Page 107 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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92 Then
McLuhan, industry, both as process and as function, is entirely
attributable to the book. However, as in all of McLuhan’s ‘mature’
work, it is television that serves as the ultimate medium of the brave
new world of media, television is the wafer and wine that transports
the masses en masse to a ‘electric communion’, its images and affects
are the currency of global village, as Cronenberg’s caricature of
McLuhan presciently (given the rise of Reality TV) puts it in his
seminal Videodrome (1983) ‘the television screen is the retina of the
mind’s eye and what appears on that screen emerges as reality,
therefore television is reality, and reality is less than television’.
There are hints here of the de-realization of traditional reality
previously found in Benjamin’s Essay. In subsequent chapters it is
shown how Boorstin and Baudrillard pursue the radical implications
of this with their notions of the pseudo-event and the hyperreal,
respectively. But television for McLuhan, embodied all of the prom-
ise and risk of the electronic age. In Part 2, what seemed as nothing
more than the hyperbole of McLuhan’s interpretation of television
now appears as an extremely insightful anticipation of the Reality
TV-dominated focus of the contemporary mediascape.

Understanding Media: – central themes in McLuhan’s
media theory

First published in 1964, Understanding Media is probably McLuhan’s
most important and certainly his best-known text. It begins where
The Gutenberg Galaxy left off, namely, at the point at which the
lineal-visual hegemony of print technology begins to unravel in the
face of a proliferation of new media. Understanding Media places itself
at the intersection of two worlds, and attempts to use each to
explain and investigate the other. The electronic media reveal the
contours and characteristics of print culture, while at the same time
print culture provides us with a negative image of what is emerging.
Stylistically, it announces a shift in McLuhan’s work. It moves away
from the scholarly proliferation of detail and citation that character-
ized his previous work, towards a mode of discourse that attempted
to replicate the speed and simultaneity of the information age (a
strategy that won him at once the attention of masses, and the
hostility of the academic community): ‘McLuhan worked very hard
in public writings to fail the standards typical for written texts. And
he largely succeeded in his failure’ (Meyrowitz, cited in Katz 2002:
193).
In the texts that followed Understanding Media, McLuhan accentu-
ated this tendency to adapt print to the needs of media understand-
ing by collaborating with graphic artists. He produced artefacts in

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