Mediation (Marxist Theory and Media Studies) - Mediation in Media Studies - Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan

Perhaps one of the best known media theorists, McLuhan is famous for his dictum that "the medium is the message." For McLuhan the central mediating factor in any society is the medium of communication itself. In this way, media occupy for McLuhan what labor or capital did for Marx. By claiming that the "medium is the message", McLuhan means that "the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology" (p. 7). For McLuhan, the introduction of any new form of media into a given culture radically alters the way that members of that culture mediate between the material world and the given values available to them.

Thus, the shift into print technology radically altered the way that all later media would be both formed and operated: "Printing from movable types was the first mechanization of a complex handicraft, and became the archetype of all subsequent mechanization" (170). As he continues, however:

Like any other extension of man, typography had psychic and social consequences that suddenly shifted previous boundaries and patterns of culture. In bringing the ancient and medieval worlds into fusion—or, as some would say, confusion—the printed book created a third world, the modern world, which now encounters a new electric technology, or a new extension of man. Electric means of moving information are altering our typographic culture as sharply as print modified medieval manuscript and scholastic culture. (p. 171)

For McLuhan, electronic media, as the new form of mediation in our culture, are creating radical new possibilities for thought and social relations. These new possibilities include the extension of our nervous system across space and time. As McLuhan puts it:

After more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society. (3-4)

This has resulted in a hybridization of media forms:

Media as extensions of our senses institute new ratios, not only among our private senses, but among themselves, when they interact among themselves. Radio changed the form of the news story as much as it altered the film image in the talkies. TV caused drastic changes in radio programming, and in the form of the thing or documentary novel. (53)

It has also resulted in the translation of human consciousness "more and more into the form of information":

By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions… of our bodies… will be translated into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. (57)

McLuhan has been critiqued as being alternately utopian, deterministic, and Eurocentric about the ways that media mediate between human beings and their natural world, but no one would deny the effects his work has had on the study of media.