McLuhan

I have to admit that I did not really understand “the medium is the massage” until reading Arther Kroker's 1995 article “Digital Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan.” Kroker suggests that McLuhan's method belongs in the long tradition going back to Hippocrates, Thucydides, and St. Thomas Aquinas: “McLuhan's historical study of the media of communication was structured by the three moments of semiology (classification of symptoms), diagnosis and therapeutics. Indeed, it might even be said that McLuhan's adoption of the three stages of the Thomistic 'article' - objections, respondeo, and answers to objections - was only a modern variation of the more classical method of experimental medicine.” The human confrontation with media technologies must be understood at the biological level, as they affect the senses, causing numbness due to the stress of prolonged overstimulation. Thus it is not merely that the media convey messages, nor that the important messages for those who can sense their effects on the human sensorium are the media themselves. Electronic media massage the senses - visual, aural, even haptic (touch) - causing a deep, subliminal numbing, hypnosis, in Kroker's words again,“[Hans] Selye's original theorisation that under conditions of deep stress, the organism anesthetizes the area effected, making the shock felt in peripheral regions,” so that we do not even notice the extent to which they have transformed us. Moreover, human sensory apparatus extend far beyond the physical limits of the body into the machinery, the 'cyborg' - not a term McLuhan every used, apparently, although he used a number of other metaphors to illustrate this point: the outering of the central nervous system, wearing the brain outside the skull, a turtle turned inside out of its shell, auto-amputations of the sensory organs, and so on.

The other shocking revelation from Kroker that does not come out in The Medium is the Massage or the interview in Playboy is McLuhan's strong Catholicism with its allegiance to the optimistic belief in eschatological transformation of world societies united in the project of classical humanism. That is not to deny him vigor in promoting the need to become aware of the effects of media and to creatively confront them. In this respect he confronts the unsatisfactory nostalgia of Heidegger: “If literate Western man were really interested in preserving the most creative aspects of his civilization, he would not cower in his ivory tower bemoaning change but would plunge himself into the vortex of electric technology and, by understanding it, dictate his new environment - turn the ivory tower into the control tower” (The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan, 1969). It is not surprising that McLuhan had such an influence on Michael Heim, who wrote in “Heidegger and McLuhan: The Computer as Component” that “scholarship requires a cybersage.” I think the scholarly, religious side of McLuhan is overshadowed by his insistence on confronting electric media with a jarring, artistic creativity that is his playing the role of the cybersage plunging himself into the vortex.