Marshall McLuhan

Remediation by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin

by
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

I’m going to start doing shorter recaps for the books and essays that feel less crucial to my understanding of what’s going on or don’t bring as much to the table. It’s no knock on the works themselves, especially as I really enjoyed reading this one. I just need to get through this faster and I don’t foresee it being as important to my exams as other works I’ve already covered.

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have one big idea in this text. It’s a little complicated but not too bad. Basically, they have a series of propositions that inform how they understand what media do and how they interact with each other. They examine this through the lens of new digital media like the web browser or VR, but it applies pretty generally across most media.

They claim that media works in two ways towards one goal. The two ways are immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy is the idea that a medium is a way to experience as closely as possible the thing represented in that medium, an idea most closely associated with point-of-view perspective in visual art forms. Hypermediacy is the idea that a medium is actually more multiplicative in ways that draw attention to the medium itself, as seen in a computer interface or television’s overwhelming combinations of different media like video and text and animation. Both of these interact with each other and are dependent upon each other, such that a medium is never wholly one or the other. Both of them are ways to get transparency, or an experience of something represented within the medium either via the act of getting closer to it or, paradoxically, further away but from many angles.

This is all tied in with their idea that remediation, or the movement of an idea or representation from one medium to another, is what mediums are. They contend that every new medium is simply the recreating and reformation of previous media in an attempt to get closer to transparency via a new combo of immediacy and hypermediacy. Its a convincing argument that they spend the majority of the middle of the book developing as they look at quite a few different media for how they remediate and employ immediacy and hypermediacy.

Their final section looks at the philosophical impact of their ideas as they develop ideas alongside Stanley Cavell and Laura Mulvey about how media position the self and incorporate their ideas of immediacy and hypermediacy into the fray. It’s all a little outside of my area of interest, but it was interesting to skim. They also push back against Marshall McLuhan’s technological determinism for its ignorance of the social and economic factors involved in the development and use of media but keep his concept of remediation and the interrelation of different media.

 

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

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Marshall McLuhan himself

McLuhan, Marshall. 2003 (1974). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Edited by W. Terrence Gordon. Critical Edition. Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Marshall McLuhan has two big concepts that, tellingly, make up the first two chapters of this massive text. The first is his pithy “the medium is the message,” a statement he returns to throughout to explain exactly what he means and some of the intricacies of the implications thereof. The point is that it isn’t the content of a medium which matters but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate. He uses bodily metaphors of amputation and prosthesis to explain how we have ceded much of our sensory organs to these media, which then structure how we interact with the world and the other people in it. This idea is augmented by his other important idea, that of the temperatures of media, where a hot medium is “high definition” and requires little human interaction in order to achieve a sense of “closure” with the medium while a cold medium is “low definition” and therefore requires more human work in order to achieve that closure. For McLuhan, closure is a rebalancing that must occur whenever a new medium is introduced to human life, which inevitably creates a numbness in the corresponding bodily sense, a phenomenon he borrows from the medical field called “autoamputation.”

McLuhan suggests that these hot and cold media have different effects depending on whether the society it enters is prepared to handle its intrusion or not. He supposes, for example, that print exploded a previously tribalistic society in Europe into a land of individuals while the introduction of radio tended to cause an implosion of nationalism. These things, again, happen no matter what the content of the medium is, it is the technological form of the medium that dictates what will happen when it becomes integrated with the culture it comes from, or comes in contact with.

Which brings us to McLuhan’s ickier side. He writes a lot, like, a lot a lot, about how various peoples are unprepared to deal with the mediums that those in the West might be able to integrate more smoothly. He writes with large, sweeping assumptions, for example, about the continent of Africa and its peoples, and how such “primitive” societies might respond poorly to different media. It’s a bunch of hooey as far as I’m concerned, and it makes one question everything else he says about “understanding media.”

