Today was a proud day for me, because I made a pertinent McLuhan reference at work and it was accepted at face value.
I’m working on a piece for PBS’s Frontline as an assistant editor, and I was talking with the editor about interviews (of which I have seen many, many hours at this point). We were talking about Thomas Friedman’s show, where he goes around the world in an attempt to prove that globalization is just the greatest thing ever.
“That’s one of the problems with documentaries,” I said. The filmmakers sell the network on a pre-conceived notion (e.g., ‘Bush is the worst president ever’, or ‘Bush is the greatest president ever’) and then we cull relevant footage from the interviews and news clips and vox pops material.
“That’s McLuhan for you–the medium is the message.” Lots of people don’t really understand what this little snippet of McLuhanism means. For example, the website Marshall McLuhan Was Wrong; which begins with the foreword
Marshall McLuhan was Wrong attempts not so much to bury content in style, but to meditatively observe as an older – albeit digitally refined – painterly aesthetic lushly sublimates electronic media. It is a self-contained, extended animated text composed of 100 images, having a duration of 5 minutes. Upon completion, it loops. Lacking a high-speed internet connection, the animation definitely needs time to fully load and trigger. Even with a high-speed connection, patience is required. Still, I believe the piece lies at the cutting edge of where the web is evolving graphically, and with a high-speed connection it should take at most 30 seconds or so to properly load and trigger.
What McLuhan was saying is that the peculiar constraints of various media shape the content being delivered. For example, you are never going to be able to make a cogent argument about, say, economic policy in the form of a three-chord pop song. But you can talk about the emotional impact of policies on an family, or even a whole community.
Consider, for example, the film American History X, which is one of my favorite films of all time. The movie is full of people making speeches that sound reasonable and contain figures, but it’s only the neo-Nazis who are allowed to express themselves this way. The message of the film is in the emotional content, the human aspect of real (imaginary) people which shows our equality. It makes an argument against Nazism without having to debate on the facts.
Now, that’s fine for a movie, but I was writing a book about the neo-Nazi movement, that certainly wouldn’t be the tack I would take. That’s OK–movies have certain limitations inherent in the medium.
You can’t hold up a pie chart during the course of a radio single, you can’t hear a mother’s cry for her dead child in a newspaper article. So, for example, when you’re making an argument against McLuhan (to be fair, “McLuhan Was…” takes issue with another utterance, namely “people will not accept a war on TV”) in the form of an animated GIF, you can’t, for example, play a sound clip. You can’t ever hear McLuhan say anything at all, for that matter.
McLuhan wasn’t saying that everything you say in a particular medium means the same thing, only that things said in a single medium all sound kind of the same.
I invite you Woody Allen-types to correct me about McLuhan, because I haven’t read everything he wrote, I admit.
