Why I Teach The Medium Is the Massage

13 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by John in Marshall McLuhan, Media Ecology, Rhetoric and Composition, Teaching, Walter Ong

The following is a revised version of a blog post I wrote on July 16, 2010. I rewrote it and posted to the Cyber-Rhetoric course blog as the last lecture on The Medium Is the Massage, and thought I’d repost it here. When I wrote the first version back in 2010, it wasn’t my intention to explain why I believe teaching The Medium Is the Massage is so important, as I assayed¹ the subject, I found myself ending up doing just that.

From the July 16, 2010 Inside Higher Ed‘s article “Technologically Illiterate Students“:

“Say you are an employer evaluating college students for a job. Perusing one candidate’s Facebook profile, you notice the student belongs to a group called “I Pee My Pants When I’m Drunk.” What is your first thought?

It should not be that this student is unemployable for being an intemperate drinker, said Susan Zvacek, director of instructional development at the University of Kansas — though that it might mean that, too. Mainly, though, it should suggest something else — something that might be more relevant to the student’s qualifications.”

“What it tells me,” Zvacek said, “is that the student is technologically illiterate.”

The piece then goes on to offer Zvacek’s definition of technological literacy:

“The digital divide used to be about the hardware haves and have-nots,” she said. “What we’re seeing now is that it’s less about who has hardware, but who has access to information; who has those problem-solving skills. And that’s going to be the digital divide that we’re going to see in the future … the ability to deal with information.”

The assumption that today’s student are computer-literate because they are “digital natives” is a pernicious one, Zvacek said. “Our students are task-specific tech savvy: they know how to do many things,” she said. “What we need is for them to be tech-skeptical.”

On the one hand, I want to stand back and suggest that the issue raised in the anecdote isn’t about technological awareness but rhetorical awareness, about the construction of the self. And it is. At the same time, however, Zvacek is getting at something else. Zvacek is responding to the US Department of Education’s definition of technological literacy as knowing how to use a computer, and in doing so, she’s not alone.²

I want to push this issue farther though, push it beyond the concepts of computer literacy or technological literacy. In fact, I want to push us beyond the use of the word literacy itself for a whole host of reasons, first and foremost because literacy is, technically, about letters, about the written word, and that positions the issue squarely in a particular techno-cultural-noetic milieu.³

I was fumbling with this very subject when I wrote about technological literacy in The Making of a Technorhetorician: A Technological Literacy Collage, which I wrote earlier that year as an example for students working on their own technological literacy collages. I’m unhappy with what I wrote there, as unhappy, in fact, as I was when I wrote it. The problem, I’ve realized, is that I fell into the trap I try to push students away from. I let the imperiousness of literacy muddle my thinking⁴ The issue, I so fumblingly hinted at in my technological literacy collage is not literacy of any sort but awareness rooted in orality-literacy studies and media ecology. Its the kind of awareness that Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong spent their careers trying to teach us.

As long as we keep basing this issue in particular techno-cultural-noetic contexts, we’re going to keep fumbling along, never to get it right. The awareness I’m talking about here, and the awareness I think Susan Zvacek is getting at without realizing it, is rooted in an awareness of McLuhan’s dictum/maxim “The medium is the massage,” that “[a]ll media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical.”⁵ That is, McLuhan’s awareness of how media work as environments:

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a working knowledge of the way media work as environments. (26)

It can be hard, at first, to convince students that I’m talking about something relevant to their lives when we jump around from such topics as the difference between alphabets, syllabaries, and logograms; Renaissance perspectivism and railroads; Homeric myth and encyclopedias; Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Absurdest theater, and the Fluxus Movement; John Cage and Charlotte Moorman, the TV-bra wearing cellist and performance artist. As McLuhan knew, you’ve got to pull the rug out from under our feet before we can get beneath the surface and understand the deep structures.

