Reflections on McLuhan's picture of "our age of anxiety"
Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts. (Marshall McLuhan)
Although he has been deceased for
decades (he died in 1980), there continues to be much truth in McLuhan’s insight. Positing his “the
medium is the message” ironic twist to a previous truth (the content was the
message) McLuhan awakened both anxiety and amazement than most Canadian
intellectual giants. Radio and film, as 'hot' media, focusing on a single sense, and spoon-feeding the audience, as compared with comic books, a cool medium, in their engaging of the audience, formed a template created by the media 'guru' that has been at the centre of his work for decades.
Beginning with a new kind of literacy, the kind that “read”
images, as compared with words, McLuhan pioneered a fresh approach to the
education fraternity, in an attempt to help students adjust to a world barely
known to their teachers. We grew up with “hard copy” books, poems, short
stories, plays and newsprint. There were movies, but they had barely begun to
be considered part of the corpus of “world literature”. They were still thought
of more as “entertainment.”
It was in 1969 that I bought my first 8 mm
camera, (a Vivitar), enrolled in a “history of film” course, and attempted to
produce and direct a highly amateurish movie version of George Orwell’s
prophetic novel, 1984 in a grade twelve “tech” class of eighteen-year-old male
students. Such courses were rare entries in university calendars, and the
instructor came from Vancouver as a summer lecturer. There were some fifty
films included in the syllabus of that course, including Citizen Cane, and The
Triumph of the Will, the propaganda piece on the Fuehrer, by Leni Reifenstahl.
Such “technical” aspects as camera angles, lighting, sound effects including
the musical score, lens types (gauze, wide angle, close-up), film speed that
examined the frames per second, (the larger the number the slower the pace of
the film, and vice versa), and “transitional edits” were among the features we
learned to look for, and take our baby steps in trying to appreciate their
meaning, purpose and impact. There was a sense of adventure in exploring a
medium that depended on the viewer’s capacity and openness to assimilate the
montage of images that flowed past the eye, the mind, the psyche and the heart.
Having been a radio ‘nut’ in my youth,
and experiencing my first exposure to television in the Spring of the year I
left for university (1959), I had a much more attentive “ear” to radio sounds
and popular music than I did to cameras and photo images. I cannot remember if
there was even one course in film studies at the university during my undergrad
years. (I doubt it!)
So, the transition, and transformation
that happens when a culture’s focus moves from books and paper, radio and the
telephone to television and photographic images, as the staple of both
entertainment and learning experiences, while not nearly as dramatic as the
current cultural transformation from television and typewriters and hot lead
print to digital images, and the technological hardware and software that drive
them. Nevertheless, it was the wave that the North American culture rode in the
sixties and seventies of the twentieth century.
Remember the first televised
presidential debate took place in the campaign between Kennedy and Nixon in the
1960 race for the White House. There have been presidential historians who have
speculated that F.D.R., confined to his wheel chair would have had considerable
difficulty being elected once let alone three times, if he had had to use television
rather than radio to campaign. So just imagine the gulf that has been crossed
since that first televised debate, to the twitter universe, facebook, snapchat
and all of the other myriad of platforms available throughout the world today.
McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’
would have to be completely re-thought today.
And if we were to take a first
look, very superficially, we would be somewhat chagrined that the medium of
twitter/facebook etc. might be the message, and not the minimal and often seriously
impaired ‘verbal” content of those platforms. Of course, it will take another
generation or two to fully comprehend and fully appreciate the potential of
these digital media, although their ubiquitous use now is being used as one of
the defining features of a nation’s notion of individual freedoms and rights.
So in that sense, the access to the new media is part of the message of
political freedom, and thereby citizen opportunity.
For those of us who spent decades at the
front of English classes, we are deeply saddened at the near total loss of the
capacity to spell, and to read beyond the literal and the denotative level of
language, not to mention the almost complete abandonment of the “cursive”
ability to write one’s own name for school children. It they want to learn how
to ‘write’ (cursive) they enrol in something called “calligraphy” as an “art”
option since it is no longer an integral part of the “regular” (compulsory)
curriculum.
Although legibility is less problematic, a feature that removes
considerable anxiety from the practice of drug dispensaries, doctors’ writing
being almost beyond readable, the montage of both letters and imogees and
photos both still and streaming is generating what could easily be considered a
completely new way of communicating.
Such communication also separates the millennials
from their parents and their grandparents, since the latter generations would be
able to “translate” only fragments of the message. “Rap” too, another melange
of sound, rhythm, emotion, body language and political rhetoric, represents
another “new language” in our contemporary culture. (One has to wonder how much
time people preparing to enter the law enforcement profession spend learning
how to read, listen to and interpret/translate “rap”!)
