The Mechanical Bride (1951) McLuhan's first book,
The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), is a pioneering study in the field now known as popular culture. In the book, McLuhan turns his attention to analysing and commenting on numerous examples of persuasion in contemporary popular culture. This followed naturally from his earlier work as both
dialectic and rhetoric in the classical trivium aimed at
persuasion. At this point, his focus shifted dramatically, turning inward to study the influence of
communication media independent of their content. His famous
aphorism "
the medium is the message" (elaborated in his
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964) calls attention to this intrinsic effect of communications media. His interest in the critical study of popular culture was influenced by the 1933 book
Culture and Environment by
F. R. Leavis and
Denys Thompson, and the title
The Mechanical Bride is derived from a piece by the
Dadaist artist
Marcel Duchamp.
The Mechanical Bride is composed of 59 short essays that may be read in any order—what he styled the "
mosaic approach" to writing a book. Each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article, or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan's analysis thereof. The analyses bear on
aesthetic considerations as well as on the implications behind the imagery and text. McLuhan chose these ads and articles not only to draw attention to their
symbolism, as well as their implications for the
corporate entities who created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed. Roland Barthes's 1957 essay
Mythologies, echoes McLuhan's
Mechanical Bride, as a series of exhibits of popular mass culture (like advertisements, newspaper articles and photographs) that are analyzed in a
semiological way.
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) Written in 1961 and first published by
University of Toronto Press,
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) is a pioneering study in the fields of
oral culture,
print culture,
cultural studies,
media ecology or
media-adequacy. Throughout the book, McLuhan makes efforts to reveal how
communication technology (i.e.,
alphabetic writing, the
printing press, and the
electronic media) affects
cognitive organization, which in turn has profound ramifications for social organization: [I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent.
Movable type McLuhan's episodic history takes the reader from pre-alphabetic,
tribal humankind to the
electronic age. According to McLuhan, the invention of
movable type greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taking place since the invention and implementation of the alphabet, by which McLuhan means
phonemic orthography. (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from
logographic or logogramic writing systems, such as
Egyptian hieroglyphs or
ideograms.) Print culture, ushered in by the advance in printing during the middle of the 15th century when the
Gutenberg press was invented, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. Quoting (with approval) an observation on the nature of the printed word from
William Ivins'
Prints and Visual Communication, McLuhan remarks: In this passage [Ivins] not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background.…The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, "formal" causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook. The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in
The Medium Is the Massage) is that new technologies (such as alphabets, printing presses, and even speech) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn, affects
social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits—"visual
homogenizing of experience"—which in turn affects social interactions—"fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a…specialist outlook". According to McLuhan, this advance of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the modern period in the Western world:
individualism, democracy,
Protestantism,
capitalism, and
nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual
quantification."
Global village In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic
interdependence" wherein electronic media replaces visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind would move from individualism and fragmentation to a
collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the
global village. The term is sometimes described as having negative connotations in
The Gutenberg Galaxy, but McLuhan was interested in exploring effects, not making
value judgments: Instead of tending towards a vast
Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us,
Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture. Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no
per se moral bent—it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's
self-conception and
realization: Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds?…Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that
detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus, print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this
visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But", someone says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality. The moral
valence of technology's effects on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For instance, McLuhan contrasts the considerable alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter 17th century with the modern concern for the "end of the book." If there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that "there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the
causalities and effects inherent in our technologies". Though the World Wide Web was invented almost 30 years after
The Gutenberg Galaxy, and 10 years after his death, McLuhan prophesied the web technology seen today as early as 1962: The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind. Furthermore, McLuhan coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term
surfing to refer to rapid, irregular, and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements such as "
Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as
Descartes rode the mechanical wave."
Paul Levinson's 1999 book
Digital McLuhan explores the ways that McLuhan's work may be understood better through using the lens of the digital revolution. McLuhan frequently quoted Walter Ong's
Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), which evidently had prompted McLuhan to write
The Gutenberg Galaxy. Ong wrote a highly favourable review of this new book in
America. However, Ong later tempered his praise, by describing McLuhan's
The Gutenberg Galaxy as "a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond." McLuhan himself said of the book, "I'm not concerned to get any kudos out of [
The Gutenberg Galaxy]. It seems to me a book that somebody should have written a century ago. I wish somebody else had written it. It will be a useful prelude to the rewrite of
Understanding Media [the 1960 NAEB report] that I'm doing now." McLuhan's
The Gutenberg Galaxy won Canada's highest literary award, the
Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction, in 1962. The chairman of the selection committee was McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto and oftentime intellectual sparring partner,
Northrop Frye.