Making the mistake of being too rooted in a particular techno-cultural-noetic perspective leads us to focus on the wrong things. My go-to example here is the belief that oral poets must be illiterate. Early scholars of oral tradition too quickly jumped to this conclusion that oral poets must be illiterate because the oral poets they studied were illiterate, even while there was evidence to the contrary, and it mistaken notion was perpetuated for far too long.⁶ As Ong argued, writing is imperious. It clouds our perspective. We are so rooted in literacy and in print culture that we far too often fail to realize it’s not our natural noetic state or that it’s not inherently better than other noetic states. This is the reason why we use literacy as the metaphor for everything, and in doing so, we fail to recognize that when we think we’re talking about literacy we are sometimes actually talking about awareness of media as environments.

I believe this is important because, as McLuhan and Fiore reminds us through the use of the A.N. Whitehead quote at the end of the book, “The business of the future is to be dangerous” (160). Yes, the business of the future is to be dangerous. As they reminded us at the beginning of the book, with another A.N. Whitehead quote, “[t]he major advances of civilization are processes that all but wreak the societies in which they occur” (6-7). However, as McLuhan and Fiore assert in the introduction to the book, “there is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening” (25). The Medium Is the Massage, as with much of McLuhan’s other work, is his attempt to give us the tools necessary to contemplate what is happening, to understand how media work as environments, so that we can help determine our own future.

Ultimately, this is why I keep teaching The Medium is the Massage, why I keep returning to it semester after semester even as I resist becoming one of those teachers who always teaches the same thing semester after semester. Back in 2009, when I was teaching at Creighton University, a student told me our university president walked by, saw the student reading The Medium is the Massage, and said, “People still teach that?” Fortunately, this particular student had gotten McLuhan’s message by that time and she explained that she found it to be an important book. She had come to understand McLuhan’s message and its relevance to her 21st-century life. I keep teaching McLuhan because it is relevant to all our 21st-century lives and it will be relevant to the lives of our 30th-century ancestors as well.

From the French Essai, meaning “trial” or “attempt,” and the origin of Montaigne’s invention of the essay genre. ↩
For those of you unfamiliar with the subject, let me suggest Cindy Selfe’s Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention; Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher’s Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives from the United States, and Stewart Selber’s Multiliteracies for a Digital Age as three good starting points. ↩
See, for instance, Anne Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s “Blinded By the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy for a Metaphor for Everything Else?” in Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. ↩
If you’re really curious as to what I mean by this, see Walter J. Ong’s “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” (The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. Ed. Gerd Baumann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. 23-50; Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 143-168.). ↩
The Medium is the Massage, 26. ↩
Scholars of oral tradition, including such people as Albert Lord who was one of scholars who first promoted the error, have also worked to correct this perception. For a good, introductory text on this subject, see John Miles Foley’s How to Read an Oral Poem. ↩

Hot and Cool Media

11 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by John in Marshall McLuhan, Media Ecology

≈ Leave a Comment

When teaching Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium Is the Massage, I find that I need to spend a bit of time teasing out what McLuhan meant by hot and cool media. This isn’t surprising since the book relies upon the concepts but doesn’t go into them in depth, and, moreover, while television is one of the book’s primary go-to examples of cool media, students today are accustomed to television as a high-definition technology. Since I’m teaching an asynchronous online course this semester, I’ve distilled my talk on hot and cool media down to this:

As W. Terrance Gordon explains in McLuhan for Beginners,¹ a hot medium is a high-definition medium that “gives a lot of information and gives little to do” and a cool medium is a low-definition medium that “gives a little information and makes the user work to fill in what is missing” (51). As Gordon notes, the amount of information involved is not the facts and knowledge we’re getting but “how our physical senses respond to, or participate in, media” (51).

Some things McLuhan tells us are hot: radio, print, photographs, paintings, movies, lectures.

Some things McLuhan tells us are cool: telephone, speech, cartoons, mosaics, television, seminars.

