McLuhan as Anti-Environment(alist)

"We have no reason to be grateful" [to technologists for] "haphazard innovation," Marshall McLuhan wrote in a 1965 essay. In this edition of The McLuhan Newsletter: what he meant, why we shouldn't.

From Tom Wolfe’s article on McLuhan in the New York Herald Tribune, November 21, 1965, perhaps the article which ‘launched McLuhan.’ Photographer unknown, taken in Howard Gossage’s (perhaps the man who ‘launched McLuhan’) ‘Firehouse’ on Pacific Avenue in San Francisco - recently, apparently, acquired by Jony Ive.

McLuhan as Anti-Environment(alist)

I am digressing away from my planned series on ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ (1964), if only for this issue, to look at an essay Marshall McLuhan wrote a year later, ‘The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment’. Really, I’m focusing on the concluding statements of the essay, where he pulls no punches in his indictment of technologists and their ‘haphazard innovations.’

The first and last pages of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,’ November 1965. Marshall had many copies of this typescript made and circulated it widely among colleagues and friends.

Environment and Anti-Environment: The base of the essay, written a year after Understanding Media was published, as Marshall McLuhan's star was rapidly rising toward the end of 1965.

In the same month, Tom Wolfe published 'Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov -- What If He Is Right?" in the New York Herald Tribune.

"If one says that any new technology creates a new environment, that is better than saying the medium is the message. The content of the new environment is always the old one. The content is greatly transformed by the new technology."

(Marshall McLuhan to Buckminster Fuller, 1964)

I think of this essay as a turning point, with Marshall starting to talk about media more and more as 'environments,' realizing that not only is it an apt metaphor, but a highly relatable one.

In the second paragraph of the essay, he states:

“Any new technology, any extension or amplification of human faculties when given material embodiment, tends to create a new environment. This is as true of clothing as of speech, or script, or wheel.”

It’s worth noting that this is Marshall’s definition of a medium or technology: any extension or amplification of human faculties [or abilities] given material embodiment.

Media: extensions of man.

Media, as exteriorizations, duplications of our senses or abilities, have a corresponding effect on our senses or abilities.

"In point of fact," he writes in 'Journal of Communication 28:4, 1978, "the multiplicity of side-effects of any communication system tend to be an entire environment of interfacings, a kind of subculture which accompanies the central 'service' or channel of communication."

"Media ... are 'make happen' agents, but not 'make aware' agents."

(‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’, chapter 5 ‘Hybrid Media: Les Liasons Dangereuses)

The 'personal and social' effects, the changes in us individually and collectively, happen mainly as a result of the way our senses are affected by technologies. We are, as individuals and cultures, essentially the sum of our senses.

"Any culture is an order of sensory preferences"

('Playboy' magazine interview, 1969). 

Very visual societies value very different things than less visual societies -- blind people obviously have very different preferences and values from sighted people. Art or information for the eye has little to no meaning for someone without sight, as art (music) or information for the ear has little to no meaning or value for the deaf.

"Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act - the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change."

('The Medium is the Massage,' with Quentin Fiore, 1967)

Our senses are not passive receptors of sensation, unchanging channels which stimulus or information passes through. Shaped from birth, our senses are calibrated individually and culturally and work together as a changing whole - to affect one individual sense, like sight, is to affect all the senses together and the entire person. When a person suddenly goes blind, they lose their sense of sight but their other senses react. Senses of hearing, of touch, for example, become more acute in reaction or compensation.

The odd thing is that it's hard to miss when you become blind or deaf, but we don't seem to notice how we are changed by technology, or only notice indirectly. None of the communication models created from Shannon and Weaver’s to the present take this into account.

"The message of the media is always the changes they ring on the human senses and perception... the medium or environment of services provides the message or program of effects."

(1973 rewrite of chapter one of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.')

In the essay, Marshall is saying that we need some sort of contrast in order to perceive the imperceptible. A background for the foreground to stand out against. The answer to 'seeing' an 'invisible environment' (such as what we get with a new medium) is by having or constructing 'anti-environments.' Marshall used artists, because artists tend to be the first to sense changes in these environments. So they act as cultural canaries in the technological coal mine. 

Artists, not all artists, but a particular sort of artist, are special because while for most of us our senses dull over time -- I now wear reading glasses, am pretty sure my hearing is not what it was, add more seasoning to food -- a certain sort of artist spends their time sharpening their senses. Because of that they are more aware of changes in the senses and environment than the rest of us, and they take great pains to express those changes through their art. Often, and naturally, that expression (and that person) is either strange or offensive to us and our sensibility, and often we don't thank them for it or recognize it for what it is: advance warning of change.

