"All of Man's artifacts, of language, of laws, of ideas, hypotheses, tools, clothing, computers -- all of theses are extensions of our physical bodies." -- Marshall McLuhan.There was a time not long ago, that is before the Internet -- for public purposes I mark 1995 the year the World Wide Web became ubiquitous -- when the notion of wringing another drop of insight out of the works of Marshall McLuhan seemed busy work. Since the Millenium and even more so in this decade, The Teens, though his material feels fresher than ever, more interesting, less vague, and even more far-reaching in its vision of our Fourth World lives that have become a reality in ways so complete that we hardly see it.
McLuhan warned against a turn toward tribalism as an answer to our confusion, although that is just what so many do and have done whether it be Burning Man or Wall Street, wagons are circled even in the allegedly hyper connected realm of technology's paradise.
In the Sixties, McLuhan's audience heard a clarion of hope in his proclamations while overlooking the warning underlying everything, the panic of disembodiment when Mass Culture overtakes Man and we are everywhere at once. The task of organizing ourselves and our minds, that strict discipline that requires real time and logic, falls apart when we live at the speed of light. Today we sense this dislocation but often don't have language to explain it to ourselves as our thoughts are hopelessly distracted by an ever-changing screen perched just in front of our faces. McLuhan used the word "Electric" to describe the threshold Man had passed on the way into our future, but he may as well have meant "Digital." Re-reading his work I have found a wellspring of metaphors, logic, ideas and language that bring today into better focus.This rediscovery is an adjustment like a first pair of glasses; a dizzying experience that creates a kind of vertigo for all the stimuli, the unseen and infinite leaves on all the trees, the innumerable things that were there but not before counted, smudged as if the recent past were a watercolor and now it is a photograph both full of more information but also more unmovable in the mind's eye, less maleable for all its cold hard facts that limn the reality of knowing after an impression becomes real.
From Marshall McLuhan's Man and Media (1979):
"I suggest that it is possible to notice, to understand, the effects of any technology, whether new or old, by applying these four questions to the situation:
1. What does the technology amplify, enhance, or enlarge?
2. What does it obsolesce?
3. What does it retrieve or bring back from a distant past?
(probably something that was scrapped earlier).
4. What does it flip or suddenly reverse into when pushed to its limits?"
Paradoxically, by looking straight into a lit torch we cannot see it. Only the peripheral can truly inform our understanding of the center of our attention. We cannot see the light's filament, the thing itself. McLuhan is the one in his time, the 1960s & 70s -- the dawn of our Digital Era -- who held the brightest lamp that both blinds us with its light and blinds us with darkness when extinguished. He believed nevertheless in off switches in opposition to any disruptive technology, a way to combat such a brilliant juggernaut. The key may be to avoid staring directly into its fierce flame, to glance at it, to look askance at the thief of all our attention and to remember that technology is but an extension of ourselves.
"I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening. Because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I’m resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons."—Marshall McLuhan, 1966