Have you noticed too the use of
repetition, (to our ears, ad nauseum) in many of the popular tunes played on
commercial radio, on ITunes, Utube and the other music platforms? A single phrase
repeated up to twenty times in the space of thirty seconds hardly qualifies as
a serious and creative use of music composition.
Yet, a tweet should not be the
primary tool of communication for a presidential candidate either! So much for
nuance, subtlety, the mastery of complicated files and the intellectual timbre
that was historically considered a minimal requirement for serious contention
for high public office. They are all relegated to the museum in the current
political climate.
And it is not only adjusting to the new
languages of the digital technology that brings McLuhan to mind. It is also the
growing gap between the current laws and conventional cultural expectations of
ordinary citizens in a world in which such massive shifts of capital, labour,
intelligence and the environment have almost completely rendered political and
legal and professional organizations out of touch and out of step with the
responsibilities they are charged with fulfilling. The more suction and storage
capacity we develop and deploy to manage information, including metadata, the
larger grows the gap between those in charge of both the collection, storage and
interpretation, not to mention the dissemination of that information. Body
cameras, security cameras on the street corners of many cities, thumb prints and
iris images as marks of one’s identity as just the tip of the iceberg of the
gap in both content awareness and power differentials between ordinary people and
the “establishment” whose access to the secrets entombed in those many vaults,
on those many hard drives is unfettered, compared with the “public” access,
awareness and inclusion in the new circle of “knowing”.
This gap between those who “know” and
those who will never “know” even what they do not know, inevitably generates a
deficit of trust, seemingly even a hollow cave empty of trust, and thereby of
confidence among ordinary people. There is a case to be made that this gap
between those “inside” and those “outside” the circle of the public discourse,
normally considered to be filled with a set of agreed pieces of information, as
well as a conventional method of making sense of the patterns of that date, is
one of the serious impediments between those in the various institutional “establishments”
and the people who send them there, whether by vote or indirectly by appointment
through the normal channels of the elected representatives.
Everyone knows and agrees that the pace
of new technological developments has already outpaced our human capacity to
absorb, to assimilate and to adjust to a purposeful and a meaningful relationship
between our lives and the new technology. All of us are playing catch-up and will
be for the rest of our lives. Even though our children and grandchildren have
and will continue to spend far more time in front of their “screens” doing all
of the various things they can do (and this list is growing daily) than we
will, they will experience a kind of scepticism about the gap between their
perception and comprehension of the world and our’s. The normal gap between
individual perceptions and world views is not under consideration here. It is
the cultural gap, the conception of the universe that comes from the capacity
to “talk” and to “see” anyone anywhere in real time, through the technology of
the chip, along with all of the other “transactions” that are possible in all
of the other spheres of human existence, that comprises a generational
separation that could rival the shift from agriculture to industrial cultures.
Another shift in both perception and
conception of the world is the shift to a nano-second as the normal unit of
time, compared with a former university lecture “hour” of fifty minutes, a
laboratory session of two hours. Meals are often punctuated by cell phone or
tablet messages, thereby rendering the family dinner table vulnerable to a new
way of being in the same room. “Presence” can no longer be considered in the
manner of only a few decades, a time period of being with another, that
frequently knew no limits, or at least rather loose time limits.
Another implication of the idolatry contemporary
culture displays in its worship of the new technology is the sound of the
suction of millions of people from the pews, the choir lofts, the organs and
the pulpits on thousands of churches. Accompanying this suction is the silence
that fills the collection plates in those same sanctuaries, and the ca-ching of
the real estate deals completing the sales of those historic pieces of
architecture from the churches to the new land-developers.
While there is greatly enhanced
opportunity for everyone to apprentice their “photo” skills and talent, and
thereby the visual literacy of the next generations will inevitably be
significantly better than was/is our’s, the kind of potential human connection,
community if you like, seems to be threatened, at least in the physical sense.
How can anyone be fully present to a face-to-face conversation when those
encounters are constantly interrupted by the invasion of some too often vacuous
message on a digital device? The short answer is, “You can’t!”
While it is truism of the capitalist
world that “they require stability” and “constancy” and a sense of what are the
rules, people too rely on some semblance of normalcy, stability, constancy and
predictability. These qualities rely to a considerable extent on getting to
know ourselves, on getting to know and experience a few others, both family and
friends, and on spending time “with” others. Flitting like gnats from text to
text and twitter to twitter, from utube song to utube song, and from email to
email, (although the latter take at least a few minutes to “write”) is hardly
the stuff of community, connection, relationship-building and feeling an
integral part of something that is outside of and bigger than one’s self.
A basketball team, a swimming team, a
hockey team….they are all worthy activities, and kids need them still. It is
the time away from ‘scheduled’ time, away from competing for marks, competing
for part-time jobs, competing for championships,,,just hanging out together
than could be one of the prices of our new technology whose size and significance
we will not begin to know until another few decades of digitization have
stamped their feet on our psyches.
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