Here is a list of hot and cool media, paired together to help illustrate the comparative nature of “high definition” and “low definition.” The hot media are in red and the cool media are in blue: (radio | telephone) (print | speech), (photographs | cartoons), (paintings | mosaics), (movies | television), (lectures | seminars).

As you compare the painting and cartoon below, the “Florence, Piazza Della Signoria” by Giuseppe Gherardi and a Peanuts cartoon respectively, notice the amount of visual detail in the painting compared to that of the cartoon. If you’re familiar with the Peanuts, you know that Charley Brown lives in a free-standing house and that Snoopy’s dog house is in a fenced backyard. Only, we only ever see the fence when it’s important, such as when Snoopy is perched on top of it pretending to be a vulture or when he’s interacting with the neighbor’s cat.

We, as viewers of the painting, are presented a fully detailed scene. It’s a high definition image and there’s little for us to “fill in,” or, in Gordon’s terms, there’s little work for us “to do.” As we look at and read the Peanuts cartoon, on the other hand, we see that there’s very little detail. We’re supposed to remember that Snoopy’s dog house is in a fenced backyard rather than off by itself somewhere with nothing but snow and a little bush off in the distance (3rd panel). The Peanuts cartoon is a low definition image and we have much work to do in filling in the context.

Florence, Piazza Della Signoria

Peanuts Cartoon

So, having looked at the two images, let me offer one more example: the lecture vs. the seminar.

In a lecture, someone stands before you and talks at you. You might be able to ask a question and get a response, maybe even engage in a bit of an exchange, but the point of a lecture is to lectured to. High amounts of information and little for you to do other than absorb (or tune out) that information. This is why a lecture is a hot medium.

In a seminar, on the other hand, you and the other seminar participants are gathered together to discuss ideas. The instructor might act as the discussion leader, but it’s quite common to have students take charge of discussions for at least part of the time. Because there are multiple, sometimes competing, ideas being expressed, the seminar resembles something more like a mosaic or a mixed media collage than a painting. You, as participant, are responsible for sharing ideas, filtering through information, asking questions, and making connections. Compared to a lecture, a seminar gives little in the way of straight-forward information and it requires its participants to fill in what information there is. This is why a seminar is a cool medium.

In his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in which McLuhan offers an extended discussion on hot and cool media (22-32), he also notes that we can heat up a cool medium and cool down a hot one, or that a medium can “overheat” and reverse itself by cooling down (33-40). When thinking about hot and cool media, this is worth remembering.

For our immediate purposes, however, it might be worth noting that at the bottom of page 125 of The Medium Is the Massage, McLuhan tells us that the images of the cool medium of television wrap around us in a “sort of reverse perspective which has much in common with Oriental art.” If you’re wondering what McLuhan might be getting at here, turn to pages 143-145 in which he quotes from the ancient Chinese philosopher and poet Laotze, who gives us what we might call a “reverse perspective”: the idea that a spoked wheel is a circle is because of the empty spaces between the spokes; the idea that a pitcher gets its form from the absence of clay; and the idea that doors and windows are valuable because of what is not there (the lack of wall allows us to move through doors and see through windows).

This Asian perspective (the East), McLuhan tells us, is much cooler than the North American and European Western perspective. Immediately following the Laotze quotes, McLuhan tells us that electric circuitry is “Orientalizing the West” (145), by which he means that it is disrupting our uniform, continuous, and connected linear patterns of thought that have their roots in the alphabet (44-45) and were fostered with the advent of print (46-61), and is instead replacing that with a sensibility that is more flowing, unified, and fused (145). In other words, electronic circuitry is cooling down the hot perspective of Western print culture.

