McLuhan’s Mediums

The many texts we have been examining in class take issue with the developments in literary technology. This idea that the advancement and broadening of literature is destroying its authenticity and therefore value has come across frequently, as seen in Sven Birkerts’s Gutenberg Elegies and Marshal McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage. McLuhan makes an argument against these new advancements, claiming they are ruining not only our literature but the standards of authorship and reading.

McLuhan decides to point his argument towards the printing press in one segment, proclaiming its debauchery: “The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property.” (McLuhan, 122) He appears to have distaste for the mechanical reproduction of works for the reason that they make reading much more public, therefore not specialized or exclusive. He opposes this technological replication because it is detrimental to authorship, but how am I now reading his own words? Is it not the printing press which made these ideas which he so earnestly wants to share accessible to me and many others? The technology we have created has not been for pleasure or amusement, rather for our increasing demands as the world of literature expands. Printing, what McLuhan refers to as a “ditto device” is its own art; a specific process which makes a more palatable visual medium for our language while also making our literature highly accessible. How we are using our new myriad of mediums for language is what I believe McLuhan should take issue with, not the mediums themselves. The notion that someone could Xerox this work and claim it as their own is valid; however it is obvious by the prominent business of publishing and selling books that our society has not succumbed to this literary dishonesty. In my eyes, McLuhan is mistaking the cause of literature’s decline for the technology which is transforming it, when it really it appears to be the people involved who are corrupting this process. Along with the printing press, McLuhan seems to resent television as a faulty medium for our language.

The television has represented a great advancement in our society; allowing stories and emotions to be conveyed to both the eye and the ear, as they appear in real life. McLuhan claims the new generation of television viewers is now a “grim bunch” and “much more serious” than previous generations. I believe his view is tainted by his frame of view; he has only experienced the beginning of television and has not yet been introduced to the whimsical side. At this point real world information, current events, is only being conveyed (his example is JFK’s funeral) and I can see how this would appear as dreary. He is thinking of television like a book, and he has only ever read non-fiction whereas now we have a wide variety of both entertaining and educational programs. He does acknowledge the need for a different set of sensory responses with television as compared to written language, however I feel as if his expectations for the two are too similar.

With closer investigation into the ideas of McLuhan I have found many similarities with my own, although I am not entirely convinced of his viewpoint. At one point McLuhan introduces a quote from Socrates, which claims the introduction of written alphabet will destroy the importance of holding personal knowledge because one can always go back and read the external medium on which the information is written without having to learn anything. I agree highly with this, now more than ever we can see the ability to “Google” something, find any information you want momentarily, has greatly reduced the need to learn and obtain knowledge. Our society has blindly accepted any written or oral language, coming from the television or computer, and has forgotten how to research and learn for yourself so that you might not have to rely on external sources. McLuhan has a right to scrutinize these mediums of language, but maybe there is a way to use them without totally relying on their information to obtain your own knowledge.