How Electronic Media Revives the Pre-modern Mind
The work of Marshall McLuhan still provides one of the most powerful analytical lenses through which to understand the deep cultural shifts happening around us today. My first introduction to him was reading his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. It was academic theory, but reads like an obscure, poetic oracle. What could it mean that a lightbulb – really – is a conveyance of information? He effortlessly weaves Ovid, Shakespeare, and Joyce into a theory of the nexus of human thought and technology, sometimes as perplexing as it is thrilling. His more systematized later work, The Laws of Media better conveys the wide-reaching explanatory power of his ideas.
McLuhan is most famous for the phrase “the medium is the message.” By this he means that when we are trying to evaluate what impact a given medium (or technology) will have on a culture, it is not the content of the medium that matters, but its form. If we are trying to understand the profound cultural effect of the internet, for example, it is useless to discuss the goodness or badness of the content of these or those sites. Rather, the most relevant kind of analysis looks at what kind of thing the internet as a whole is – how it works, who uses it, how it has and will obliterate other technologies and institutions that we had heretofore viewed as indispensable. Most fundamentally, we ought to ask how the internet changes our relationship to truth and sense-making – how we learn what the world is like and, crucially, how we decide which sources to trust. Unfortunately, McLuhan’s career did not extend into the internet age, but many of the cultural trends that he highlighted in his work have been put into overdrive as more of the world lives their lives through their screens.
It’s worth pointing out that he uses the term “media” more broadly than we expect. Media for McLuhan includes any artefact by which we mediate with our environment, which help us achieve our ends. The label does apply to newspapers and magazines, as they disseminate information to help us learn about our world, but it does also to any other tool such as a knife, a credit card, or an atomic bomb. Each of these likewise alters the world by their mere existence in ways that are difficult to fathom comprehensively. The use of each of these brings to fuller expression the heart of human nature, the terror and wonder of its potential. Nevertheless, his work focuses primarily on the media by which cultures communicate information: the phonetic alphabet, on the one hand, and the new electronic forms of media that are fundamentally altering the way we think, speak, and act.
The power of McLuhan lies in his idea that these two media forms account for the deepest cultural shifts in history. When the phonetic alphabet came to preeminence in ancient Greece, things began to change. Pagan ritual turned into theater. Philosophy replaced myth. Poetic meaning was discarded in favor of “literal” meaning. Rome, the cultural heir of Greece, took this foundation and turned it into empire, leveling the continent with industrialized military might, straight roads, and procedural law. When Rome fell, so did European culture fall back into preliterate myth and tribalism. But the literate media forms, preserved by the Church, came back to prominence. Still Christians, they began to think again as Greeks, to govern as Romans. The trends of literate culture came to full expression after Gutenberg: the hyper-philosophical reduction of all knowledge to abstract conceptual bits (that mirrors a reality they take to be composed of material bits) strung together in explanatory sequence, which underlies an unbridled faith in reason and the positive linear trajectory of humankind.
We stand today more than a century into the next cultural shift, the cause of which McLuhan attributes to the rise of electronic media. Beginning with the arrival of the telegram, and increasing with the use of radio, cinema, television, and on into the internet age, the corollaries of literate culture have been waning (though, of course, still obviously present). The old way fell under criticism for being insensitive to context or qualitative nuance. The ideal of empire dissolved. Objectivism gave way to the multiplicity of perspective. Existentialists reintroduced human ineffability to the universe-as-mechanism model of the enlightenment. Even the supposed rational purity of the rule of law is held in suspicion, now seen as vitiated by the deeper underlying forces of class interest and ethnicity (read “tribe”). As we shift into a post-literate age, the hallmarks of literate culture are fading in clarity, just as those of pre-literate culture are coming back into focus.
Literate Culture: A World of Mechanism and Theory
But can we really attribute these changes to, of all things, the phonetic alphabet? How could such a seemingly banal technology change the tides of history? While, of course, no theory can comprehensively explain the infinite intricacies of history, the breadth of explanatory efficacy in McLuhan’s work is surprising. So what is it about the phonetic alphabet that has such a profound effect?
