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The Medium is the Mess-Age

The Medium is the Message 

The familiar phrase “the medium is the message” is one of the core ideas behind Marshall McLuhan’s perception of the advancing world.   According to him, the “medium” represents anything that can be deemed an extension of ourselves (often considered in terms of technology), and the “message” is the subsequent and observable pattern that emerges from our consistent and increased use of such technology.  What McLuhan was saying was that our use of any given medium is in itself an indicator, or message, of that medium’s influence on our lives—and not only our own lives, but that of society as a whole.   For example, television (a medium) is generally made-up of a variety of projected programs, all of which communicate thoughts and ideas to its viewers.   Interestingly, McLuhan proposed that the content of those programs were not what constituted “the message”, but rather it was the overall subliminal effect that television itself has on our social conscience.   In essence, he was asserting that the medium and the message shared a symbiotic relationship that always sees the one being intrinsically affected by the other:   Television evolves based on the cultural response it receives, while our cultural environment is in turn perpetually shaped by television.    Indeed the message always reflects the medium, or, as McLuhan so famously put it, the medium is the message.  

It might be worthy to mention at this point too that McLuhan was not insinuating the content produced by a medium was something entirely irrelevant (though he’s been generally misinterpreted on this matter).   To the contrary, it’s quite likely he watched the news and that he had his favorite television shows.  What he was merely emphasizing was that a far greater and imposing message could be derived by studying the nature of a medium itself than by considering any of that medium’s specific content.   He was really only stressing that the medium, not its content, was the overriding message one ought to be concerned with, and that to truly understand our surroundings, one must have a firm comprehension of the various mediums we regularly come in contact with, as well as their lasting effects on our environment.   Content, McLuhan suggested, served only to distract us from grasping the full impact of a particular medium on our environment.   To further illustrate this, he compares “the content” of a medium it to a juicy piece of meat that is carried by a burglar in order to distract the watchdog of the mind (significantly, McLuhan also asserted that the content of the medium was  almost always a medium too).

Case in point: During his lifetime, McLuhan had witnessed an incredible shift in society that saw more people stay at home on Sundays to watch television than those who went to church. Television, the medium, had become a message in itself, reflecting how the world was changing by television’s very existence. The programming, though varied in content, consistently provided people a distraction from other affairs (like church).  Some of the more valuable programming like the evening news certainly continued to connect people to the rest of their community and the world, but with much less direct engagement.  People could remain connected without extending themselves to any personal degree. As a result, regardless of its content, television was indisputably altering the path of our culture.   A similar trend can be seen today with the advent of the internet.   (Interestingly, in applying pattern recognition to his study of the mediums available to him during his lifetime, McLuhan was able to predict the Internet nearly 30 years before its existence)

McLuhan on Art

Marshall McLuhan treated art as something entirely different than the various mediums he studied, and generally considered it to be something completely unique and subjective.  “Art”, he said, “is anything you can get away with”.  He also pointed out that art was used by artists to reflect what was going on in our society at any given time, and not only what was happening at the moment, but where culture as a whole was headed. He pronounced: “Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen”.  By contrast, the medium he referred to when he stated “the medium is the message”, was not so much a predictor of things to come, but rather a catalyst which could induce societal change. 

Art on the other hand does not function to tempt change, but instead provides critical observation and extrapolation on how the mediums around us are affecting our world.   It provides a commentary   on where we have arrived as a culture through the use of specific mediums, and, based on an awareness of previous trends, sheds insight on where these mediums might take us.    Remarkably, trend (or pattern) recognition was something McLuhan applied significantly throughout his medium studies.   It is therefore no surprise he would recognize art as a product of this same process, or that he defined the artist as “a person who is expert in the training of perception”.     

Though McLuhan didn’t identify art itself as a medium, he did recognize that a relationship existed between art and medium which was both undeniable and necessary.     Not only is art often created as a response to the prevailing mediums around it, but art is also frequently created from those very mediums on which it comments.   

The Pun 

Marshall McLuhan had a fascination with puns. So much so, that if one popped into his head he could never be restrained from sharing it with his peers (which often incurred a chorus of unimpressed groans). That said, this love of puns provides a fine example of McLuhan’s exceptional ability to recognize patterns in the things around him (in this case with language), and it’s that pattern recognition that allowed him to view the world the way he did, and helped him to connect “the medium” to “the message”.

Sylvia Browne

Though McLuhan focused his studies on the medium as a physical and technological extension of our selves, an argument could probably be made that extra-sensory perceptions (ESP) also suit the McLuhan definition of a “medium”. After all, “extra-sensory” implies its source is an extension of our natural capabilities. The problem with extra-sensory perceptions though, such as those found in fortunetellers, psychics, and spirit mediums (yes, mediums), is that there is no scientific evidence or ‘truth’ that they exist.  It’s really only speculation. However, the concept is certainly there, and at least in concept, McLuhan’s rule of medium-ship should still apply. 

