Marshall McLuhan

The role of the alphabet, as the defining catalyst to Western change, has been a topic of historical debate. In his book, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Marshall McLuhan examines the relationship between the alphabet and the printing press. He argues that human consciousness was dramatically altered with each creation. In an attempt to explain historical distress, McLuhan describes the implications that follow with changes in our sense perception. New technologies work well at controlling their user because they isolate senses, or as William Blake wrote in his poem, Jerusalem, “they became what they beheld” (McLuhan). McLuhan suggests that, “Sense ratios change when any one sense or bodily or mental function is externalized in technological form” (McLuhan). In recent years, the notion of a “global village”, which first appears in Gutenberg Galaxy, has become ever more apparent. Commenting on the birth of such a village, McLuhan relates the growing interconnectedness of people through electrical extensions of our senses. Movies, television programming, and radio broadcasts increase our sensory capabilities by reaching distant territories with diverse cultural values. Despite a connection to the “global village”, a sensory isolative characteristic increases the complexity of outcomes. The implications of sensory isolative media are integral to McLuhan’s ideas. Although published in 1962, McLuhan’s technological analysis remains relevant and continues to comment on current trends with poignant accuracy.

Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media (1964): Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness… Any extension, whether of skin, hand or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex.

The use of an interface can only be viewed as a tragic alternative. It is simply a substitute—a bridge. To support this position is not to dismiss vast human progress conceived through technological media. Advancements in modern communication have torn down barriers of ages past. Nevertheless, even in its altered form, the interface remains communicative. The effectiveness, however, of transferring the original message and its intended meaning is debatable. Hence we should be concerned with the sensory isolative characteristics such media exhibit. In Understanding Media, McLuhan focuses on a key tendency of communication media: technological extensions—unnaturally—imbalance human sense ratios.

This insight into technology was further cited in understanding media in relation to societal concern. Although he was often aphoristically linked with popular culture commentary (as illustrated with an appearance in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall”), McLuhan stressed the necessity to distance oneself from their environment. He spoke of the necessity in standing-back in order to objectively report on topical debate. McLuhan’s ideas directly address the complications inherent to current communication interfaces. A most basic element of pre-technological communication—the sensorium—is altered when filtered through an interface. In commenting on the electronic extension, McLuhan notes: Each new technology creates an environment that is itself regarded as corrupt and degrading. Yet the new one turns its predecessor into an art form.