Page 102 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of the media 87
only be fully realized when his work is reinforced with the more
resolutely oppositional writings of the other writers in this volume.
This avoids the pitfalls of an uncritical reading which reduces him,
in the words of Debord, to ‘the spectacle’s first apologist … the most
convinced imbecile of the century’ (Debord 1991: N33). This notion
of McLuhan as a critical theorist of the media can be justified
without too much need to read him against the grain of his own
apparent enthusiasm. His position is far more ambivalent than his
posthumous canonization as the patron saint of the techno-
enthusiast Wired magazine might lead us to believe. In the following
presentation of McLuhan’s key concepts, this critical edge to his
work is brought out, allowing the reader to see that in the midst of
his celebration of the possibilities created by the mass media, he was
also a hugely important theorist for those who have been the
sternest critics of the media’s cultural effects. Indeed, McLuhan’s
first study of the media, The Mechanical Bride (1951), was an
unreservedly critical account of advertising. It stressed the potential
for the emergent media technologies to create conditions of control
and manipulation. Indeed, its terms are reminiscent of Adorno, as
McLuhan argued that mass-media culture erodes cultural values so
that ‘low, middle, and highbrow, are consumer ratings, nothing
more’ (McLuhan 1951, cited in Stevenson 2002: 122), and he
unflinchingly acknowledges the system of false values and dehuman-
izing images that results in order to enhance profits. Although
McLuhan repudiated the terms of his early critique as the imposition
of outmoded literate values on radically new media culture, beneath
the vertiginous play of references and examples of his later texts a
significantly critical element remained as an undercurrent through-
out his work.

Key concepts in McLuhan

Media determine the nature of cultures/societies

The fundamental shift from McLuhan’s original perspective on mass
media to that of his later, more central, work results from a rejection
of question of content and value, in favour of a structural analysis.
That is, from McLuhan’s perspective, media create technological
environments – the nature and extent of which should override any
concern with the apparent effect of their specific content, or
particular message. While the McLuhan of The Mechanical Bride
evaluated the impact of media technologies from the surety of
accumulated cultural values, the later McLuhan sees such values as
entirely determined by media technologies. This raises an immediate
question as to the suitability and appropriateness of interrogating

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