Just how far in advance that warning is has also been changing as technology increases in speed and scope, crossing the world in hours and days rather than years and decades.

"The need of our time is for the means of measuring sensory thresholds and of discovering exactly what changes occur in these thresholds as a result of the advent of any particular technology."

This was Marshall's solution for interrupting inadvertent change, 'unintended consequences.' Where the FDA states that food and drugs must be 'safe' for human consumption, this is the technological equivalent. If the changes from technologies come from how our senses are each and collectively changed, we need to be able to measure our senses to be able to measure the change. It's actually quite straightforward, even as it's a very tall order.

The major challenge is that ‘safe and effective’ are fairly easy to demonstrate from a food and drug standpoint: the substance doesn’t make you sick, and it does what it says it will. We haven’t even accepted the idea of just how we are fundamentally changed by technologies (ie on a sensory level, the effects rippling out from there) to be able to understand what ‘safe’ in this context means—and this is why Marshall was urging the development of the ‘means of measuring sensory thresholds.’ By being aware of the relative tolerances of our individual bodily senses, by being able to measure and monitor them, we can judge their ‘health.’ We can observe how they change in reaction to stimulus, and we can decide what is or is not ‘good’ or desirable.

Stability. Continuity. This is how to get there. Until then, we enthusiastically embrace every new piece of hardware and software, and wonder where our culture went.

Far from being a 'technological determinist,' McLuhan was if anything a technological anti-determinist. Personally, he didn't care for much change. He was a very conservative person. An English professor. But note that he wasn't saying 'don't innovate.' He was warning against 'haphazard innovation,' and all innovation is haphazard when we don't really know what the result is going to be in the long run.

"All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values."

(‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ chapter 20 ‘The Photograph: The Brother Without Walls’)

No technology company that I've ever heard of tests the impact of their products on human senses and considers the result of the changes to our senses, which change perception, which form or change preferences and values. No government or government body that I've ever heard of is aware of the nature and effect of technologies, from language to laptop, in forming and altering us on a basic sensory level, or willing to hold technology companies to account for the role their products have in fundamentally changing people and societies on that basic and profound level.

"The crossings or hybridizations of the media release great new force and energy as by fission or fusion. There need be no blindness in these matters once we have been notified that there is anything to observe."

‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ chapter 5 ‘Hybrid Media: Les Liasons Dangereuses’)

"With such knowledge in hand it would be possible to program a reasonable and orderly future for any human community. Such knowledge would be the equivalent of a thermostatic control for room temperatures. It would seem only reasonable to extend such controls to all the sensory thresholds of our being."

This, is 'media ecology' as McLuhan envisioned it. Not a 'field of study' or 'the study of media as environments,' at least not only that. For it to be meaningful it has to be accompanied by action.

Marshall concludes the essay with a provocation, a bit of a slap in the face to technologists, a wake up call to all of us:

"We have no reason to be grateful to those who juggle the thresholds in the name of haphazard innovation."

We celebrate new apps and gadgets, we mourn and protest and fight over the loss of identity and culture, yet refuse to connect the dots. The closest we get, trying to regulate content, is so far from being meaningful in terms of the effect on our senses as to be laughable, if not pitiable.

These changes to our senses, which produce the changes in ourselves, do not come from the content carried by media. In terms of that effect, it doesn't matter who you watch on TikTok. In terms of how their senses are altered and in turn how they are altered, it doesn't matter if your kids are watching 10 hours of 'educational' content on their devices or 10 hours of anything else. In this way, it’s not so much the medium which delivers the content, but the content which delivers the medium.

The medium is the message. The user is the content, and "the content is greatly transformed by the new technology."

Thank you for reading,

/// a.

/// note: I published this just a week after the last newsletter rather than waiting because I’m going to be on the road at the end of the month (look out, San Francisco!) so am buying myself a bit of time in case I don’t get to another newsletter for a month or so.

/// please note that The McLuhan Newsletter is a free publication. No paywalled content. I am grateful for the paid subscribers that help me take the time and space to think and write on these subjects.

/// related: I have a bit of open time while I’m in SF so if you want a consult, a talk, a McLuhan in Residence for an afternoon, be in touch.