Understanding Media (1964) McLuhan's best-known work,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), is a seminal study in media theory. Dismayed by the way in which people approach and use new media such as television, McLuhan famously argues that in the modern world "we live mythically and integrally…but continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age." McLuhan proposes that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study—popularly quoted as "the medium is the message". His insight is that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content it delivers, but by its own characteristics. McLuhan points to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles, or a television has programs, but it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces at night that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan writes, "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." More controversially, he postulates that content has little effect on society—for example, whether television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, its effect on society is identical. He notes that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book can be reread at will, but a movie must be screened again in its entirety to study any part of it.
"Hot" and "cool" media In the first part of
Understanding Media, McLuhan writes that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Using terminology derived from French anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss's distinction between hot and cold societies, A movie is thus said to be "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value: "Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue." Some media, such as movies, are
hot—that is, they enhance a single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort to perceive a detailed moving image. Hot media usually, but not always, provide complete involvement with considerable
stimulus. In contrast, "cool" print may also occupy
visual space, using
visual senses, but require focus and comprehension to immerse readers. Hot media creation favour
analytical precision,
quantitative analysis and sequential ordering, as they are usually sequential,
linear, and logical. They emphasize one sense (for example, of sight or sound) over the others. For this reason, hot media include film (especially
silent films), radio, the lecture, and photography. McLuhan contrasts
hot media with
cool—specifically, television [of the 1960s i.e. small black-and-white screens], which he claims requires more effort from the viewer to determine meaning; and comics, which, due to their minimal presentation of visual detail, require a high degree of effort to fill in details the cartoonist may have intended to portray. Cool media are usually, but not always, those that provide little involvement with substantial stimulus. They require more active participation on the part of the user, including the perception of abstract patterning and simultaneous comprehension of all parts. Therefore, in addition to television, cool media include
seminars and cartoons. McLuhan describes the term
cool media as emerging from jazz and popular music used, in this context, to mean "detached". This appears to force media into binary categories, but McLuhan's hot and cool exist on a continuum: they are more correctly measured on a scale than as
dichotomous terms.
Dwight Macdonald, in turn, reproached McLuhan for his focus on television and for his "
aphoristic" prose style, which he believes leaves
Understanding Media filled with "contradictions, non-sequiturs, facts that are distorted and facts that are not facts, exaggerations, and chronic rhetorical vagueness."
Brian Winston's
Misunderstanding Media, published in 1986, chides McLuhan for what he sees as his
technologically deterministic stances.
Raymond Williams furthers this point of contention, claiming: The work of McLuhan was a particular culmination of an aesthetic theory which became, negatively, a social theory ... It is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism.… For if the medium—whether print or television—is the cause, all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to effects. David Carr wrote that there has been a long line of "academics who have made a career out of deconstructing McLuhan’s effort to define the modern media ecosystem", whether it be due to what they see as McLuhan's ignorance of sociohistorical context or the style of his argument. While some critics have taken issue with McLuhan's writing style and mode of argument, McLuhan himself urged readers to think of his work as "probes" or "mosaics" offering a toolkit approach to thinking about media. His eclectic writing style has also been praised for its postmodern sensibilities and suitability for virtual space.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967) The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, published in 1967, was McLuhan's best seller, "eventually selling nearly a million copies worldwide." Initiated by
Quentin Fiore, McLuhan adopted the term "massage" to denote the effect each medium has on the human
sensorium, taking inventory of the "effects" of numerous media in terms of how they "massage" the sensorium. Fiore, at the time a prominent
graphic designer and communications consultant, set about composing the visual illustration of these effects which were compiled by Jerome Agel. Near the beginning of the book, Fiore adopted a pattern in which an image demonstrating a media effect was presented with a
textual synopsis on the facing page. The reader experiences a repeated shifting of analytic registers—from "reading"
typographic print to "scanning" photographic
facsimiles—reinforcing McLuhan's overarching argument in this book: namely, that each medium produces a different "massage" or "effect" on the human sensorium. In
The Medium Is the Massage, McLuhan also rehashed the argument—which first appeared in the Prologue to 1962's