Where most other theorists have linked the movies to prior media like photography or theater, McLuhan links it instead with print, and specifically the book, given its visual presentation of a high density of information and its linear progression. I think there are fundamental flaws to this idea, especially when one starts to consider the content of the media (which, to say the least, is an area where McLuhan and I have some differences of opinion). He does, however, productively link it to an industrialized society where people come together to make one thing, which, he says, is similar to the symphony orchestra of the 19th century. He also, like Eisenstein, links film to stream-of-consciousness writing in the works of James Joyce and others.

McLuhan writes that TV is a medium well-suited to looser personalities (like JFK instead of Nixon, famously) and process instead of product. McLuhan also believes that, because TV (in 1964, at least) is a cool medium in which the audience must participate in order to experience closure, TV then leans towards the documentary and makes us into people who require a depth of knowledge on a subject presented to us via its poorly resolved images. I tried to foresee what McLuhan would have made of TV in is current form, which is higher definition and therefore hotter. I couldn’t really do it. McLuhan doesn’t provide a whole ton of great roadmaps for a project like that, and thinking of a medium without its content seems antithetical to me anyways (and, frankly, impractical, given McLuhan’s own ultimate failure to do so).

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

McLuhan is in conversation with scholars and writers of his time who, he claims, think about media in a wrong way. McLuhan’s arguments are indeed more expansive than many, though I think they are bound up in some really bad assumptions that taint them pretty thoroughly. More importantly, McLuhan has been a source for debates in several of the books I’ve read so far, and likely more as I keep reading. The strongest pushback to him I’ve found so far is Raymond Williams’ in Television: Technology and Cultural Form, where he argues that McLuhan’s is a theory of technological determinism which ignores the culture’s role in a given medium’s invention, production, and reception. There is still some merit to be found in McLuhan’s big ideas, but they need to be separated out from the unuseful stuff and properly accounted for to be of any real value

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

McLuhan’s strategy here seems to be largely scattershot. The first section of his book develops the big theoretical ideas before the second part, the longer part, dives into a bunch of media on an individual basis where he discusses that particular medium’s peculiarities in the context of his larger ideas. Within these chapters, however, thoughts seem to bubble up out of aphorisms and telling anecdotes. This can lead to a confusing and difficult to follow flow of ideas.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

McLuhan seems to be going for a kind of gestalt-based theory. He’ll throw dozens of vaguely connected ideas at you in a given chapter, from a variety of angles, and hope that something sticks. It often does, but it also leads to a sense of time wasted, unfortunately.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

As a work of theory I think this is valuable but heavily flawed. I remain unconvinced of his content-less understanding of the media, while his imperialist tendencies make it difficult to read his arguments in good faith. I’m sure I’ll return to him, but more likely as a person to argue against than with.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

medium, message, closure, autoamputation, prosthesis, high definition, low definition, hot medium, cool medium, literacy,

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. (19)

What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. (20)

Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as content. The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The content of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech. (31)

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition.” High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, “high definition.” A cartoon is “low definition,” simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone. (39)

Intensity or high definition engenders specialism and fragmentation in living as an entertainment, which explains why any intense experience must be “forgotten,” “censored,” and reduced to a very cool state before it can be “learned” or assimilated. […] For many people, this cooling system brings on a life-long state of psychic rigor mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly observable in periods of new technology. (40)

Nevertheless, it makes all the difference whether a hot medium is used in a hot or a cool culture. The hot radio medium used in cool or non-literate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. A cool or low literacy culture cannot accept hot media like movies or radio as entertainment. They are, at least, as radically upsetting for them as the cool TV medium has proved to be for our high literacy world. (48)

The present book, in seeking to understand many media, the conflicts from which they spring, and the even greater conflicts to which they give rise, holds out the promise of reducing these conflicts by an increase of human autonomy. (76)

By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat-controls – all such extensions of our bodies, including cities – will be translated into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. With the new media, however, it is also possible to store and to translate everything; and, as for speed, that is no problem. No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier. (86)

