“Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. It is this implo-sive factor that alters the position of the Negro, the teen-ager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media.”

-p5

While this is no doubt a commentary upon both the the civil rights and student activists movements that were happening around the time of the publication of UM, these ring particularly true in our current moment. In the 60’s this meant the use of widely available hand held camera footage as disseminated through national media outlets. In the 2010s this meant ubiquitous cell phone footage as disseminated through the internet(and then subsequently without fail through national media outlets) As I’ve written elsewhere in this piece on the rise of Trumpism:

Just like 40 years prior, new technology — cell phone cameras, and the internet — gave citizens more access to intolerable images of human tragedy. That same technology offered them images of confrontation and destruction. These images permeated the entire media environment, and scandalized a largely older, largely white, and largely rural and suburban voting public, and in the next presidential election in 2016 a “law and order” candidate emerged victorious. In those intervening years, the mass media had become far more sensational, pervasive, conservative, addictive, powerful and unmoored from the facts. Trump simply met that media on it’s own terms.  

That is, TV shifted the power dynamic, and the internet is again shifting that dynamic, and each has had their backlash or reversal.

“Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting. The advantages of fragmenting himself in this way are seen in the case of the surgeon who would be quite helpless if he were to become humanly involved in the whole of mankind and to incorporate us with in his operation. We acquired the art of carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete detachment.“

-p4

MM smartly uses the surgeon as his reference point for utter detachment, however his “most dangerous social operations” bring to mind the social operation of war. Clearly this is a social operation that doesn’t happen with full detachment as can be evidenced by the existence of PTSD in so many survivors of war. If McLuhan’s assumption that this fragmentation and aloofness decreases as electronic culture draws further into “involvement” with our actions, then this should bear out in the inability for soldiers to separate themselves from the violence they personify, the decreased inability to simply say “I had a job to do.” One could see this “involvement” going one of two ways 1. A soldier who has become personally involved in the carnage decides he/she cannot continue to make war. 2. A soldier who continues to make war either possesses the values (or lack thereof) that allow them to make the carnage of war or they must realign or work their values into “involvement”–to change their mind to reflect their choice. My suspicion is that the latter is actually the more prevalent. Involvement may not necessarily mean bringing your values into action, but turning actions into new values.

“After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man– the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be “a good thing” is a question that admits of a wide solution.”

-pp3-4

McLuhan is coming out swinging! I have to think he loses as many readers as he gains here in the first paragraph with his use of conversational voice, the grandiosity of his predictions, and the way he simply expects the reader to jump in to the already moving stream of his thought. Seems he relies on the provacative nature of his assertions to draw the reader further on to suss out the meaning. This feels like the narrative mode and not the philosophical or scientific necessarily in that it draws the reader on through intrigue and may take knowing the whole of the work, really to understand any of it’s constituent parts. Although, this is the intro, so he’s allowed some broad strokes.

He sets up a 3 part narrative here of which only the 3rd part remains “The technological simulation of consciousness” Part of the thrill of reading UM some 60ish years since its publishing is deliberating on whether any of his predictions have come to pass. Cinematically, this “simulation of consciousness” could be read the iconic scene in The Matrix when the protagonist, NEO, declares “I know Kung-fu” after having the knowledge of it downloaded like a computer into his brain. This sort of simulation is still a ways off it seems, but as is usually the case, McLuhan’s prophecies admit quite a bit of speculation. Another film, Netflix’s “The Social Dilemma” a recent 2020 docudrama about the moral implications of data collection by internet social network platforms lays out a picture of consciousness simulation through the creation of digital proxies of users that can help advertising platforms predict if they will be open to the suggestion of types online advertising (perhaps the most ubiquitous contemporary version of simulation). With “Much as we have already extended our senses,” MM includes the extension into the “simulation” atmosphere of television by the 1960s and the already colossal power of TV advertising. It would seem we haven’t yet fulfilled this 3rd state of his prophecy as laid out here quite yet, but surely making “rapid” strides toward it.

On a personal note, my first reading of UM would have been around 2006, just about 15 years ago. It’s worth noting that in that 15 year period, we have gone from the height of social networking optimism with the advent of many platforms such as Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter, the various “Spring” and “occupy” movements they’ve helped create, to a very wary attitude about these platforms and the future of the internet itself after numerous scandals, such as Cambridge Analytica and QAnon. McLuhan’s question of whether more powerful simulations will be “a good thing” begs the moral question that is perhaps more relevant now than then.

To kick off Mud Maps, I’ve decided to do a re-read of Marshall McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. I’m reading the 1966 McGraw-Hill paperback reprint of the 1964 title with an introduction by McLuhan. I’ll be posting as I go, and offering comments, critiques, and conclusions drawn. Thanks for reading!