It was his publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), however, that announced McLuhan’s presence on the international cultural scene. Once again, Innis’s influence could be perceived, alongside that of J.C. Carothers, in McLuhan’s argument that the development of typography led to a visual realm of culture, one where the psychodynamics of print is making way for that of the auditory spaces of the new electronic media. What is revolutionary about this? For McLuhan print culture facilitated the organization of a spatial continuum through linear progression, whereas the new electronic, auditory culture, in effect, abolishes the space-time continuum because of its instantaneity and simultaneity: ‘electric technology is instant and omnipresent and creates multiple centres-without-margins’. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), such a revolutionary mode of thinking is explored in the realms of clothing, housing, money, photography, advertising, games and television, to list just some of the chapters. In his introduction to the MIT Press Edition of Understanding Media, Lewis H. Lapham lists the ‘leitmotifs’ of McLuhan’s book. The items in the left-hand column belong to the world of print-based culture, those in the right-hand column to the electronic world where ‘the medium is the message’, in other words, McLuhan’s prophetic charting of postmodernity:
Print Electronic Media
visual tactile
mechanical organic
sequence simultaneity
composition improvisation
eye ear
active reactive
expansion contraction
complete incomplete
soliloquy chorus
classification pattern recognition
center margin
continuous discontinuous
syntax mosaic
self-expression group therapy
Typographic man Graphic man
McLuhan developed the terms ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ medium to describe these two realms: a hot medium is one that is data rich, a cool one being of low definition and data poor; hot media do most of the work for the audience, whereas cool media demand audience work and what McLuhan calls ‘participation’. Contrary to many commentators on television, McLuhan regards TV as a cool medium, whereas print, in its fomenting of nationalism and religious unrest, is a hot medium. McLuhan warns against comparing television with film or photography, since with television, the viewer, bombarded with light, is the screen. Film and photography have exceptionally high-definition images; for McLuhan, the low-definition televisual image is not deficient or substandard, rather, it is instead a fundamental difference: that of a mosaic pattern, unconsciously reconfigured by the viewer to create an abstract, sculptural and iconic form. McLuhan takes this a step further, to argue that there is a difference between visual and mosaic space; the latter involves ‘imaginative reorganization’ or a paradigm shift:
The nonvisual mosaic structures of modern art, like those of modern physics and electric-information patterns, permit little detachment. The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being, as
does the sense of touch.
One of the side-effects of the simultaneity and instantaneity of electronic modes of being (the extension of the central nervous system into ‘a global embrace’), is that of the ‘global village’, where all subjects participate in the consequences of every action. For McLuhan, this is also a shift from the concept of the private individual to that of the publicly exposed being, a shift also from control of content, to ‘instant sensory awareness of the whole’ where the medium is the message (and the massage). Structure and configuration are now key, and in his exploration of these ideas, McLuhan’s texts function at the surface level to create a gestalt. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967), is a text where graphic space and design massively disrupt the linearity of print culture, mainly through the techniques of close-up and magnification/blow-up. Other effects abound, including the fact that the original printing of the book was done in two different formats, leading to a doubling that as Richard Cavell points out ‘identifies the residual role of tactility within the visual’. Pages in the book are printed upside down, text is treated as graphic image free from the linearity of type (through rotation, blow-up and so on), advertisements, cartoons and iconic images from popular culture overpower more conventional pictures, image repetitions overpower fragmented phrases and sentences, and quotations become more important than conventional notions of ‘primary’ text. The text simultaneously has a modernity and a slightly ‘sixties’ feel about it; it also may have lost much of its shock value due to the multitude of imitations that have since followed. Nonetheless, some of the book’s more radical ideas have become gnomic statements: short, pithy truths that most media-savvy people would probably now agree with, recognizing McLuhan as a prophetic voice from the past. The eternal return to McLuhan begins with such a recognition, and various virtual McLuhans repeatedly surface in today’s digital domain as different groups reinvent themselves electronically through such leading media gurus. The ‘tribalism’ that results from the creation of the electronic global village is also an ethical responsibility; as McLuhan argues, minority groups can no longer be ignored, and through the commitment and participation of electronic media ‘we have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other’.
Source: FIFTY KEY LITERARY THEORISTS by Richard J. Lane, Routledge Publication.