As he explains in The Laws of Media, what makes the phonetic alphabet unique is that it breaks spoken language down into meaningless bits of sound – the phoneme – and renders them in written form by a series of meaningless shapes – the consonant. In other forms of written language, such as ideograms or those composed of syllabaries, the building blocks by which more complex words and sentences are written are themselves meaningful concepts (e.g. “paw” is a unit of a syllabary but also itself means father). The language never delves below a basic unitary gestalt. The “meaning” of a letter in a phonetic alphabet, on the other hand, is an arbitrary shape-sound association, which the student is forced to learn by rote memorization. To read a word, we visually assemble a sequence of shapes from which to abstract a sequence of corresponding sounds, and from there a concept arises. This process relies more on the visual sense and the left hemisphere of the brain than other methods of written language. Thus, and this is the key, the way in which these literate societies perceive and make sense of their world is far more reliant on the visual sense and left-brain hemisphere than pre-literate ones, resulting in wildly different modes of thought. (If this still seems farfetched, I recommend reading the full account in The Laws of Media).
The emphasis of the visual sense leads to two notable tendencies. Both can be best understood if we first think of our experience of the world without the visual sense (try closing your eyes). The first thing we notice is a markedly different experience of objects. It is no longer a shape with boundaries defined within my visual field. Instead, it can only be apprehended as a tactile impulse that is novel, perhaps unexpected or mysterious, against the ground of less interesting tactile inputs. As a blind man reaches forward for his drink, he feels at first nothing… nothing… nothing… ah! there it is. The object is approached and apprehended as a figure arising from a ground, understood in relation to its ground. Our hearing works the same way. Voices come to us from a ground of silence. We don’t notice the hum of our car engine until an unexpected (and foreboding) click and clack arise from it. We understand the object as necessarily arising from, and related to, its context. This figure-ground mode of apprehension contrasts with the visual mode in which objects are apprehended and understood by their having clearly delineated boundaries. They are figures without ground, far less dependent on context, and accessed at a distance.
The second notable difference of the non-visual-dominant perceptual world is the effect it has on our conception of space. If we close our eyes, we become more acutely aware of our being at the center of our perceptual experience. Auditory or tactile inputs are liable to come at us from any direction, and objects of our experience have a more direct relation to us as observers, that is, they are more obviously perspective-relative than objects of visual perception. Because the subject lies at the center of this acoustic space, out of which ears and fingers strive to perceive the outer world, that world is understood as spherical – the kind of space that has a center. Thus preliterate cultures innately characterized the heavens as a dome above, the grave as the valley beneath (and because they are preliterate, there is a poetic multiplicity of meanings in each of these ideas). The visual sense, and visual-biased literate cultures, on the other hand, perceive space in Euclidean terms. It is a neutral expanse, extending infinitely in any direction. There is no obvious “center,” and if there were, the observer would not intuitively put himself there. The observer is in fact almost suppressed from the world entirely. Whatever we see, we see it as if from the outside looking in, as if through a frame. We stand, as it were, outside the world and see it “objectively.”
The practical use of the phonetic alphabet also requires an emphasized reliance on the left hemisphere of the brain, which is more quantitatively inclined. It perceives the component parts of the whole and specializes in maintaining proper order and sequence of items. This contrasts with the right hemisphere, which collects the components and perceives the meaning they express in unity. For example, the left hemisphere sees a nose, a mouth, a chin, and eyes in sequence, but the right assembles the images into a meaningful and recognizable face. The left keeps proper track of the letters and words of a sentence, but the right comprehends the meaning of the unified whole. McLuhan theorizes that this feature of the brain accounts for the tendency of literate cultures to seek understanding by breaking down objects of investigation into component parts.
The upshot here is that the proclivities of the visual sense and left hemisphere of the brain – perceiving figures with clearly delineated boundaries and without ground, suppressing the centrality of the observer’s perspective, and emphasis on the ordered sequence of components rather than an intuited unity and wholeness – have become the defining features of thought structures in cultures that communicate thought by a phonetic alphabet. In general, these are the features that distinguish Western thought from all other cultures on earth.
