Page 101 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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86 Then
McLuhan’s mediology reside in his refusal to engage with the grand
narratives of continental thought. This meant that he has, in
Kroker’s words: ‘no systematic, or even eclectic, theory of the
relationship between economy and technology’ (Kroker 1984: 79).
For our purposes, however, McLuhan’s work provides a highly useful
assessment of the specific properties of media technologies, which
gives an illuminating context for such contemporary critiques of the
mediascape as Baudrillard’s notion of a totalitarian semiotic order
encountered in Chapters 7 and 8.
Readers of Adorno’s work may suspect that he has forgone any
real encounter with the particularities of specific media in favour of
a predetermined position on the general determining features of the
culture industry. McLuhan, by contrast, captures the genuine novelty
of media technologies. He believes that instead of merely being
manifestations of the abstract dynamics of capitalism and commodi-
fication, the media are active components in the transformation of
the very nature of our society. From this perspective, many of the
supposed shortcomings of McLuhan’s work attest to the degree to
which he allowed the object of his study to transform his conceptual
schema. But rather than a result of sloppy thinking, the absence of
an overall theoretical framework is born of a profound recognition
that media demand new ways of thinking. It is in this regard that
McLuhan spoke of his books as ‘mosaics’, that is, constellations of
interrelated concepts which the reader could access at random,
rather like the television viewer channel hops, or the web user
navigates the Internet. His work conveys the singularity and potenti-
ality of media, adopting the tactics of his object of study and
articulating them in an immediate and engaging manner to the
extent that his theory has often been adopted and adapted as good
public relations for the media’s positive social role. Such attention to
the specific qualities of the media tends to be lacking in the more
overtly critical, but also more philosophy/political economy-based
accounts of critical thinkers such as the Frankfurt School. McLuhan’s
work has been a direct inspiration for other major critical media
theorists, in particular, Baudrillard, Kittler and Virilio. His insights
have stood the test of time, remaining relevant in the face of 40
years of accelerated media evolution.
Our critical reading of McLuhan is made with full acknowledge-
ment of his own tendency to act as a consultant to the prime movers
of the culture industry and his willingness to educate them in the
application of his ideas in the creation of an ever more docile
consumer culture (albeit in a more deliberate and self-conscious
manner than Freud whose psychoanalytical insights were trans-
formed into marketing techniques by his nephew ‘the father of
1
public relations ’ Edward Bernays). McLuhan’s critical potential can

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