Marshall McLuhan: A Primer for Artists I

Part I

Marshall McLuhan was, to say the least, kind of a big deal. Best known for his snappy slogans and critical study of the medium of television, McLuhan was the popular intellectual of the 1960s and 70s. He was a literary scholar, a futurist, pretty damn funny and one of the rare academics who embraced public life and intellectual spectacle in equal measure. He’s the one who told us “the medium is the message,” that we live in a “global village,” and that the “Electric Age of Information” was going to require an all together different approach from the norms of the mechanical-literary West.

What’s more, he’s one of ours. Born in Edmonton in 1911, Marshall McLuhan will soon be celebrated on the centenary of his birth. Latitude 53, the Art Gallery of Alberta, the University of Alberta and others are assembling an array of events, lectures, and art work in June and July around this man and his ideas. You can expect to see and hear a lot about McLuhan in the coming months and yet, for many, this will be an introduction rather than a revisiting.

McLuhan’s popularity has waned rather sharply since the 1970s, to the point that he seems somewhat lukewarm to academics these days and all but absent from public discussion. Perhaps this is to his benefit. As a celebrity academic and social provocateur much of McLuhan’s ideas seem to get lost in his showmanship, one-liners, and unflinching certainty. He was notoriously misunderstood, particularly when his predictive statements and “probes” got interpreted with the air of fact. And yet, the passage of time affords us the luxury of returning to McLuhan with a lucid, critical eye to better understand his interventions into the study of media. We may, afterall, not be finished with Mr. McLuhan just yet. His work has become increasingly important to theorizing digital communications and the internet (which, by the way, he predicted by 30 years).

What I’ve compiled below forms something of a two-part primer on McLuhan’s media theories, particularly intended for artists and the wider arts community. Not only did his ideas strongly resonate with art writers and art makers in the 60s and 70s, McLuhan also laid out an intriguing case for the function and utility of art to society that is still terribly pertinent to our cultural environment today.

Media Hot and Cold

McLuhan was one of the first humanist thinkers to give serious consideration to the phenomenological effects of media. This is to say, he studied the sensory and cognitive experience of media consumption and suggested that these effects in turned shaped both our internal faculties and our experience of the world. While this certainly sounds like the set up for dystopian outrage, particularly in light of the hysteria about television during his time, McLuhan instead seeks to embrace rather than disavow the determining implications of media. He takes the stance that all technology, from the wheel to the computer, are extensions of human functions rather than a replacement of our innate condition. This being said, media as a kind of prosthesis of phenomenological sensation can amputate certain faculties, produce states of shock, and prioritize particular types of information over others.

The key to understanding the effects of technology is to comprehend what kind of internal reception it induces in its users. To do this, McLuhan conceives of a continuum of hot and cold that can describe media, information, cultures, and epochs. Cool media (like their sunglasses and leather jacket wearing persona) are dispassionate and collected. They typically contain many types of sensory information, often relayed in low definition. This places cognitive demands on the user, who must actively work to compensate for scrambled information in order to interpret content correctly. Television was McLuhan’s eternal example of a cold medium, and if you think back to television screens from the 1960s it makes a lot of sense. The brain was required to compile millions of disconnected dots and lines into a cohesive, moving image. This blending and inventing of information was tough work, and occupied a large share of the viewer’s cognitive capacity such that television (in McLuhan’s book anyways) produced a viewer that was ever dispassionate and certainly vulnerable to suggestion. Hot media, conversely, extend a single sense in high definition. Photography and radio were two such media. They were said to incite greater reactions while demanding less cognitive involvement from their users.

(Handy chart via Dr. Mark Wolfe at the University of Calgary)

Media, it should be mentioned, don’t necessarily fit neatly into the binary of hot/cold. Radio is considered to be hotter than television, but colder than photography. Media could be “hotted up” or “cooled down” by shifting phenomenological strategies and demands placed upon the viewer. A Seurat pointalist work, for example, is much cooler than a Rockwell or a David painting. A televised John Coltrane set is cooler than the hockey game.

Media, therefore, can be seen to provoke different ways of thinking. The hot medium of print breeds an impassioned individualism whereas television begets a cool collectivity. TV, as a mode of participation, seemed poised in McLuhan’s books to revolutionize educational strategies and group identity. The uproar about TV was largely dismissed by McLuhan as a kind of futile reaction of a society primed to hot media struggling to make the cognitive shift to see the world cooled down. This interconnected, participatory TV audience also seemed poised to induce a ‘global village’ of tribal collectivities placed into ever closer proximity due to the globe-spanning spread of information in the Electronic Age. TV, it has since been argued, never quite accomplished this, but the internet has certainly picked up that torch.

“I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say,” – Marshall McLuhan

Here’s where it gets tricky. McLuhan sets out a theory that appears terribly convenient. It allows us to map virtually every media and draw some fairly certain conclusions. And yet, however convinced McLuhan seems, at the end of the day he backs away from claiming these conclusions as fact. His method was to fire many provocative probes out into the public discourse, statements that challenged the truth but may not necessarily be truthful in themselves. It’s a very postmodern pedagogy. What is truth anyways?

This complicates how we should approach and use McLuhan as a philosopher. He’s not so much writing a manifesto or a manual, but rather assaulting us with thinking experiments and ‘what if’ statements disguised under the force of a logically reasoned argument. McLuhan’s thinking takes us in some very interesting directions, but it’s ultimately designed to open the debate rather than to close it.

So, in the spirit of his probes, I would invite you to take up the challenge implicit in McLuhan’s work and weigh in on his philosophy so far. Are you hot about media or cool to McLuhan? Where do you see the utility of this line of thinking and where might it fall short? What is the temperature of the internet, and how might it cognitively prime your experience of the world?

I will be getting into McLuhan’s thoughts on art and media content next week, while detailing the argument he makes for the necessity of art. In the meantime, this is probably enough to chew on. I look forward to hearing from you!

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