Knowledge in literate cultures became synonymous with theory, which is a word, related in Greek to “theater”, which itself suggests a bias toward the visual sense. Now, the entire point of a theory is that it is objective – it is the real truth, the true truth, kept pure from irrational bias and human perspective error. This is only possible if the centrality of the observer is suppressed entirely (that centrality, incidentally, is precisely what the work of post-modern philosophy reasserts). I am not mocking the idea of objectivity. A measure of it, or at least a pretense of it, is required for me to write this (or you to read this) in good faith. I would argue it has its place in any sane system of thought. But, when taken toward its extreme, objectivism discounts the perspectival aspect of any thought or word out of hand and imagines itself to rise above critique.
The theories by which the literate culture comes to understand the world are constructions of atomized pieces of thought. Theories can be broken down into collections of arguments; these are broken down into collections of propositions; these into collections of terms or concepts, which are abstracted from our sense data. Thus the knowledge-seeking endeavor of the West is to break our world into clearly delineated conceptual bits that must be reassembled in properly ordered sequence (concept à proposition à argument à theory). When this is done properly (and published in a peer-reviewed journal), the result is regarded as unassailable, objective fact, another jigsaw piece of the grand narrative. The first attempt at seeking universal truth by proposition-sequencing is attributed to a wandering Athenian named Socrates. It is this foundation upon which Western academia has been built.
The world that these philosophers and scientists investigate is likewise conceived as being fundamentally composed of material bits. Atomic theory, whether in the age of Democritus or Newton, springs from the same left-brain impulse. To understand nature means to understand its component parts, the laws by which they assemble, break apart, and move through time. Eventually, philosophical ideas of formal and final causes operating in nature are abandoned in favor of efficient cause. It is supposed that this causation, the forward temporal flow of cause-and-effect, is the only one that can be real. The cosmos is – at bottom – only an endless motion of predictable efficient causation, a beautiful mechanism of infinitesimal matter shot about like billiard balls on a table. It is not my purpose here to say that this is false, only to summarize McLuhan’s point that this is the view we would expect from a literate culture: a world broken into clearly delineated bits, understood by theory that properly orders and sequences their movements.
We see the same tendencies as we move into the daily life of these cultures. Social organization takes on many of the same mechanistic qualities. The phonetic alphabet naturally gives rise to a mode of thinking and communicating that is direct and objective, the meaning of which is detached from human emotion or bias, clear in its abstraction, free from poetic nuance or allusion. This allows the speaker or writer to precisely capture their thought on a page. Whether the message includes the command of the emperor, the company policy, or the assembly instructions for mass-produced goods, it can be sent to the ends of the earth without corruption or misunderstanding. Fine-tuned organization and coordination become possible even at the scale of global empire. Industrialization is all but inevitable, as the seeds have been sown for almost unlimited productivity, provided the process is efficient and useful. The individual, perhaps diminished in the full expression of their humanity, becomes a cog in this machine, valued by what they do rather than who they are.
We might locate historical culmination of these tendencies in the industrial cataclysm of WWI. Up to that point, the progress of humanity, as viewed by the West, was as linear as their modes of thought. After the Great War we begin to see grave, widespread doubts about European values and assumptions. This loss of faith deepened with the Great Depression, another World War, and the threat of nuclear destruction. Writers like Huxley and Bradbury conceived of a future of complete material efficiency and abundance in which human dignity and meaning yet evaded us. We knew we were on a fast track somewhere, but suddenly unsure whether it was heaven or hell.
The drawbacks of literate modes of thought became starkly visible in the 20th Century, and they were precisely what McLuhan’s theory would predict: Dissatisfaction with a mechanistic universe, abhorrence of empire, a return to the preeminence of context and relatedness, striving toward wholeness. The West looked East for answers. We became enamored of their thought and belief, straining our ears for wisdom from yogis and the Dalai Lama.
Oral Culture: A World of Relationship and Story
Today we are midway in this cultural transition. We’re all buying yoga mats, but they’re still mass produced by wealthy capitalists. The cause of this transition, though, according to McLuhan, isn’t the horror of the Great War itself. If we look closely, we see some of these trends developing in the 19th Century – then only in the work of the most brilliant artists and philosophers. The watershed moment was the arrival of the electronic communication, of which the telegram was the earliest manifestation. The progress of science and technology of the literate West, rocketing forward with increasing velocity, broke through into a new kind of awareness in which a qualitatively different consciousness of the outer world became possible. What were once the separate worlds of Europe, America, Africa, the near and the far East were now instantly accessible all at once. We could read of their daily events in near-real-time in newspapers. Sensitive minds felt a deep shift away from “knowing” by piecemeal assembly (left-brain) and toward “knowing” by instantaneous access to the whole (right-brain). Human perception had never reached so far, so fast – and the world became small.
