Page 118 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of the media 103
packaging, presentation surrounding the commodity, is a direct
response to the proliferation of images, and can be seen as
confirming Debord’s thesis that under the spectacle the commodity
is essentially by an image that determines material forms and
relations, so that the media does not present images of commodities,
rather the commodity is a concrescence of the spectacle.

Film

Understanding Media casts film as a Janus-faced technology; it recalls
the discrete, sequential technology of print, while at the same time
intimating the dynamic gestalt of television. Film, like the phonetic
alphabet, arrests an unbroken flux, fragmenting it into separate
units, which are then recombined to produce the impression of a
continuum. In this manner it looks back to the age of print, and
forward to the age of television. Film is a hot medium, and so is
treated as a passive experience in which the viewer, ensconced in the
dark, hands over their nervous system to an external input. Film
inherits and greatly accentuates the camera’s paradoxical relation to
the real, and McLuhan treats it as the medium of the imaginary,
such that the illusion of movement that is its formal premise is
replicated in its content. It provides, a hot instant gratification for its
viewers who for an hour or two are immersed in a simulation of lives
and times they can never know: ‘The movie is not only the supreme
expression of mechanism, but paradoxically it offers as product the
most magical of consumer commodities, namely dreams’ (McLuhan
[1964] 1995: 254). But this dream is predicated upon the mechani-
cal, and in this sense the description of Hollywood as the ‘dream
factory’ (and the commercialization of this idea in such ventures as
Spielberg’s Dreamworks animation company) is telling, not least
because it involves a collective mode of production that sets it apart
from the more atomized labours of text and introduces it to the full
operational capability of the culture industry.

Television

Television is the locus of McLuhan’s media theory. In television the
fusion of eye and ear is complete. Television involves a re-education
of the eye, which must be relieved of the habits of centuries of print
culture and trained in the holistic or depth perception that televi-
sion requires. Indeed, McLuhan argues that television is not a visual
but a tactile experience, something not watched but ‘felt’. As
established above, new media necessitate a reorganization of the
human sensorium, and this results in a restructuring of human

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