In the past two hundred years, the acceleration of technological advancement in communications has been nothing short of astounding: the telegraph (1837), the telephone (1876), radio (1895), cinema (1895), television (1927), the Internet (1983), the World Wide Web (1989), social media (1997), the smart phone (2007), and artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT (2022). This period contrasts with the slower pace of when the Gutenberg printing press (c. 1440) replaced copying handwritten manuscripts (c. 3400 BC). The dazzling speed of technological innovation no longer makes Elon Musk’s dream of developing implantable brain-computer interfaces far-fetched, with the first human clinical trials already underway.
How do we make sense of the rapidity and transformation in these communicative technologies? Grant N. Havers, chair of the philosophy department at Trinity Western University in Canada, looks to his fellow countryman, Marshal McLuhan, for answers in The Medium is Still the Message: Marshall McLuhan for Our Time. Havers resurrects McLuhan’s theories and ideas about the media by presenting them in an accessible manner without sacrificing philosophical depth to understand the digital world in which we live. As the “father of media studies,” McLuhan shows that media are not simply tools of communication: they create new environments that radically change how we think about politics, economics, culture, identity, and religion. Without understanding the power of media technologies, we become enslaved to these creations and make them the new idols of our era.
The Man
Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1911, but his family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, two years later. McLuhan obtained his bachelor’s in 1933 and his master’s in 1934 at the University of Manitoba with both degrees in English. He then completed his second bachelor’s degree in English at Cambridge in 1936, a degree that he considered far superior to the ones he obtained in Canada. During this period, he was influenced by G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, I. A. Richards, and T. S. Eliot. He converted to Catholicism in 1937 and taught at St. Louis University, where he deepened his study of Catholic scholasticism.
McLuhan and his family finally settled in Toronto, where he took up a professorship at St. Michael’s College, a position he held until his death in 1980. His breakthrough publications were The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). Both works examined the effects of mass media on culture and human consciousness, and where the phrases “the global village” and “the medium is the message” entered the public discourse. “The global village” came from McLuhan’s prediction of the World Wide Web in The Gutenberg Galaxy, where he argued that the visual, individualistic print culture would be replaced by “electronic interdependence.” Humankind would move from fragmented individualism to a new social organization of collective identity known as the “global village.” McLuhan also coined the phrase, “the medium is the message” in Understanding Media, where he proposed that the form of media, not its subject, should be the object of study because the role that media plays in society is determined more by its characteristics than its content.
In 1963, McLuhan established his own institution, the Centre for Culture and Technology, and he continued to write, give interviews, and engage in popular culture in the hope of effecting change while understanding the power and nature of mass media. By the 1970s, he turned to activism, whether it was supporting urban localism and environmentalism or opposing the reforms of Vatican II. In 1979, he suffered a massive stroke that rendered him unable to read or speak in the last year of his life. But before his death, he witnessed the fulfilment of one of his most famous predictions: the transformation of entertainment into politics with the election of Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980.
Rear-View Mirror Thinking
In an age of rapid technological change, McLuhan believed that humans recoil from these new media environments and instead rely on “rear-view mirror thinking”—focusing on the preceding environment to make sense of their new reality. For example, television was initially understood by many as merely an extension of radio, a medium they already knew. By framing new technologies with reference to older, familiar ones, people not only miss the unique potential of innovations in new technologies, but they also can become disoriented when their previous mental frames are unable to navigate the new media landscape. This “total disorientation at all times” makes people vulnerable to political ideologies and tribal identities.
The instability of human identity in an age of rapid technological change was a continual interest of McLuhan, especially where he thought human nature itself could be turned into an object and reshaped at will.