Gordon, W. Terrance. McLuhan for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1997. ↩

Tools, Technologies, and Infrastructures

16 Friday May 2014

Posted by John in Marshall McLuhan, Media Ecology, Technology

≈ Leave a Comment

Last December, a discussion regarding the differences between tools, technologies, and infrastructures took place on WPA-L, a listserv for writing program administration. Late in the conversation, I offered the following as a first stab at the issue after someone suggested that the term “technology” was introduced in the 20th Century. I’m posting my response here, slightly edited, as a placeholder to return to at some point.

While I understand the desire to tease out the differences between technology, tool, and infrastructure, I don’t believe there is a simple way to do so. Technologies can be tools and tools can be technologies. A glance at the OED, as Rich Haswell suggested, is instructive here. First, we learn that the OED lists its first known usage of the word technology back to 1612 in the context of a discourse or treatise on an art or arts. Second, if we just limit ourselves to entries 4a-c, we learn that technology can encompass a body of knowledge; the application of that knowledge; a process, method, or technique; and specific objects such as a machine or a piece of equipment. The definitions, along with their earliest recorded usages, are:

4.a.: The branch of knowledge dealing with the mechanical arts and applied sciences; the study of this. (1787)

4.b.: The application of such knowledge for practical purposes, esp. in industry, manufacturing, etc.; the sphere of activity concerned with this; the mechanical arts and applied sciences collectively. (1829)

4.c.: The product of such application; technological knowledge or know-how; a technological process, method, or technique. Also: machinery, equipment, etc., developed from the practical application of scientific and technical knowledge; an example of this. (1898)

While literacy is a technology, pens and paper can also be technologies. Writing and rhetoric, too.

So, what is a tool? The OED lists 4 major definitions with a total of 11 distinct meanings. We can, I think, be selective and just look at definitions 1.a and 2.a:

1.a: a mechanical implement for working upon something, as by cutting, striking, rubbing, or other process, in any manual art or industry; usually, one held in and operated directly by the hand (or fixed in position, as in a lathe), but also including certain simple machines, as the lathe; sometimes extended to simple instruments of other kinds (c.888)

2. a: Anything used in the manner of a tool; a thing (concrete or abstract) with which some operation is performed; a means of effecting something; an instrument. (c.1000)

A tool, then, can be something – physical or abstract – which we use to perform an action to make something happen. A pen can be a tool, and so can language. Literacy and writing, too.

Does this mean everything is a technology? No. Our naturally occurring vocal cords are not technologies; however, as we use them to perform actions to make something happen, we could call them tools. That said, I’d invoke Marshall McLuhan here and limit tools to extensions or products of our physical and mental faculties. So, while an idea – the product of our thinking – could be a tool, our vocal cords are not.

For infrastructure, the OED gives us “A collective term for the subordinate parts of an undertaking; substructure, foundation.” As such, infrastructures are made up of technologies and tools as well as other things. For instance, the infrastructure of literacy within a particular context would include one or more languages and scripts as well as the writing materials used in that culture, all of which are both technologies and tools. The infrastructure of literacy would also include the means by which it is learned and taught, as well as the social, political, cultural, and economic forces that support, promote, and reward literacy within its particular context.

Therefore, we can’t say categorically that a pen is a tool and writing is a technology. They’re both. The distinction between technology and tool isn’t determined by what something is but by how it’s being considered and discussed. We think of something as a tool when we consider an object (physical or abstract) as an instrument by which we may effect change. We think of something as a technology when we consider the object as the application of mechanical arts and applied science to make things (including processes – processes are things) and when we think of something as the product of the application of mechanical arts and applied sciences.

Of Black Holes, Maelstroms, McLuhan and Poe

20 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by John in Marshall McLuhan, Media Ecology, Probes

≈ Leave a Comment

A simulated black hole from Ute Kraus’ “Step by Step into a Black Hole.”

