Despite the fact that Marshall McLuhan’s interview with Playboy took place in 1968, his observations about emerging electronic media still seem timely and precise. At the time he was talking about television, but consider how fitting his words are when looking at the new world of social media. He said, “Every aspect of Western mechanical culture was shaped by print technology, but the modem age is the age of the electric media, which forge environments and cultures antithetical to the mechanical consumer society derived from print. Print tore man out of his traditional cultural matrix while showing him how to pile individual upon individual into a massive agglomeration of national and industrial power, and the typographic trance of the West has endured until today, when the electronic media are at last demesmerizing us.” (p. 244-245)
The words “the modern age is the age of electric media” and they “forge environments and cultures” really strike me. He said those things at a time before cell phones and computers, when people still wrote letters and picked up their telephones. There wasn’t even a television in every home, but he saw that this new media was so influential that he knew it would change the world. Did he see what was coming? A world where we have communities that we reach only through our electronic devices, and that we would spend the majority of our waking lives in front of one screen or another? I’m sure he couldn’t have imagined how much more we would be inundated by “electric media”, as I’m sure we can’t imagine how much more there is to come.
He also saw fit to include a caution: “Today, in the electronic age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics” (p. 238). He called the television instantaneous communication. What would he think of text messaging or Skype? He also predicted that it would change cultures and values, and clearly that has been the case.
Another theorist who quite possibly owned a time machine is Gerard Hauser. He wrote his book, Vernacular Voices, in 1999. Thinking back to 1999, I remember that we had email. A quick google search told me that Geocities had existed for five years, but Myspace wouldn’t come until 2003 and Facebook would follow in 2004. Social media, as we know it, did not exist. Yet, Hauser wrote this: “By some accounts, it would appear that a participatory public life has declined beyond retrieval. Richard Sennett has examined the possibility of living a rich public life under conditions of late capitalism and concluded that we have regressed into ritual relations with strangers. According to Sennett, we have lost the tension between our public personae and our private identities that gives meaning to both. Instead of being self-aware, we have become self-absorbed…” (p. 37). It was as though he could predict the world we are now living in; at the most cynical, one filled with people with their faces glued to their devices, kids growing up with poor social skills, and people unloading highly personal details onto the very public plain of social media. People are more likely to meet a stranger online who lives in another country than they are to start a conversation on the bus. People are more likely to comment on a message board than actually, physically participate in public life.
Another thing Hauser brought up, which is certainly a part of a much larger conversation, relates to the declining use of language and social skills: “Others link our society’s failure to find invigoration in public life to its general lack of linguistic and conceptual tools suited for public living. Others seem unable to think and talk in meaningful ways that transcend the impulses and needs within their own skins” (1999, p. 37). He wrote this before people really started using acronyms instead of sentences , before every eight year old had their own cell phone, before the message board became inundated with anonymous people spewing hate.
Did they see what we would become? Did they think that was as bad as it was going to get? (I say “bad” because for the most part, these societal changes are referred to negatively). Either way, the words of McLuhan and Hauser were just as perceptive about the issues of their respective times as they are today.
(I found these images on Google)
Citations
Hauser, Gerard. (1999). Vernacular voices: The rhetoric of publics and public spheres. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
McLuhan, M., McLuhan, E., & Zingrone, F. (1997). The Playboy interview. In E. McLuhan & F. Zingrone (Eds.), Essential McLuhan (pp. 233-269). London: Routledge.
Communication Theory 