The Gutenberg Galaxy—that all media are "extensions" of our human senses, bodies and minds. Finally, McLuhan described key points of change in how man has viewed the world and how these views were changed by the adoption of new media. "The technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth [century]", brought on by the adoption of fixed points of view and perspective by typography, while "[t]he technique of the
suspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century," brought on by the
bard abilities of radio, movies and television.The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backward into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in
Bonanza-land.An audio recording version of McLuhan's famous work was made by
Columbia Records. The recording consists of a pastiche of statements made by McLuhan
interrupted by other speakers, including people speaking in various
phonations and
falsettos, discordant sounds and 1960s incidental music in what could be considered a deliberate attempt to translate the disconnected images seen on TV into an audio format, resulting in the prevention of a connected stream of conscious thought. Various audio recording techniques and statements are used to illustrate the relationship between spoken, literary speech and the characteristics of electronic audio media. McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand called the recording "the 1967 equivalent of a McLuhan video.""I wouldn't be seen dead with a living work of art."—'Old man' speaking "Drop this jiggery-pokery and talk straight turkey."—"Middle-aged man" speaking
War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) In
War and Peace in the Global Village, McLuhan used
James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake, an inspiration for this study of war throughout history, as an indicator as to how war may be conducted in the future. Joyce's
Wake is claimed to be a gigantic
cryptogram that reveals a cyclic pattern for human history through its Ten Thunders. Each "thunder" below is a 100-character
portmanteau of other words to create a statement McLuhan likens to an effect that each technology has on the society into which it is introduced. In order to glean the most understanding out of each, the reader must break the portmanteau into separate words (many of these themselves portmanteaus of words taken from multiple languages other than English) and speak them aloud for the spoken effect of each word. There is much dispute over what each portmanteau truly denotes. McLuhan claims that the ten thunders in
Wake represent different stages in the history of man: •
Thunder 1: Paleolithic to Neolithic. Speech. Split of East/West. From herding to harnessing animals. •
Thunder 2: Clothing as weaponry. Enclosure of private parts. First social aggression. •
Thunder 3: Specialism. Centralism via wheel, transport, cities: civil life. •
Thunder 4: Markets and truck gardens. Patterns of nature submitted to greed and power. •
Thunder 5: Printing. Distortion and translation of human patterns and postures and pastors. •
Thunder 6: Industrial Revolution. Extreme development of print process and individualism. •
Thunder 7: Tribal man again. All characters end up separate, private man. Return of choric. •
Thunder 8: Movies. Pop art, pop Kulch via tribal radio. Wedding of sight and sound. •
Thunder 9: Car and Plane. Both centralizing and
decentralizing at once create cities in crisis. Speed and death. •
Thunder 10: Television. Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. The last thunder is a turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.
From Cliché to Archetype (1970) Collaborating with
Canadian poet Wilfred Watson in
From Cliché to Archetype (1970), McLuhan approaches the various implications of the verbal
cliché and of the
archetype. One major facet in McLuhan's overall framework introduced in this book that is seldom noticed is the provision of a new term that actually succeeds the global village: the
global theatre. In McLuhan's terms, a
cliché is a "normal" action, phrase, etc. which becomes so often used that we are "
anesthetized" to its effects. McLuhan provides the example of
Eugène Ionesco's play
The Bald Soprano, whose dialogue consists entirely of phrases Ionesco pulled from an
Assimil language book: "Ionesco originally put all these idiomatic English clichés into literary French which presented the English in the most absurd aspect possible." McLuhan's
archetype "is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment."
Environment would also include the kinds of "awareness" and
cognitive shifts brought upon people by it, not totally unlike the psychological context
Carl Jung described. McLuhan also posits that there is a factor of interplay between the
cliché and the
archetype, or a "doubleness": Another theme of the Wake [
Finnegans Wake] that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is 'past time are pastimes.' The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the 20th century, the number of 'past times' that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of 'doubleness' or 'interplay' because this type of
hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy. McLuhan relates the cliché-to-archetype process to the
Theatre of the Absurd: Pascal, in the seventeenth century, tells us that the heart has many reasons of which the head knows nothing. The Theater of the Absurd is essentially a communicating to the head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it has tried to forget all about. In the seventeenth century world the languages of the heart were pushed down into the unconscious by the dominant print cliché. The "languages of the heart", or what McLuhan otherwise defined as oral culture, were thus made archetype by means of the printing press, and turned into cliché. According to McLuhan, the satellite medium encloses the Earth in a man-made environment, which "ends 'Nature' and turns the globe into a repertory theatre to be programmed." All previous environments (book, newspaper, radio, etc.) and their artifacts are retrieved under these conditions ("past times are pastimes"). McLuhan thereby meshes this into the term
global theatre. This updates his concept of the global village, which, in its own definitions, can be said to be subsumed into the overall condition of the global theatre.
