The McLuhan message

The first time that I heard the saying "the medium is the message", I thought that maybe the speaker was making a sarcastic occult reference. Like: "listen to the idea of the psychic, not the forecast of the psychic". But it was like a chant, a scriptural hymn that would follow me around. I wondered, is this just the Apple design motto? Is it like, "every decision that you make in the formation of art will impact the audience's perception of that art?"

A week or so ago I finally read up on this slogan. This blatantly oxy-moronic poetry. I read this.

At first, it seems like he's calling attention to the fundamental design of objects. He talks about light bulbs creating an infinite amount of information. He repeats himself in example after analogy after example. Within a few pages he starts to really get into the meat of it. He points out that if the fundamental design of an object is a form of communication in and of it's self, then the artist, the designer, the inventor all have a sort of responsibility. Then he starts aggrandizing himself with these proclamations that he is like Louis Pasteur, telling doctors to wash their hands.

I think that he was probably right. On every level. And he knew it, a little too well.

We live in an age with constantly new ideas, new mediums, where the designers and legislators haven't taken even a second to understand what they may mean. Intellectual property rights and Net Neutrality are great examples of this kind of ignorance that McLuhan meant. Democratically elected Governments are rushing all over the world to take rights away from their citizens and give them away to unbelievably large and powerful corporate interests. The rights of our very minds. The power over all of our knowledge (the bedrock of any successful democracy) is being sold to people who want to use it to make even more money. Money off of putting you and I in prison, money off of selling us infinite sequels, money off of remakes of remakes that some people don't know and never will know was once alive and well in another medium.

But besides the sobering effect of trade agreements and copy right laws, we could easily pull apart the thoughtlessness of the social media. The social medium. Every hope, every hate, every love, and every moment in our lives cataloged and shared at every moment. Governments and highest bidders know our business, but that isn't too much to worry about. In fact, the total lack of governance is an outright travesty. Through social media, more then a billion of us have become intimately involved in the action of public shaming, and lazy research. We politicize ourselves in extreme ways, while still expecting to maintain "friendships" with people that we slowly alienate. There just isn't any washing of hands. No one is thinking about how much this life is spilling into that life, undoing whatever moments of privacy we once had.

Marshall McLuhan definitely knew his stuff, and I think that I'll be thinking about his work for a very long time.