The Medium is the MASSAGE

“The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur”.
A. N. Whitehead

The medium, or process, of our time—electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re- evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing—you, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to “the others.” And they’re changing dramatically.”

Societies have always been shaped more by the-nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways. The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media. The older training of observation has become quite irrelevant in this new time, because it is based on psychological responses and concepts conditioned by the former technology mechanization. Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our Age of “Anxiety” is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools-with yesterday’s concepts.

Youth instinctively understands the present environment the electric drama. It lives mythic ally and in depth. This is the reason for the great alienation between generations. Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new environments created by electric informational media.

“In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning’s grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.”

—A. N. Whitehead, “Adventures in Ideas.”

Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories—for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in “apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result. Learning, the educational process, has long been associated only with the glum. We speak of the “serious” student. Our time presents a unique opportunity for learning by means of humor a perceptive or incisive joke can be more meaningful than platitudes lying between two covers.

“The Medium is the Massage” is a look-around to see what’s happening. It is a collide-o scope of interfaced situations.
Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on “substance.” The dramatic and rapid changes of “substance” elude these accusers. Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, un-changeable point of view—the witless repetitive response to the unperceived.”

YOU

“How much do you make? Have you ever contemplated suicide? Are you now or have you ever been…? Are you aware of the fact…? I have here be-fore me…. Electrical information de-vices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions—the patterns of mechanistic technologies—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, un forgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mis-takes.” We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted. How shall the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that a Mof us have become the unwitting workforce for social change? What’s thatbuzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?”

YOUR FAMILY

The family circle has widened. The world pool of information fathered by electric media—movies, Telstar, flight-far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear.Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world’s a sage.

YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD

Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of “time” and “space” and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has re-constituted dialogue on a global scale.Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism. The old civic, state, and national groupings have become un-workable. Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than”a place for everything and everything in its place.” You can’t go home again.”

YOUR EDUCATION

There is a world of difference between the modern home environment of integrated electric information and the classroom. Today’s television child is attuned to up-to-the-minute “adult” news—inflation, rioting, war, taxes, crime, bathing beauties—and is bewildered when he enters the nine-teeth-century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules. It is naturally an environment much like any factory set-up with its inventories and assembly lines.
The “child” was an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare’s day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense. Today’s child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up—that is our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.”

YOUR GOVERNMENT

Nose-counting, a cherished part of the eighteenth-century fragmentation process, has rapidly become a cumber-some and ineffectual form of social assessment in an environment of instant electric speeds. The public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, is finished. To-day, the mass audience (the successor to the “public”) can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions. A new form of “politics” is emerging, and in ways we haven’t yet noticed. The living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television in Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing everything.

THE OTHERS

The shock of recognition! In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained—ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels “commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.

Excerpts by: “Marshall McLuhan – Quentin Fiore⏐The Medium is The Massage⏐Jerome Agel⏐1967