The Global Village (1989) In his posthumous book,
The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (1989), McLuhan, collaborating with Bruce R. Powers, provides a strong
conceptual framework for understanding the cultural implications of the technological advances associated with the rise of a worldwide
electronic network. This is a major work of McLuhan's as it contains the most extensive elaboration of his concept of
acoustic space, and provides a critique of standard 20th-century communication models such as the
Shannon–Weaver model. McLuhan distinguishes between the existing worldview of
visual space—a linear, quantitative, classically geometric model—and that of
acoustic space—a
holistic, qualitative order with an intricate,
paradoxical
topology: "Acoustic Space has the basic character of a sphere whose focus or center is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere." The transition from
visual to
acoustic space was not automatic with the advent of the global network, but would have to be a conscious project. The "universal environment of simultaneous electronic flow" inherently favors
right-brain Acoustic Space, yet we are held back by habits of adhering to a fixed point of view. There are no boundaries to sound. We hear from all directions at once. Yet Acoustic and Visual Space are inseparable. The resonant interval is the invisible borderline between Visual and Acoustic Space. This is like the television camera that the
Apollo 8 astronauts focused on the Earth after they had orbited the Moon. McLuhan illustrates how it feels to exist within acoustic space by quoting from the autobiography of
Jacques Lusseyran,
And There Was Light. Lusseyran lost his eyesight in a violent accident as a child, and the autobiography describes how a reordering of his sensory life and perception followed:When I came upon the myth of objectivity in certain modern thinkers, it made me angry. So, there was only one world for these people, the same for everyone. And all the other worlds were to be counted as illusions left over from the past. Or why not call them by their name—hallucinations? I had learned to my cost how wrong they were. From my own experience I knew very well that it was enough to take from a man a memory here, an association there, to deprive him of hearing or sight, for the world to undergo immediate transformation, and for another world, entirely different, but entirely coherent, to be born. Another world? Not really. The same world, rather, but seen from a different angle, and counted in entirely new measures. When this happened all the hierarchies they called objective were turned upside down, scattered to the four winds, not even theories but like whims.Reading, writing, and hierarchical ordering are associated with the
left brain and visual space, as are the linear concept of time and phonetic literacy. The left brain is the locus of analysis, classification, and rationality. The right brain and acoustic space are the locus of the spatial, tactile, and musical.
"Comprehensive awareness" results when the two sides of the brain are in true balance. Visual Space is associated with the simplified worldview of
Euclidean geometry, the intuitive three dimensions useful for the architecture of buildings and the surveying of land. It is linearly rational and has no grasp of the acoustic. Acoustic Space is multisensory. McLuhan writes about
robotism in the context of
Japanese Zen Buddhism and how it can offer us new ways of thinking about technology. The Western way of thinking about technology is too related to the left brain, which has a rational and linear focus. What he called robotism might better be called androidism in the wake of
Blade Runner and the novels of
Philip K. Dick. Robotism-androidism emerges from the further development of the right brain, creativity and a new relationship to spacetime (most humans are still living in 17th-century classical Newtonian physics spacetime). Robots-androids will have much greater flexibility than humans have had until now, in both mind and body. Robots-androids will teach humanity this new flexibility. And this flexibility of androids (what McLuhan calls robotism) has a strong affinity with Japanese culture and life. McLuhan quotes from
Ruth Benedict's
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword an anthropological study of
Japanese culture published in 1946:Occidentals cannot easily credit the ability of the Japanese to swing from one behavior to another without psychic cost. Such extreme possibilities are not included in our experience. Yet in Japanese life the contradictions, as they seem to us, are as deeply based in their view of life as our uniformities are in ours.The ability to live in the present and instantly readjust.
Beyond existing communication models "All Western scientific models of communication are—like the
Shannon–Weaver model—linear, sequential, and logical as a reflection of the late medieval emphasis on the Greek notion of efficient causality." McLuhan and Powers criticize the Shannon-Weaver model of communication as emblematic of left-hemisphere bias and linearity, descended from a print-era perversion of Aristotle's notion of efficient causality. A third term of
The Global Village that McLuhan and Powers develop at length is
The Tetrad. McLuhan had begun development on the Tetrad as early as 1974. The tetrad is an analogical, simultaneous, fourfold pattern of transformation. "At full maturity the tetrad reveals the metaphoric structure of the artifact as having two figures and two grounds in dynamic and analogical relationship to each other." Like the camera focused on the Earth by the Apollo 8 astronauts, the tetrad reveals figure (Moon) and ground (Earth) simultaneously. The right-brain hemisphere thinking is the capability of being in many places at the same time. Electricity is acoustic. It is simultaneously everywhere. The Tetrad, with its fourfold Möbius
topological structure of enhancement, reversal, retrieval and obsolescence, is mobilized by McLuhan and Powers to illuminate the media or technological inventions of cash money, the compass, the computer, the database, the satellite, and the global media network. == Key concepts ==