Page 109 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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94 Then
+ What Winner (1977) refers to as the myth of neutrality – a simple
minded instrumentality which might argue, for example, that the
media is neither good or bad, it only becomes so when directed
to these ends by external factors. McLuhan is scathing about this
attitude calling it: ‘the voice of the current somnambulism.
Suppose we were to say, “Apple pie is in itself neither good nor
bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value.” Or, “The
small pox virus is neither good nor bad …” ’ (McLuhan [1964]
1995: 11).

For McLuhan, all these approaches are predicated upon a funda-
mental ignorance of the true nature of technical media and so they
cannot help but fail to give an accurate account of the subject. He
compares those critics of the mass media who focus on the questions
of content and ideology to a guard dog duped by a juicy steak while
the burglar goes about his business (McLuhan [1964] 1995: 32).
Such critics who pride themselves on their ability to penetrate the
surface and expose the occult agenda that drives media culture, are
in fact, entirely superficial according to McLuhan. Paradoxically, it is
only by ignoring the explicit content of a given medium that its real
features and functions become apparent.
McLuhan’s refusal to succumb to what he sees as the appeal of the
message’s meretricious novelty reveals that at another level the
content of a given medium is in fact the ‘form’ of a previous
medium. To use some of the examples offered by McLuhan:

1 The content of writing is speech.
2 The content of the first books is made up of earlier manuscripts.
3 The content of film incorporates the theatre and photography
(and later phonography).
4 Radio has the gramophone as its content.
5 Television’s content adapts both radio and film.
The implication of this series of mediations of content is that media
are essentially tautological: the message of the medium is the fact of
mediatization itself. This has obvious and profound consequences for
the status of what normally passes for a message. In representing any
term, media necessarily represent themselves, everything spoken of
in the media to a greater or lesser extent, speaks of the media.
Midas-like, the media turn everything they touch into media.
This process creates the rise of what Boorstin ([1961] 1992) calls
the pseudo-event (dealt with in the next chapter and developed
further in relation to Baudrillard’s work in Part 2). Boorstin argues
that mass media resulted in the creation of ‘events’, whose nature
was inseparable from the media, in other words one could not talk
of the media as mediating or representing an inviolate, prior ‘event’,
but must instead recognize that they are an integral, co-productive

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