While technology has been significantly responsible for the secularization of society, it has also been accountable for allowing an alternative form of spiritual thought to pervade our culture.  The idea of ‘God’ may be in question by an increasing number of people, but other metaphysical concepts are clearly gaining momentum among the masses.  Horoscopes, psychics, magic, the paranormal, the occult, UFO’s and other speculative pseudo-sciences of the like are becoming ever more popular around the world, and these “New Age” ideas are being perpetuated significantly by the advances of today’s electronic media.

Remarkably, these ‘new’ extensions of understanding, or what McLuhan might have considered mediums, are by no means new at all, but actually something we’ve only rediscovered (at least on a socially conscious scale) within the last century.  In fact, such New Age mediums were probably the “mediums” we were most familiar with at the beginning of time when we first attempted to understand ourselves and the universe (long before we ever discovered the conveniences and revelations of modern technology).    Now as we make a return to these ancient concepts, it will be interesting to see how we try to harmonize them with this modern and increasingly automated world we find ourselves so dependent upon. 

With interest in New Age mediums on the rise (a quick Google search reveals an endless list of websites dedicated to horoscopes, psychics, palm readers and countless other spiritual mediums catering to an ever-mounting audience), we start to see a pattern, or “Message”, emerge:  that our culture is becoming more and more future-conscious.   Consequently, the introduction (or re-introduction) of the soothsayer as a source of knowledge has placed humanity at the edge of a new epoch of “apocalyptic” awareness, a phenomenon that sees heightened expectations for a massive shift in consciousness or human existence.  Excitement about 2012 has become commonplace, environmentalists continue to declare the instability of the planet, and those influenced by the paranormal and various conspiracy theories concern themselves with invasions from other dimensions or worlds.   Realistically however, despite all the hysteria, our future remains relatively uncertain and unpredictable (not at all unlike Sylvia Browne’s own self-proclaimed ESP-influenced predictions).  After all, how could any accurate pattern ever be deciphered from the study of mediums that are reputably specious and scientifically incredulous?   Unless the premonitions claimed by these mediums can be substantiated beyond mere fabrication, it appears that art will remain the more reliable indicator of where we are and where we may be headed.    In the end, one can always turn to art for answers.  

Finally, using the image of Sylvia Browne, a psychic, also serves as an apt reminder of McLuhan’s own sage-like savvy at prophesying the future (consider his  bold and accurate predictions of the internet and  “the global village”).   To his credit though, McLuhan has proven to be far more accurate in his predictions than Browne ever has.   Furthermore, McLuhan’s ability to recognize patterns in technology and society and forming predictions based on those patterns earned him the designation of ‘artist’ by some of his contemporaries.  Though McLuhan was rather modest about this designation, his strong perceptive ability certainly conforms to his own description of the artist as “a person who is expert in the training of perception”.

Marshall McLuhan #1: The Medium is the Mess-Age

In the current hyper-accelerated culture we live in, most signs and portents suggest that this messy age of science and technology is on the brink of a catastrophic and nearly unresolvable predicament. Whether this is true or not is merely speculative, and any conjecture to this effect often finds its roots in New Age thinking to some degree or another. 

The presented image of Sylvia Browne (who herself has been a harbinger of modern New Age thought) juxtaposed with the text “The Medium is the Message”, is used as an allusion to McLuhan as being a sort of visionary himself.   After all, he had predicted the internet 30 years in advance, and had also hazard to guess (and quite accurately) the effects it would eventually have on our society.   At the same time, the image of Sylvia Browne accompanied by the McLuhan adage “The Medium is the Message”, serves doubly as a visual pun that plays on the word “Medium” (puns of course being something McLuhan couldn’t get enough of).   The complete picture also reflects a pattern we see emerging in our society, a “message” that New Age mediums like Sylvia Browne articulate through their very existence; that is, how humanity has become increasingly obsessed with the future. Ultimately, the hope is that this image, a work of art in its own right, serves as an early warning to its audience that we are indeed a culture transitioning, whether justifiably or not, into a New Age of understanding and social existence.

**I feel it is important to note that although I didn't make any specific reference to his book in this blog post, it was Douglas Coupland's recent biography on Marshall McLuhan that provided me much of the inspiration I needed to create the image "The Medium is the Mess-Age", as well as the ensuing text explaining its meaning.   Like Coupland's book however, I too chose the internet as a primary source of information for expounding my ideas (hence all the embedded links), as I figured this served better as an homage to Marshall McLuhan, a man who perceived the information superhighway long before it ever came to exist.**