Page 121 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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106 Then
This places McLuhan in a curious relation to the other theorists
we have examined, most of whom adopt a uniformly critical position
in relation to the mass media. Raymond Williams powerfully articu-
lates the case against McLuhan in this respect when he says:
If specific media are essentially psychic adjustments, coming not
from our relation with ourselves but between a generalized
human organism and its general physical environment, then of
course intention … is irrelevant … and with intention goes
content … All media are in effect desocialised: they are simple
physical events in an abstracted sensorium … If the effect of the
medium is the same, whoever controls or uses it, and whatever
apparent content he may try to insert, then we can forget
ordinary cultural and political argument and let the technology
run itself.
(Williams 1974: 127)
If on one level McLuhan’s fidelity to the medium as message
resulted in a failure to consider the very real social, economic and
political conditions in which it was installed, it also provided him
with fundamental insights into unique experiential and cultural
opportunities generated, and enabled him to anticipate, amid a
welter of pseudo-prophecy, a number of very real trends. Thus
Williams’s further judgement that the influence of McLuhan’s media
theory ‘is unlikely to last long’ appears today, given the rise in
McLuhan’s stock in the digital era, as misguided as McLuhan’s most
foolish pronouncements.
Williams’s criticism prefigures some of the analysis of the pro-
found cultural harm caused by the media, encountered in Part 2.
Whereas Williams and more contemporary theorists (like Benjamin
before them) frequently see room for the development of positive
social forces within such powerful media trends, critical theorists
tend to take Williams’s fears as an accurate summary of social and
political conditions within the mediascape. As an introduction to
Part 2’s latest versions of these critical accounts, in the next chapter
we see how, in the 1960s, Guy Debord combined a McLuhanite
account of specific media properties with a much more politically
informed sense of the wider environmental effects to produce his
critical concept of the society of the spectacle.

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