This trend only became more pronounced as electronic media flowed more freely. Radio broadcasts, cinema, and television all gave us access to new ideas, new cultures, human experiences wholly unlike our own. And these were not abstract, detached representations but direct depictions. The effect on our psyche was likewise far more visceral and direct. It was this change in our perception that produced a change in our approach to truth and knowledge. The traditional values of our literate heritage began to appear cold, colorless, even inhumane.
The thought forms of literate tradition became less “obvious,” and those of pre-literate culture began to return. We began to strive to understand objects, not as neutral, groundless figures, but as being situated in a rich context. The reemergence of figure-ground perception led us to greater appreciation for the network of relationships that define every person, tool, or idea. It is only in the simultaneous unity of complex interrelations that anything can truly be understood (e.g. “… but what is the effect of this factory on the environment?”) Truth was seen to be observer-dependent – the centrality of the subject came again to the fore. This way of thinking first crept into the highest cultural forms but has since come to define the thinking of every adolescent student who piously proclaims, “truth is relative.”
In art, beginning in the 19th Century, the dominance of visual perspective developed in the Renaissance began to fade. The painting ceased to be an objective representation of a visually idealized scene and began to give greater voice to the idiosyncrasies and inner states of the artist. Objectivity was diminished in the impressionists and abandoned altogether in the expressionists. Classical methods of perspective were exchanged for the multiple, simultaneous perspectives of cubism – a subconscious attempt to capture the all-at-once-ness implicit in the new world of electronic media.
In philosophy, the left-brained, visual modes of thought came to their fullest expression in the positivist school, but already the new media forms were having their effect on the continent. The observer-dependence of truth paves the way naturally to more conscientious group identification along the lines of class and ethnicity. Empire fractures into tribalism. In Germany there was a rediscovery of the role of mythos as a defining feature of nationality. Karl Marx reimagined economic and political forces from the proletariat perspective (though his solution, oddly, was thoroughly objectivist in its conception: an idealized mechanism for distributing material wealth). In the 20th Century, philosophers dissatisfied with the traditional mechanical view of the universe suddenly discovered compelling reasons for abandoning it. They struggled to reaffirm the centrality of subjective human experience and the autonomy of will. The fractionalization of truth continues today, rather ironically, as professors continue to produce (objective?) theories of viewpoint epistemology and race-dependent ethics.
The same transition was felt in the sciences. The Newtonian, billiard-ball universe fell into crisis with Einstein’s theory of relativity. The new view held explicitly that perceived events in the universe are relative to the observer, who is understood to be its “center.” The mutual interrelation of figure and ground, of observed and observer, came to more complex articulation, with perplexing results. The messy world of Schrodinger and Heisenberg is a far cry from the clockwork orderliness imagined in the enlightenment.
In all these examples, it is evident that the excesses of visual sense and left-brain bias have been tamped down. McLuhan would say that this is because we are no longer primarily making sense of our world through the manual movement of material written with a phonetic alphabet. New media has imbued us with an appreciation for instantaneity and simultaneity, for wholeness, for context and relationship.
The post-literate age brings with it many echoes of the pre-literate. We are looking again to story rather than theory for deep understanding of our world, for only this can achieve the necessary poetic depth and many-sidedness of life itself. Narrative reflects truths that simultaneously manifest on the level of the individual, the family, the society, and the cosmos. From Jung, Joseph Campbell, and even Jordan Peterson today, many are rediscovering the power of ancient myth. We no longer care that they are not “literally” true.
But there is much to be feared in this transition as well. Literal thought can be inhuman in its detached abstraction, but modern thought and communication descends directly into heart and gut. It is less intellectual and more visceral in its effect – intoxicating, almost. The pretense of objectivity is no longer present to settle disputes; truth claims are hotly debated as each side attempts to establish a more widespread acceptance of its “narrative.” The new political reality is tumultuous, divided into narrative-defined factions. We are re-tribalizing.