The United States was a case in point for McLuhan by representing a forward-looking society that judged its political identity and institutions according to an obsolete set of traditions and practices. As Americans embraced new communicative technologies like radio, television, and the Internet, its citizens still looked to a technologically outdated print culture of the eighteenth century for its political identity. According to McLuhan, the inability of American institutions to adapt to technological changes led their citizens to engage in “rear-view mirror thinking.” Americans hark back to the age of the Enlightenment with its values of individualism, rationality, and mass literacy as the fixed identity of the republic. In the age of electronic and digital technology, Americans were not only nostalgic for its earlier print culture but were unable to conceive or communicate otherwise, creating “total disorientation” among its citizens and thereby making them susceptible to ideology and identity crisis.
Havers builds upon McLuhan’s insights to account for American political identity and politics today: America’s “admirable celebration of literacy makes it unable to grasp the full effects of electronic (now digital) media.” The failure of conservatives to understand that most Americans are indifferent to the values and principles of the republic’s founding is because conservatives believe their fellow citizens live in a print-literate culture with Enlightenment values. Following in the footsteps of McLuhan, Havers argues that there is nothing left to conserve in America with the transformative cultural, technological, and institutional change in the past two hundred years.
Nothing Left to Conserve?
The democratic deliberation required for serious political debates―the dialogue and back and forth among legislators and branches of government―no longer exists in the age of television and the Internet. Today’s medium would be too “hot” for McLuhan because these media are not set up as if they were a newspaper or radio. The well-known fact that those who listened (via radio) to the 1960 presidential debate thought Richard Nixon won, while those who watched television believed John Kennedy did, underscores McLuhan’s insight that “the medium is the message.” It is not cool deliberation and reasoned argumentation that win current political debates, but the repeated replay of theatrical tactics and well-rehearsed talking points that the public continually consumes.
But are there really no “permanent things” left to conserve from the Founding in today’s America? As some have argued in these pages, there are certain ideals and principles that continue to remain with Americans in their experiment of self-governance: the common good, natural rights, and government by the people. Americans still believe in these ideas in spite―or because―of cultural, technological, and institutional change. This persistent belief is not a case of “rear-view mirror thinking” but an understanding that enduring principles continue to animate in people’s lives regardless of how they are conveyed because they are real and true.
The Magic of Post-Literate Society
McLuhan would not be too sanguine about a digital print culture and instead predicted a “post-literate” society―one where electronic and digital media make literacy less necessary and common. For McLuhan, the decline in literacy and the collapse of an American print culture make it impossible to discover a vantage point to critique the digital world in which we live. As McLuhan humorously put it, “We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.” Fish don’t know water because they are unable to live―and therefore perceive―the environment in which they live. Likewise, for Americans in a post-literate society, they are unable to perceive a culture, politics, and reality other than what is shown on their screens.
The instability of human identity in an age of rapid technological change was a continual interest of McLuhan, especially where he thought human nature itself could be turned into an object and reshaped at will. This transhumanist impulse becomes more prevalent in a post-literate society where science and art have merged together in the creation of new realities. Perhaps no better product captures this than Apple’s iPhone, where technology, science, art, and design are brought together to revolutionize “mobile image making.” Out of its more than 1.5 billion users, very few, if any, understand how the iPhone actually works. As a consequence, the technology of the iPhone is perceived as a type of “magic”―a belief that reality can be shaped according to one’s will.
McLuhan aptly observed that the adoption of these “magic” technologies for communication does not require the use of one’s body: “One of the peculiarities of radio and electric technology is that it moves you instantaneously: you are everywhere at the speed of light, without a body.” The result is a dualistic conception of human nature with the sensual (the body) and the abstract (the mind) existing apart, with the body ignored. This neglect of the body not only led to a type of Gnosticism for McLuhan, but it also created a new form of collective consciousness where, McLuhan wrote, “something is shared by everyone, in some mysterious way.”
This mysterious community is McLuhan’s “global village” where “everyone is involved in everyone else’s business.” Potentially, this place could be one of harmony (remember the promise of the World Wide Web uniting the world?), but more likely it would be a place of tribal politics and conflict. McLuhan at different times predicted both but thought conflict was more probable: “Electric technology creates not the nation but the tribe―not the superficial association of equals but the cohesive depth pattern of the totally involved kinship groups.”
