Marshall McLuhan has always struck me as one part visionary and one part kook. His argument that the “message” of a particular technology is the change it introduces into human affairs. Certainly this is a brilliant observation. There is not only an effect from what a train delivers, but also effects resulting from the speed of delivery and the new types of deliveries that can be made. McLuhan describes a societal trend away from sequence to configurations. This parallels a trend in the sciences away from the so called “clockwork universe” of Newton to the conceptions in his time of randomly distributed parameters. Today the sciences are attempting to tackle chaos itself, so if anything we’re headed beyond McLuhan’s configuration based culture into something potentially far stranger.
On the other hand, several of his claims are incoherent. After clearly stating that content is unimportant, he describes an African who listens to the BBC but understands nothing. One wonders if the BBC really carries the same technological message for such an individual. Can we really ignore content? Surely there is an interaction between how something is said and what is being said that McLuhan underestimates. Trains that carry televisions aren’t changing human affairs in the same way as those that deliver victims to concentration camps. Are such trains making the world smaller or larger? Do they make the world more cohesive or increase divisions? While content isn’t everything, it shouldn’t be entirely ignored.
Some of McLuhan’s arguments seem dated, which is not surprising as every author is a product of their temporal context. In Chapter 8 he waxes eloquent on the collective unconscious and the possibility of eliminating language. In doing so, he brushes aside any consideration for what language is and how it works, preferring to reject it out of hand as a relic better replaced by a non-thinking hemogeny. Eew. In Chapter 9 he claims that Chinese people have more sensations than Westerners because their alphabet is loosely based on pictograms. I don’t think he presents any evidence for this argument, and personally I’m highly dubious of this ill-defined claim. To my ears it sounds a little racist, though I highly doubt that was his intent. Still, it’s clear that the written word has an effect on us not only in what is being said, but in how the saying is being accomplished.
By concentrating on the changes that technology introduces, without discounting the complexity of content or resorting to opinion over observation, McLuhan’s media as message can be a useful tool in understanding social and cultural change.