Sense and Nonsense in Media and Regulation

the ‘unintended consequences’ of any given modern technology tend to vastly outweigh the intended benefits. It’s not a bug, it’s the feature -- but need not be the future.

image courtesy of Dark Matter

Someone I do a bit of consulting for asked me the following question and I thought I'd share it and my reply with you, and perhaps go a little further. It's a very large territory in terms of the effects of technologies which is also one of the most consequential aspects: the effects of technologies on humans’ senses singly and together.

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With the caveat that I’m not spending all my time closely monitoring these matters, in none of the conversations I'm hearing of US Senate or anywhere else are they talking about the impact on the senses which is one reason I am pretty sure they're nowhere near any kind of meaningful regulation -- they just don't understand the basics of how media operate on a structural or formal rather than on the surface (service) level of content.

EFC writes: Hey Andrew

I am copying in C because we share the same relentless curiosity about everything.

I’m curious about the term “common sense.” I recall reading somewhere in the MM materials that “common sense” is what can be verified or demonstrated visually. Did you ever see that? I could not tell you where.

Have you ever read that and what is your take on the meaning of this term?

Hi EFC, and C.

While I can't recall where he might have said that, if he did, it was probably do with the notion of 'visual space', of space as experienced by the eye rather than the ear ('acoustic space'). Visual space is all about logic, and connection, and sequence – rationality, where ‘acoustic space’ is about feeling, resonance, simultaneity. Rationality need not apply. The notion of 'common sense' fits in more I think on the world of the eye than of the ear, though perhaps there’s a place in both.

However, 'common sense' means something else in the McLuhan world. It refers to 'the sensus communis' or, the common sense - which dad (Eric McLuhan) wrote about extensively in his 'Sensus Communis, Synesthesia and the Soul: An Odyssey' The book is currently out of print until I figure out how to set up the publishing wing of TMI, which I just haven't had the time to do yet. Meanwhile there is a recording of a speech he gave on the subject if you want to check it out. It's ... involved.

Essentially, 'the sensus communis' is the operating system of our senses. In that sense, the common sense. Our senses operate together with a balance (not necessarily an equal balance) among them – imagine that each sense has a volume knob regulating its intensity and some are set at 2, some at 5, some cranked up to 10. The ratio among or between our senses is not static but dynamic, and one of the main avenues of McLuhan research is in how each new technology disrupts the current ratio and creates a new one -- thereby creating new human experience, and new humans. When a new technology comes along and cranks one sense to 10, it can lower other senses’ intensity. When one is dropped down to 0, the others can perk up. Note that when you strain to hear something you will often close your eyes. It all begins (and maybe ends) with the senses.

Early in his research, McLuhan discovered how each technology affects us first by our senses, our organs of perception. They stimulate some senses, not others. And different technologies operate primarily on different senses – think of radio versus television or a book or a car, with which senses do we experience them?

Later in his research, in the mid 1960s, he was introduced to a work which would become very helpful to him with his work on the senses.

My father told me about how one day they (Eric and Marshall McLuhan) were at the Centre for Culture and Technology (once Marshall’s home base at the University of Toronto before it was rather nastily closed on him, a story for another time) and a translator introduced themselves. They had just translated Understanding Media into Braille, and wanted to tell Marshall about another book they had translated, ‘And There Was Light’ by French resistance leader turned author Jacques Lusseyran.

In his book, Lusseyran exquisitely describes what happened when he was a young boy and, as the result of a playground accident, quickly became completely blind. His account details a wonderful thing which you may have heard before: that as his visual faculty dimmed, other senses perked up. He lost his sense of sight but with heightened hearing, tactile acuity, etc., a whole new world opened up.

This, to Marshall, was exactly what he was trying to get across in his media studies:

 When you affect one sense, you affect all the senses.

Moreover, that when you rearrange the senses, you rearrange the person, you rearrange the culture, the society, the world.

This can hardly be overstated.

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With that preface, the following might make a bit more sense.

