Marshall Mcluhan: Electric Age

(Inpho aimlessly walking around.) Someone says, 'Hello there!'
(Inpho stares at the stranger.) Inpho: 'Who are you?' Stranger: 'Name's Marshall'
(Marshall Mcluhan appears.) Marshall Mcluhan: 'Marshall Mcluhan!' Inpho: 'Hi, I'm Inpho.' MM: 'Inpho?'
(Marshall Mcluhan and Inpho in a cascade of zeros and ones.) MM: 'Inpho, indeed! In this age of information, we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information.'
(Marshall Mcluhan and Inpho walking together.) MM: 'Today every move we make can be recorded and saved on a computer in the form of useful, and marketable, data. Our entire lives have become information processes because we have put our nervous systems outside us in technology.
(Mcluhan and Inpho standing still, hear a beep beep.) MM: 'Oh that's my watch. I got 10,000 steps! Blood pressure's a little high, though.'
(Mcluhan and Inpho walking, image of a computer, and a computer network.) MM: 'None of us have any idea what this information environment is doing to us. All we see is the surface content. But media shapes and transforms our whole ecosystem.
(Mcluhan and Inpho walking first in a straight line, then in a circle.) MM: 'Consider print. As an environment, print is linear, sequential, one thing after another. Thinking is often seen in the same way. It's a linear sequence, with one idea following after another. But is thinking really a linear process? Or is it that print is causing us to see it that way? There is nothing linear or sequential about the total field of awareness that exists in any moment of consciousness.'
(Mcluhan and Inpho walking.) MM: 'This is only one example of the way technology alters our patterns of perception. But with everyone so transfixed by the content, hardly anyone notices these more significant effects.'
(Inpho with his eyes full of binary.) MM: 'Our current shift from print to electronic information is a revolution we're only beginning to see. Information is instant in the electric age. And if everything is instant, then what happens to sequence?'
(Marshall Mcluhan standing still, Inpho with a river of ones and zeros flowing throug his head.) MM: 'This revolution will have implications for the future of language itself. Electric information has no need for words. And so, perhaps, neither will we. Electricity points the way to an extension of consciousness itself, on a world scale, and without any verbalization whatsoever. Such a state of awareness may have been the preverbal condition of man.'
(Mcluhan faces Inpho.) MM: 'You already don't say much, eh Inpho? I hope you haven't returned to the preverbal state already.' (Both face a vast empty space.) MM: 'There's still so much to talk about!'
(Mcluhan and Inpho standing still.) MM: 'Unfortunately, it'll have to wait for another time. Goodbye Inpho!' (Inpho stares blankly into empty space)
(Mostly empty space, Inpho starts walking again, alone.)

Afterword

I don't necessarily agree with everything that I say.

Marshall Mcluhan

Marshall Mcluhan is notoriously difficult to understand. He loved puns, he enjoyed being a bit cryptic, and some of his stuff frankly doesn't make any sense at all.

It doesn't help that people who have supposedly picked up on his work (writers such as Neil Postman and Nicholas Carr), seem to reduce his arguments to something like "technology is making us stupider". Which... maybe. But I don't think that is what Marshall Mcluhan was saying.

In my own imperfect understanding, Mcluhan's main ideas go something like this:

  • Technology is not neutral. Media and technology create and shape our whole environment. They change our perceptions and perspectives ('alter our sense ratios', in Mcluhan's words). They change how we see ourselves and how we understand the world. This is where his most famous phrase, "the medium is the message", comes from.

  • He divided history into three major epochs/ages, according to which media form was dominant. They are: the oral age, the print age, and the electric age.

  • Print, in particular with the phonetic alphabet, is the technology that has defined Western civilization. Mcluhan argues that our concepts of individuality, privacy, rationalism, and abstraction, all stem from the character and environment created by print technology.

  • Today the print age, and the world it created, is in collision with the electric age. And so we are seeing the environment and institutions built in the print age being undermined and subverted by the new environment inherent in electric technology. This environment is decentralized, holistic, instantaneous, and totally involving.

Writing long before the internet came around, Mcluhan amazingly predicted and described so much of our world today that we still find so disorienting and confusing.

Resources

The quotes and content for this comic come from Mcluhan's most popular book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

Also check out this video of a Q&A he did for ABC Radio in Australia in 1977.