Page 106 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of the media 91
Abstraction

McLuhan stresses that the effects of alphabetization were incremen-
tal and unfolded over many centuries. Drawing on the work of
Harold Innis (whom he regarded as the main stimulus for his media
theory), McLuhan argues that writing served as the defining source
of political and social organization that allowed the development of
technological civilization in various forms that we would not nor-
mally associate with writing. For example, he saw the numerical
ordering of troops as an application of the abstract system of writing
to human affairs. Perhaps most significantly, he argued that the
extensive network of roads that enabled the coordination of the
far-reaching Roman Empire was an extension of what he regarded as
the technology of writing. Roads aided writing’s accelerated transmis-
sion in the form of papyrus, allowing the Empire to function as a
veritable information system in which signals were transmitted from
and to a command centre (Rome) which evaluated and responded
to them. More generally, this reflects McLuhan’s belief that an
adequate definition of media must encompass not only explicit
means of communication and representation, but those material
technologies (such as the wheel, roads, clothes, and the built
environment) with which the former enter into complex interrela-
tions.
According to McLuhan, it is only with the West’s adoption and
subsequent adaptation of the technology of the printing press that
the full impact of alphabetization is realized: ‘it was not until the
experience of mass production of exactly uniform and repeatable
type, that the fission of the senses occurred, and the visual dimen-
sion broke away from the other senses’ (McLuhan 1962: 54). It is no
exaggeration to state that, for McLuhan, printing is the driving force
of the destiny of the West, a destiny whose direction is entirely
determined by the aforementioned disruption of the senses, and the
consequent privileging of vision. Printing results in a cultural
transformation of both the subjective and objective worlds. It is the
manifestation of a mediated process that involves a reformatting of
the subjectivity in accordance with its technological needs. Let us
briefly consider some of the results attributed to print by McLuhan.
McLuhan asserted that printing begins to produce the first
suggestions of mass, standardized society. The book as medium
generates the first media audience, in which society is now formu-
lated in terms of its spectorial status. From this position it appears
that the process of corporatization and standardization of populaces
bemoaned by Adorno, occurred within a space already prepared by
a vestigial, culture industry of standardized print. Indeed, according
to The Gutenberg Galaxy (McLuhan 1962), industry is an entirely
appropriate term to use in the context of print culture. For

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