How can the modern person who is so engrossed in an electronic and digital media culture not understand politics but grasp Shakespeare and the Nicene Creed?
As Havers points out, the current debate and controversy over identity politics support McLuhan’s claim. The desire of marginalized people to create communities based on shared attributes and interests to bolster their stigmatized identities is to privilege one group over another. By contrast, the earlier visual, individualistic print culture was associated with the belief that rights extended to all individuals and not to groups or tribes. The rise of digital technologies and social media has yielded the opposite. Being too “hot” and “magical,” the medium of these new technologies has accelerated tribal identity, where the global village is one of strife and hatred instead of harmony and peace.
A Schizophrenic Account
For McLuhan, one of the ways out of this digital mess was the medium of the book to awaken the critical faculties of the mind. Displaced by electronic and digital media, the book was no longer a vehicle of self-expression but “a probe of society”: to examine and critique a postliterate society from a literate perspective. Reading books, and living in print culture generally, was an individual interior experience where people could create private lives for themselves in contrast to the digital world of outward presentations of the self. By studying the relationship between one medium and another, McLuhan believed an “anti-environment,” a place to critique the digital media ecosystem in which we live, could exist. It should come as no surprise that McLuhan welcomed the creation of Robert Maynard Hutchins’ and Mortimer Adler’s “great books” program at the University of Chicago as one way “to probe society.”
Another was religious belief, and particularly in natural law, that enabled people to “keep their cool” amid rapid technological change. By trusting in the inherent goodness of God’s creation, the Christian manifests “detachment and amusement at human gullibility and self-deception.” This psychological distance from the world permits a critique of it, to recognize that digital substitutes cannot replace the unity of the body and soul. To live only a digital life is to live a life free of one’s natural body with its limitations and instead to aspire to a God-like authority over creation. Without an anchoring principle or belief, people will be increasingly dependent upon these technologies for information and their values, the idols of our age. As Havers describes it, “In the absence of a religious consciousness, we will experience nothing but disorder and chaos.”
Unfortunately, these solutions come across as simplistic and contradictory. If the changing technological landscape precludes citizens from appreciating their country’s founding principles, then wouldn’t they equally be incapable of valuing the books of great literature or accepting religious beliefs? Why does “rear-view mirror thinking” only apply to politics but not to culture and religion? How can the modern person who is so engrossed in an electronic and digital media culture not understand politics but grasp Shakespeare and the Nicene Creed?
McLuhan’s remedies not only echo a post-liberal conservatism but are also unconvincing because he is selective about which aspects of human nature are impacted by technology. The person, whether ancient, medieval, or modern, is a unitary entity, both body and soul, as McLuhan, a practicing Catholic, believed. It is therefore strange that his diagnosis and answer to modernity’s crisis is selective―politics is a dead-end but culture and religion are not―and raises questions about his analysis.
The issue may not be whether the medium of new media is “too hot” or “cool” but whether our citizens are civically educated so they can navigate this new world of digital media. Such an education includes digital and information literacy, but also civic knowledge and practice. McLuhan is invaluable for us to understand the role, nature, and purpose that media plays in our lives, but his dismissal of enduring animate principles and skepticism of the renewal power of politics is disappointing.
Nonetheless, by reviving McLuhan’s ideas about the media and its impact on politics, culture, religion, and identity, Havers shows that “human beings do not live well at the speed of light.” Like McLuhan, Havers believes that a print culture provides the conditions for deliberation and reasoned argumentation, whereas electronic and digital media promote our tribal identities and loyalties. While there are questions about McLuhan’s treatments for the ills of a digital media culture, Havers has done an invaluable service by highlighting a thinker who forces us to think about the age in which we live and how we can make sense of it.