Marshall McLuhan

That Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan is a hero of mine should be no secret to those of you who have known me for some time. For me, reading McLuhan is second in effect and benefit only to reading scripture itself. I could prove this by showing you my tattered, dog-eared, underlined, highlighted, scribbled in and held-together-with-tape copy of McLuhan’s “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”.

If you too are a Canadian, you may have been introduced to McLuhan by the  1-minute Canada Heritage commercial (see at right).

The Medium Is The Message
The aphorism “The medium is the message” basically means that the content of a medium is not its message – or at least not the totality of it. Obsession with content masks the real facilitator of change – the medium itself. In McLuhan’s words: “the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”

The true message of a medium is its effect on humanity and human interaction. Some media expand and enrich our potential for human flourishing; others diminish it. The judgment of whether a medium is good or bad has less to do with the content of the medium than the effect of the medium itself.

TV
Applying the aphorism to one particular medium, McLuhan said the “message” of television is that it “turned the family circle into a semi-circle.” What does he mean?

First, the family circle. Prior to the advent of television there are no mediators of communication – no screens between us. There was plenty of two-way, face-to-face communication:

(We could extend backwards the analysis of the family circle prior to industrialization. In our agrarian phase, the family circle was both larger and more time intensive as multi-generational families lived and worked together. With the advent of the technologies that comprised industrialization, we were only able to engage the family circle after mom and/or dad got home from their 10, 12 or 18 hours at the factory.)

Next, what TV turned the “family circle” into. It greatly reduced face-to-face human contact and established a daily regimen of one way communication from screen to human. Families might still have been sitting in a room together, but communication between them was greatly reduced if not eliminated altogether:

In the era of social media the family circle is re-established in some ways and further diminished in others. Now, everyone has a screen in front of them, whether it’s a cellphone, iPad/Pod, or a display monitor. These screens now largely mediate the conversations between us and our families. In addition, we now have infinite potential connections outside of the circle – all of them also mediated by screens:

McLuhan was wary of making moral pronouncements about any medium. His goals were simply to determine the causes of their coming into being and to expose their effects on humanity. And so that is where I will leave the development of this idea.. for now.

Marshal McLuhan: “That baseball’s popularity will ebb and football’s will grow as TV continues to do its work on us.  TV and football are tactile.  Baseball is visual.”

From the Gallup site a chart which shows that since the coming of TV in the late 1940s the popularity of baseball in America has fallen and football has risen.

Gallup first asked this open-ended “favorite sport” question in 1937, and has updated it on a regular basis since 1990. In the very early years, baseball was king, with football second by a considerable margin. But by 1972, football had overtaken baseball, and it has been the top sport ever since, surpassing 40% mentions in each of the last three years.