De Tocqueville, in earlier work on the French Revolution, had explained how it was the printed word that, achieving cultural saturation in the eighteenth century, had homogenized the French nation. Frenchmen were the same kind of people from north to south. The typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society. The Revolution was carried out by the new literati and lawyers.

This may be the first time in UM that MM connects the galvanizing force of literacy brought by print to the creation of republics. It is one of the farthest reaching statements in UM, and I think one of the strongest, in part, because its effects are easier to overlook. That is, we think of inventions of machines as a means by which we gain greater control over nature, and seldom consider the ways that we are in turn affected, which feels to me as the central lesson to be learned from UM, that is, to train yourself to consider the ways that any new invention or medium may affect patterns of thought, and thus patterns of language, and then patterns of social organization.

And it is only on those terms, standing aside from any structure or medium, that its principles and lines of force can be discerned. For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary. Prediction and control consist in avoiding this subliminal state of Narcissus trance. But the greatest aid to this end is simply in knowing that the spell can occur immediately upon contact, as in the first bars of a melody.

MM takes the challenge a step further here–saying not only do new mediums change patterns of thought in ways that can be hard to quantify, they do so with unconscious power. MM relates the phenomenon to a trance or a spell. Like a drug, contact with new mediums can blind us to the power they yield, and contact may be hard to avoid.

A few works of literature that come to mind here are China Meiville’s Embassytown, Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby, and even the American remake of the film “The Ring.” In The Ring, a viewer watches a short clip which features abstract film episodes and always a ring shaped form. They then find out they will soon die because they watched it. As such the The Ring works as a type of horror based on the danger of new media. The power of film media is such that we cant help but watch, but there is an unknown consequence in watching. Eventually a ghost emerges from the screen to claim the life of the viewer. The corruptive force of power also being the them of other ring based media such as Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Lord of the Rings.

Interestingly, The Ring features a haunted VHS tape, a trope that has become more popular since in a series like Netflix’s Archive 81 series. And it is true that as technologies grow older and unused, their cache as modes by which to tell uncanny stories becomes more pronounced. One such internet story BEN DROWNED features a haunted Nintendo 64 copy of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Indeed an entire genre of horror games has sprung up which exploit the look and feel of 64 bit gaming. Why exactly this works is harder to pin down, but if we take MM’s “extensions” at face value, if we accept that our media is as a prosthetic, ever becoming a part of what we consider our “self”, the horror may in part be the terror of looking down at you have accepted as your arm, and finding a monstrosity there instead. If we extend the body out into the universe of objects in our orbit, we thus extend our capacity for body-horror–avatars in gaming being one such extension.

Palahniuk’s Lullaby is a more straightforward correlation with MM use of “a melody” as a kind of siren song leading doomed media consumers to dangerous shores. In his novel, the protagonist learns a “culling song” a song that will kill a person just by hearing it. A similar tension ensues between the alure of power of using the song and need for destroying its power. Additionally, being a melody, it is infectious by design.

One of my favorite uses of media as narcotic takes place in Meiville’s Embassytown. An alien race at the edges of star system has evolved language in such a way that they are incapable of lying, indeed they are hardly capable of metaphor or simile, only of language that directly represents their reality. Because they form language by speaking from two mouths at once, ambassadors to this race are specifically genetically bred twins who are able to converse with them. A turning point happens when a non-ambassdor becomes able to speak the language. The effect of this two-fold voice on others in the race is immediately narcotic, so much so that the race is devastated by a stupor that comes over their entire civilization, where they need to hear the voice even to survive.

By speculating a language by which major upheaval of culture come through the unconscious affects of changes in media Embassytown is a rare narrativization of the effects of media on language.