Page 119 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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104 Then
subjectivity: ‘the rigorous separation and specialisation of the
senses … [cannot] withstand … the radio and TV waves that wash
about the great visual structure of abstract Individual Man’ ([1964]
1995: 275). The critical approach promoted in this book finds
McLuhan’s account of the dissolution of the Individual Man a
convincing one – it is what makes his work an important contribu-
tion to critical theories of mass media despite the fact that he
tended to celebrate such dissolution (although the various points in
his work in which he voiced profound concerns were frequently
overlooked by commentators [see Harris and Taylor 2005: 7–8]).
McLuhan’s analysis of television is exclusively dictated by the
technical conditions of the medium at the time of its formulation,
conditions that led him to characterize it as a cool medium . Whereas
4
the hot medium of film was seen as a transitional form which drew
on the discrete, sequential technology of print to create the illusion
of a moving image, television is clean break with the typographic
paradigm: ‘The TV image is low on data … It is not a photo in any
sense but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by a
scanning-finger. The resulting plastic contours appears to be light
through, not light on, and the image formed has the quality of
sculpture and icon, rather than picture’ ([1964] 1995; 273: original
emphasis). Here is the source of the qualities of participation and
tactility ascribed to the medium. For McLuhan tactility does not
designate touch so much as an immediate interplay between differ-
ent sensory channels – synathesia. Television by presenting an
audio-visual image that is marked by its modulation ‘the ceaselessly
forming contour of things’ replicates the interplay of senses. This
interplay results in a new form of image, which he terms the
‘mosaic’, this is a synthetic image in which elements continually
coalesce to preserve a continuum – a high-technology continuation
of the urban shock and distraction identified by Benjamin.
In spite of this apparent over-investment in certain aspects of the
technical conditions of the television of the time, McLuhan did
identify a number of significant trends. Although most commenta-
tors would today question the degree of television’s impact, the
trend toward decentralization, the blurring of public and private
spheres, and clear demarcation of roles that McLuhan, on the basis
of his analysis of television, predicated has been confirmed. Similarly,
while his definition of television as a participatory medium is for the
most part confused and confusing, it remains the case that television
is still the most powerful media in terms of simultaneous collective
experience, as clearly demonstrated in the epochal events of 9/11 –
a televisual event watched live, and later in a loop of traumatic

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