Page 115 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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paradoxical quality. It is at once the archetypal broadcast medium –
it scatters its signal on the four winds – but at the same time it
establishes an intimate, sensual relationship to the listener speaking
directly to their shell-like ear.
In its first capacity, radio functions in the manner of a new
sensory environment: an omnipresent sonic envelope that surrounds
the collective, providing an incessant stream of consciousness. Dis-
solving space and disrupting the atomized individual of print
culture, radio is a crucial catalyst in fomenting the global village.
McLuhan argues that radio’s role as an artificial sensory environ-
ment only becomes apparent after its displacement as the prime
broadcast medium by television. This relieved radio of its duty to
provide mass entertainment (the phase of its development discussed
by Adorno); the family no longer gathered around the wireless of an
evening. Instead, radio becomes a system of myriad transistors
making up what McLuhan described as a ‘nervous information
system’. This information system’s function is reflected in monitoring
of environmental conditions, thus ‘weather is that medium that
involves all people equally. It is the top item on the radio, showering
us with the foundations of auditory space or lebensraum’ ([1964]
1995: 261). This mixture of the environmental and tribal makes
radio a nervous system in the sense of constant inquisitive disquiet,
a medium of rumour, gossip and chatter: ‘talk radio’. In this respect,
radio exemplifies the darker aspects of the global village: ‘Radio is
the medium of frenzy, and it has been the major means of hotting
up the tribal blood of Africa, India, and China’ ([1964] 1995: 270).
This is, of course, an area in which the danger of crude media
determinism are readily apparent, in which circumspect analysis is
preferable to McLuhanite generalization. Nevertheless, it is interest-
ing to note the integral role of radio in the instigation of the
horrors of the Rwandan genocide, in which a constant background
chatter of hate and dehumanizing rhetoric primed a civilian popu-
lace to perform atrocious acts of ethnic cleansing. Even a relatively
modest outbreak of inter-ethnic tension, such as the Birmingham
riots of 2005, reflects radio’s power in this regard; pirate radio
stations, broadcasting rumour as fact raised existing tensions to flash
point.

Eye

McLuhan’s treatment of visual media is set against his history of the
senses and their extension, and involves the coalescence of the
ocular bias of typographic culture with the resurgent aurality of the
preliterate. For McLuhan, television is the culmination of this

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