An article in the MIT Technology Review reports that researchers have found that vortices in the south west Indian Ocean and in the South Atlantic are mathematically equivalent to black holes. Cosmology in general and black holes in particular have long been an interest of mine. I believe I did my first report on black holes in elementary school and as an undergraduate I took two astrophysics courses on stars and galaxies, the upper division course essentially a course in cosmology. In that course it was six or seven physics majors and me, and I for the course I researched the possibility of mini-black holes making up dark matter in galactic halos.

While this article is fascinating in and of itself, I’m particularly draw to its referencing Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Decent into the Maelstrom” which so captured McLuhan’s own imagination:

The vortices that can form in turbulent water are a familiar sight. Edgar Allan Poe described just such a whirlpool in his short story “A Descent into a Maelstrom” which he published in 1841:

“The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel…”

In this passage, Poe describes one of the crucial feature of these rotating bodies of fluid: that they can be thought of as coherent islands in an incoherent flow. As such, they are essentially independent of their environment, surrounded by a seemingly impenetrable boundary and with little, if any, of the fluid inside them leaking out.

If you’re thinking that this description has a passing resemblance to a black hole, you’d be right. Haller and Beron-Vera put this similarity on a formal footing by describing the behaviour of vortices in turbulent fluids using the same mathematics that describe black holes.

Surfing business man from The Medium Is the Massage

Page 150-151 from McLuhan and Fiore’s The Medium Is the Massage.

While McLuhan first makes use of Poe’s “A Descent into a Maelstrom” in the Preface to The Mechanical Bride, he returns to it time and again throughout his writings and lectures.¹

Based on this MIT article, I’m now thinking about what McLuhan doesn’t pay attention to in Poe’s story, that is the description of the broad belt, what the MIT article calls “coherent islands in an incoherent flow.” What might the media/environmental equivalent of this belt of “coherent islands in an incoherent flow” be? Or is it even relevant because McLuhan clearly positions us within the maelstrom, inside the black hole, and, therefore, beyond the belt?

As can be seen in the image above, on pages 150-51 of The Medium Is the Massage, McLuhan and Foire juxtapose an image of the surfing business man with McLuhan’s claim that Poe’s story “The Descent into the Maelstrom” can serve as “a possible stratagem for understanding our predicament, our electrically-configured whirl.” For more context on McLuhan’s use of Poe’s story, see this segment from Kevin McMahon’s documentary McLuhan’s Wake and “Lobby” and “Chapel” from Paul Guzzardo’s “BuildBetterBarrel,” a series of nine new media events that takes its name from McLuhan’s use of Poe’s story. [↩]

Embracing the “Great Divide” Critique

15 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by John in Marshall McLuhan, Media Ecology, Walter Ong

≈ Leave a Comment

While I’ve found most “Great Divide” critiques of orality-literacy studies and media ecology to be based in misunderstanding—see, for instance, the “Complications and Overlappings” section in chapter 2 of Walter Ong’s The Presence of the Word—I’m rather fond of how Lance Strate embraces the “Great Divide” as a means of disarming it in his article “Studying Media as Media: McLuhan and the Media Ecology Approach”¹ :

Other critics complain that media ecology scholars like McLuhan, Havelock, and Ong put forth a “Great Divide” theory, exaggerating the difference between orality and literacy, for example. And it is true that they see a great divide between orality and literacy. And a great divide between word and image. And a great divide between the alphabet, on the one hand, and pictographic and ideographic writing, on the other. And a great divide between clay tablets as a medium for writing and papyrus. And a great divide between parchment and paper. And a great divide between scribal copying and the printing press. And a great divide between typography and the electronic media. And now a great divide between virtuality and reality. I could continue to add to this list, but the point is that there are many divides, which suggests that no single one of them is all that great after all. The critics miss the point that media ecology scholars often work dialectically, using contrasts to understand media.

His point, of course, is that those who use the “Great Divide” theory as a critique of orality-literacy studies and media ecology do miss the point: that the misunderstanding (error) isn’t within orality-literacy studies and media ecology but with those who get hung up on the idea of contrasting two mediums to better understand their natures.