Cultural Convergence and the World of Tomorrow
The point of all this analysis is to gain a clearer sight of where we are headed. Our culture is obviously fluctuating rapidly around us, and it is impossible to determine where all these changes lead if we allow ourselves to get caught up in the headlines. What McLuhan offers is a brilliantly incisive vision of the common underlying features of a century and a half’s worth of culture developments: a sensemaking shift from sequence to simultaneity, from knowledge of components to apprehension of the whole, from separateness to interconnectedness, from one-direction mechanism to two-direction relationship, from theory to story. Even if he were wrong to attribute this to media, his distillation of culture changes into these categories remains illuminating.
By highlighting this cultural fault line, we can make at least one valuable prediction as more and more of human cooperation happens electronically: the defining features of literate culture will continue to recede. The implications are massive. The cultural forms of the last 500 years are undergoing tectonic shift, and nothing will be left unaffected.
This is not to say it will all happen at once – as we have seen, the new forms have a way of creeping in undetected. Where they do appear, they revolutionize at once, able to reach a critical mass of support eerily fast. But the rapidity of cultural transition is slowed by at least two factors. First, though our culture uses electronic media for its transmission, we still communicate by the phonetic alphabet (though not, notably, in podcasts or Youtube videos, which is becoming a go-to education source for many). It stands to reason that we will remain affected to some degree by its inherent biases.
Second, the inertia of the last 500 years of literate cultural and institutional forms will take a long time to peter out. Ideas of propriety are far more mutable than ideas of legality, for instance. In academia, cutting edge research has been the most responsive to this cultural transition, but it will be a long time before they stop teaching the scientific method to high schoolers. The largest cogs of our social machinery – our government offices, courts, universities, and publishers – have deeply ingrained rules that define procedure and value. For these to undergo fundamental shift would virtually imply our transition into a new civilization entirely. Nevertheless, that is the road we have embarked upon.
Today, our being affected by both literate and pre-literate currents has yielded strange results. In my experience teaching ethics to college students, the moral propositions that they most staunchly defend are (1) that no moral proposition can be objectively true, and (2) that humans are born with certain inalienable rights. The incompatibility is obvious, yet these are almost always held simultaneously (though seldom defended in the same sentence). The university system likewise has been forced to walk the tightrope between its claim to authoritative objectivity (its raison d’etre) and the subjectivist bent of its leading edge. The result is many ostensibly authoritative voices denouncing the presumption of traditional, “constructed” authority, upon which, coincidentally, the institution of their employment was also founded. How long can such an institution last?
The news media, too, has been forced into profound transition. Though these were among the first organs of electronic media, they nevertheless have striven to embody literate ideals of objectivism and detached impartiality. Inevitably, as an industry, their pretense has given way to their structural nature, as the mosaic patchwork of news outlets end up competing for narrative primacy. The crucial claim of each news production is, of course, the unimpeachable objectivity of their story, but the average reader catches on that there are ways of pushing a narrative that don’t involve lying about facts. As much as journalists believe in objective reporting, there is no such thing. Narrative always precedes reporting because narrative highlights what events are worth reporting in the first place. Their work reaffirms a preexisting gestalt. But if each side of the aisle has its own separate media narrative, complete with its own set of confirming facts and events, how can they ever hope to work together? How can our culture achieve any kind of meaningful unity?
These confusions – and we’re justified in calling them crises – lead us to the truly pressing questions of our cultural moment. For universities, the question to be grappled with now is, in a world that increasingly holds objectivity claims suspect, what role can the university play as a truth-seeking institution? For news media, how can a single outlet gain audience and credibility that transcends the pre-existing ideological lines? There are others like these, but they are all getting at the same mystery – what will tomorrow be like? But to understand tomorrow, we must imagine how it will answer the question, “what is true?” This question underlies all culture. What McLuhan suggests in his work is that many in the West, and soon all, will search in a new way for a different kind of answer than we have for the past several centuries. Our new journey toward truth will come to mark the turning of history’s page.