With the explosion of social media, media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s claim that “the medium is the message” is arguably more relevant today than it was when he first wrote it in 1964. McLuhan’s understanding of the transformative effects of mass media on individuals and society, and how the forms of media (the medium) are at least as important as the content (the message) in effecting significant social changes has proven prescient. His claim makes a crucial point regarding media and power in today’s technological world, and is especially evident in the complex convergence of media ownership, consumer industries, and political power ambitions.
This convergence gives great control to an elite few in shaping culture, enabling – through technology – the manipulation of many media consumer behaviours into desired political and economic outcomes. Henry Jenkins loosely defines convergence, in a media context, as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences”, and that “[i]t is shaped by the desires of media conglomerates to expand their empires across multiple platforms and by the desires of consumers to have the media they want where they want it, when they want it, and in the format they want” (2006).
Raymond Williams, a contemporary of Marshall McLuhan’s, is critical of McLuhan’s theories of technological determinism. In “Television: Technology and cultural form”, Williams puts forth the argument that it is the human producers of content that shape culture; that the media technologies are merely ancillary to carefully produced and programmed content; and it is the choices producers and consumers make regarding the production and consumption of mediated content that directs and shapes technology, not the other way around. In other words, media technologies are simply cultural products, with no inherent agency separate from human intent and activity (2004).
While McLuhan and Williams present opposing theories regarding mass media and its effects, both theories have proven to be more complimentary than they are contradictory. However, despite there being compelling arguments supporting each theory, I find myself leaning more towards McLuhan’s technological determinism than I do towards Williams’ cultural materialism. This is based on the explosion of big data and its algorithmic power as a creator – not just a channel – of content and intended effects.
In 2017, human society and our created cultures are barely able to keep up with the subtle yet profound ways technology is shaping how we live and how we think. But even in the television age, it is telling that Williams wrote “[t]hen again it is a widely of often ruefully admitted experience that many of us find television very difficult to switch off; that again and again, even when we have switched on for a particular ‘programme’, we find ourselves watching the one after it and the one after that” (2004). Williams attributes this to the “flow” of broadcast content, but goes on to say, “a characteristic for which hardly any of our received modes of observation and description prepare us.” To my own thinking, Williams almost appears to acknowledge that the television itself has some power to change our behaviours – even if this is not his intention at all – because the glowing screen, its sounds, its very presence, keeps us seated in front of it, turned on, even as we turn off. Yes, flow is central; but no, it is not wholly causal to our viewing habits. The medium itself has agency, compelling viewers to stay with it, even when the content is no longer of interest to us.
Since 2004, when Facebook was first developed – and later social media additions, such as Twitter, Google+, and others – the sweeping phenomena of social media has reshaped global society in a way that retribalizes us in our search for uniformity, acceptance, or identity. McLuhan envisioned a global village evolving through media and electric technology, and his vision is particularly realised through the electronic medium of the internet, which “shapes and controls the scale of human association and action” (1964). Our online associations and communications transcend traditional geopolitical borders, and even have the power of subverting moderate points of view into more extremist political binaries, as was evident in the last presidential elections in the United States, and in the proliferation of ‘terrorist’ ideologies and religious extremism.
In our modern access to global digital networks, and with big data as a bridging technology, the flow of targeted messages has become a powerful tool in the marketing of ideologies, particularly those of Western capitalist democracies, and much of this is now automated. It simply could not exist without the technology.
Additional to cultural responses to media, McLuhan saw media as an extension of ourselves. It extends our physical, psychological and social self within its culture-shaping matrix: as the wheel extends our feet, the phone extends our voice, and electronic media extends our nervous system (1964). Our attentions are caught and held by the media in digital social media contexts, using multiple electronic devices, and this is physically and socially changing us. The technologies have become physical extensions of our bodies, shaping who and how we are, and creating and recreating cultures, in real time, everywhere, in what McLuhan called the ““unified field” of electric all-at-onceness” (1962). Studies suggest that this ‘always on and always there’ electronic media is having a significant impact on brain function, though these studies are still in their relative infancy (Richtel, 2010).
It is this technological extension of ourselves that has made the surveillance of our every move and every thought not just possible, but highly profitable. As McLuhan states in The Gutenberg Galaxy, “[a]nd as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence” (1962). Many believe surveillance to be closed-circuit television cameras placed around cities for crime-prevention purposes, telecommunications “bugging”, or James Bond styled spies working for the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency, or the United Kingdoms’ Military Intelligence services. Big data industries have changed this reality though, and now we are all under constant surveillance in almost every aspect of our lives, in multiple mediated ways.
Personal and private data is harvested through user demographics, the decisions users make while interacting across various media in multiple contexts, and keywords users might express when producing content on internet blogs, in the comments sections of news articles, social interactions via Facebook timelines, Snapchats, and various specialised discussion forums; and even through devices that are worn to monitor our heart health, exercise habits, and sleeping patterns.
