliteration alphabet developed for Chinese). I can’t even pronounce a new character without asking someone who knows what it is. So such a language would reinforce communal settings, in which a person must rely on others with superior knowledge to increase his/her own knowledge. With a phonetic alphabet, as long as one knows the phonetic rules of the language, one can easily pronounce a new word or look it up. As such, one can rely on other written media to increase one’s knowledge, and as long as one has access to said media, one does not need other people for this pursuit.

A phonetic alphabet also a more individualist nature than a character-based language in the sense that each letter is itself, and only itself. It corresponds to a sound (or maybe two or three, depending on the phonetic rules of the language), and that is all. In Chinese, there are several basic characters, and then characters made by combining basic characters into more complex characters. So if one recognizes a component in a complex character, one can guess the meaning. This sharing of character components creates linguistic webs of association that mimic the tribal relations McLuhan writes about.