Page 114 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of the media 99
make up the bulk of the text. It is in his readings of individual
media that McLuhan offers suggestive details that serve to flesh out
his broad generalizations and hint at its darker, critical potential.

Ear

The role of what we might call the media of the ear (radio,
gramophone, telephone) is critical in disrupting the hegemony of
the text. For McLuhan they induce a re-tribalization, a return of the
repressed aurality that characterized pre-literate cultures. Given this,
as well as McLuhan’s belief in the environmental and corporeal
impact of media, they are seen as the locus of wide-ranging cultural
shifts. Similarly, the revolution in literary form that took place in the
opening decades of the century is seen by McLuhan as a registration
of the environment and sensibility produced by the new media.
James Joyce (McLuhan’s Virgil) and T.S. Eliot, among others, reflect
the breakdown of standard lineal, textual perception in favour of the
plural, inclusive sensibility engendered by the media.

Radio

The development of radio illustrates many of the key ideas of
Understanding Media. McLuhan regards it as a product of hybridiza-
tion, absorbing the content of pre-existing media, such as newsprint,
phonography, and the theatre. Its evolution in the increasingly
crowded media ecology of the twentieth century is marked by
various renegotiations which serve to accentuate certain characteris-
tics of the medium, while at the same time relieving it of other
functions. At the most general level McLuhan regards it as the
crucial operator in reawakening the ‘tribal’ sensibility that he sees as
characterizing post-literate culture. Radio affects a re-tribalization,
functioning as ‘a subliminal echo chamber of magical power to
touch remote and forgotten chords’ ([1964] 1995: 264). Thus
McLuhan attributes the rise of Hitler to the impact of radio and its
effects upon the German unconscious, which he argues was not
sufficiently inoculated by print as the Anglo-Saxon mind had been.
Certainly, the Nazis recognized the unique power of radio as a
propaganda tool, Goebbels describing it as ‘the Eighth Great Power’,
and many have noted the unique ‘radiogenic’ power of Hitler’s
voice, and its ability to access some atavistic stratum of the German
collective mind (see, for instance, the discussion of Adorno and
Horkheimer’s analysis of radio in Chapter 3). Difficult as it is to
entertain McLuhan’s rather crude, emphatic declarations, behind
them there lies a subtler observation: namely, that radio has a

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