The vast quantity of data collected about the communicated media habits of consumers is parsed through sophisticated algorithms, which then feedback to targeted users as the strategic communications of dominant political and economic ideologies and aspirations, in ways that will have the most desired effect. This data loop inherent in new media becomes a “private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind” (McLuhan, 1962), in what McLuhan might call a “collide-oscope of interfaced situations” (2001).
Data is also bought and sold by governments and corporations who have a stake in knowing everything about us: for example, health insurance companies have the technology to monitor data tracked from third party wirelessly networked devices that are worn as activity trackers, and that we believe are sold to us as purely motivational tools to help us move more, eat less, and sleep better. There is a commercial incentive for them to gather this kind of data, as they can set insurance premiums or deny pay outs to insurance claims based on the information collected. There is no need for the consumers of these specific products or specific health insurance companies to communicate details about their health and fitness via email or telephone call, as their whole body – even the chemical makeup of their perspiration – can do the communication for them, cybernetically.
Norbert Wiener, a contemporary of McLuhans (albeit within different disciplines) was a pioneer in developing modern cybernetics: the flow and feedback of information between man and machine. In later writings, he had reservations about the technologies we develop – and that he had helped to develop – replacing us in work, and eventually controlling us completely. In a 2014 article published in The Atlantic, Wiener’s fears, as expressed in his book, God & Golem, Inc, are interpreted thusly: “His fears for the future stemmed from two fundamental convictions: We humans can’t resist selfishly misusing the powers our machines give us, to the detriment of our fellow humans and the planet; and there’s a good chance we couldn’t control our machines even if we wanted to, because they already move too fast and because increasingly we’re building them to make decisions on their own. To believe otherwise, Wiener repeatedly warned, represents a dangerous, potentially fatal, lack of humility” (Hill, 2014).
Like McLuhan and Williams, Wiener did not live long enough to witness the internet and the World Wide Web, but his fears for humanity are in alignment with McLuhan’s theories of technological determinism, and the truth of these fears are most evident in a powerful and politically motivated elites’ use of social media and big data. Through the complexity of hardware and software interfaces, wealthy interest groups have all but usurped democracy, twisting it into an oligarchic kleptocracy that is managed by technocrats and enabled by an unwitting public’s use of social media technologies and the highly monetised data that is harvested through such usage.
Big data corporations, such as Cambridge Analytica (2017), operate in the shadows to disseminate automated trigger messages to algorithmically understood and primed receivers, who will “like” and “share” without caring whether information is true or false, so long as it advances their own ideology and plays into their own myths about themselves and the world around them. As an article in The Guardian shows, the Brexit vote for Britain to leave the EU, was more technologically than democratically driven (Cadwalladr, 2017). This is frightening, and as McLuhan says in an interview with Playboy Magazine, “there is much evidence to suggest that man may have paid too dear a price for his new environment of specialist technology and values” (1969). In 2017, the stakes – political, environmental, and economic – are much higher.
We live in a vastly different social, political, and economic world than we did just seventeen years ago, at the turn of the century. It is technology that has changed us, and the faster the technology evolves, the more we find our lives changing to meet its demands. Williams and Jenkins make good points regarding culture effecting technology, but Williams is too dismissive of McLuhan’s technologically deterministic view, and Jenkins is too utopian in his convergence theories.
Paradoxically, McLuhan also believed that “[b]ecause of today’s terrific speed-up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us — and thus win back control of our own destinies” (1969). Presently, our current technological incarnations are more dystopian than utopian, and we appear to be living somewhere between George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. We will need to be more vigilant in how we allow vested interests to use the media technologies we have now built our lives around to not be used so easily against us, as slaves to their omnipotence and the amorality of the increasingly powerful few that own the hardware and software media companies we so heavily depend on. Either way, for good use or ill, the medium has very much proved itself to be the message, and we are addicted to and driven by our media platforms more than we are by their content.
References
Anon., 2017. Cambridge Analytica. [Online]
Available at: https://cambridgeanalytica.org/
[Accessed 20 May 2017].
Cadwalladr, C., 2017. The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked. [Online]
Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy?CMP=share_btn_fb
[Accessed 24 May 2017].
Hill, D., 2014. “The Eccentric Genius Whose Time May Have Finally Come (Again)”. [Online]
Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/norbert-wiener-the-eccentric-genius-whose-time-may-have-finally-come-again/372607/
[Accessed 19 May 2017].
Jenkins, H., 2006. Welcome to Convergence Culture. [Online]
Available at: http://henryjenkins.org/2006/06/welcome_to_convergence_culture.html
[Accessed 21 May 2017].
McLuhan, M., 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy. 1st ed. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
McLuhan, M., 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Signet.
McLuhan, M., 1969. The Playboy Interview [Interview] (March 1969).
McLuhan, M., 2001. The Medium Is The Massage. 9th ed. Corte Madera, California, USA: Gingko Press.
Richtel, M., 2010. Digital Overload: Your Brain On Gadgets [Interview] (24 August 2010).
Williams, R., 2004. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Taylor & Francis e-Library.