In chapter 24 of ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,’ Marshall discusses games as extensions of our social selves:

   The form of any game is of first importance. Game theory, like information theory, has ignored this aspect of game and information movement. Both theories have dealt with the information content of systems, and have observed the "noise" and "deception" factors that divert data. This is like approaching a painting or a musical composition from the point of view of its content. In other words, it is guaranteed to miss the central structural core of the experience. For as it is the pattern of a game that gives it relevance to our inner lives, and not who is playing nor the outcome of the game, so it is with information movement. The selection of our human senses employed makes all the difference say between photo and telegraph. In the arts the particular mix of our senses in the medium employed is all-important. The ostensible program content is a lulling distraction needed to enable the structural form to get through the barriers of conscious attention.

   Any game, like any medium of information, is an extension of the individual or the group. Its effect on the group or individual is a reconfiguring of the parts of the group or individual that are not so extended. A work of art has no existence or function apart from its effects on human observers. And art, like games or popular arts, and like media of communication, has the power to impose its own assumptions by setting the human community into new relationships and postures.          

In the first chapter of the book, titled ‘The Medium is the Message,’ Marshall paraphrases T.S. Eliot, who was talking about the use of meaning in a poem, to talk about the use of content for a medium.

It is, however, no time to suggest strategies when the threat has not even been acknowledged to exist. I am in the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them. Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the "content" of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as "content." The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The "content" of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.

(I go into more detail about that Eliot/McLuhan quote in this post)

We are in a time when the threat has been acknowledged to exist, just not properly placed. It’s almost impossible to ignore the unsettling feeling that something is very wrong, even if we seem to be looking everywhere but where we should be. Still, it’s progress. But the progress we are making seems agonizingly slow especially when placed alongside technological progress moving agonizingly fast.

If you’ve read the previous posts on Maelstrom Escape Strategies, you’ve found me to be hopeful and optimistic. It’s difficult to maintain that attitude, (and maybe not very McLuhanesque of me) but it beats the alternative.

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Marshall McLuhan was usually careful to speak as neutrally as possible when discussing technologies and their effects on people individually and collectively (what he called ‘the psychic and social effects.’)

This was less because he was afraid to take a position in public and more because he believed that once you decide whether something is good or bad you become blind to its total character. When you are trying to ‘understand media,’ that is the end of the investigation.

A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters (UM, 1964, ch 24)

Not everyone agrees with that of course. Notably, Neil Postman – who admitted in a 1995 interview that “I can’t think of a book I’ve written that I could have written if not for McLuhan,” said:

I don’t see any point in studying media unless one does so within a moral or ethical context. (Postman quoted by E. M. Griffin)

McLuhan molded his approach more after that of the detective than the deacon. The effective detective (in fiction as in life) must remain as objective as possible to maintain the widest perception and observation, to let the facts speak for themselves, to not let feelings cloud judgement.

Both approaches have their relative merits and limits, and perhaps are complimentary rather than contrary, a place if not a necessity for both.

He did, however, have strong feelings and opinions and did speak more strongly from time to time.

In this conclusion to his 1965 essay ‘The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,’ Marshall rails against the people responsible for unleashing technologies on us that have such existential consequences. He feels that we should know better. He wasn’t wrong then, and certainly, 60 years later, we should have made more than near-zero progress.

As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art…In an age of accelerated change, the need to perceive the environment becomes urgent. Acceleration also makes such perception of the environment more possible. Was it not Bertrand Russell who said that if the bath water only got half a degree warmer every hour, we would never know when to scream? New environments reset our sensory thresholds. These, in turn, alter our outlook and expectations.

Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?

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

Marshall McLuhan, 60 years ago, warned us of the true results of technology, which he calls here ‘haphazard innovation.’ When you survey the ‘unintended consequences’ of any given modern technology, you find they tend to vastly outweigh the intended benefits, that it’s not a bug, it’s the feature – but it need not be the future if technologists and politicians pause to consider that the medium is the message.

Does it make sense?

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Andrew McLuhan, Bloomfield