If the movie merges the mechanical and organic in a world of undulating forms, it also links with the technology of print. The reader in projecting words, as it were, has to follow the black and white sequences of stills that is typography, providing his own sound track. He tries to follow the contours of the author’s mind, at varying speeds and with various illusions of understanding. It would be difficult to exaggerate the bond between print and movie in terms of their power to generate fantasy and the viewer or reader. (383)

Film is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a collective art form with different individuals directing color, lighting, sound, acting, speaking. The press, radio and TV, and the comics are also art forms dependent upon entire teams and hierarchies of skill in corporate action. Prior to the movies, the most obvious example of such corporate artistic action had occurred early in the industrialized world, with the large new symphony orchestras of the nineteenth century. (392)

As much as the infinitesimal calculus that pretends to deal with motion and change by minute fragmentation, the film does so by making motion and change into a series of static shots. Print does likewise while pretending to deal with the whole mind in action. Yet film and the stream of consciousness alike seem to provide a deeply desired release from the mechanical world of increasing standardization and uniformity. Nobody ever felt oppressed by the monotony or uniformity of the chaplain ballet or by the monotonous, uniform musings of his literary twin, Leopold Bloom. (395)

The TV image requires each instant that we “close” the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile, because tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object. (419)

With TV came the end of bloc voting in politics, a form of specialism and fragmentation that won’t work since TV. instead of the voting block, we have the icon, the inclusive image. Instead of a political viewpoint or platform, the inclusive political posture or stance. Instead of the product, the process. (427-8)

Now that we have considered the subliminal force of the TV image and a redundant scattering of samples, the question would seem to arise: “What possible immunity can there be from the subliminal operation of a new medium like television?” People have long supposed that bulldog opacity, backed by firm disapproval, is adequate enough protection against any new experience. It is the theme of this book that not even the most lucid understanding of the peculiar force of a medium can head off the ordinary closure of the senses that causes us to conform to the pattern of experience presented. The utmost purity of mind is no defense against bacteria, though the confreres of Louis Pasteur tossed him out of the medical profession for his base allegations about the invisible operation of bacteria. To resist TV, therefore, one must acquire the antidote of related media like print. (436)

If we ask what is the relation of TV to the learning process, the answer is surely that the TV image, by its stress on participation, dialogue, and depth, has brought to America new demand for crash-programming in education. Weather there ever will be TV in every classroom is a small matter. The revolution has already taken place at home. TV has changed our sense-lives and our mental processes. It has created a taste for all experience in depth that affects language teaching as much as car styles. Since TV, nobody is happy with a mere book knowledge of French or English poetry. The unanimous cry now is, “Let’s talk French,” and “Let the bard be heard.” And oddly enough, with the demand for depth, goes the demand for crash-programming. Not only deeper, but further, into all knowledge has become the normal popular demand since TV. […] the right approach is to ask, “What can TV do that the classroom cannot do for French, or for physics?” The answer is: “TV can illustrate the interplay of process and the growth of forms of all kinds as nothing else can.” (439-40)

The young people who have experienced a decade of TV have naturally imbibed an urge toward involvement in depth that makes all the remote visualized goals of usual culture seem not only unreal but irrelevant, and not only irrelevant but anemic. It is the total involvement in all-inclusive nowness that occurs in young lives via TV’s mosaic image. This change of attitude has nothing to do with programming in any way, and would be the same if the programs consisted entirely of the highest cultural content. The change in attitude by means of relating themselves to the mosaic TV image would occur in any event. It is, of course, our job not only to understand this change but to exploit it for its pedagogical richness. The TV child expects involvement and doesn’t want a specialist job in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his society. (443)

Television: Technology and Cultural Form by Raymond Williams

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Matt Groening’s The Simpsons

Williams, Raymond. 1974. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Second Edition (1990). New York: Routledge.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Raymond Williams dedicates much of this book to explaining what television is as a technology (that is, an extension of the more fundamental technology that is broadcasting, which first came to prominence via audio and the radio), what kinds of cultural requirements called it into existence (the increasingly atomized social world of a post-Industrial Revolution society), and the effects it has (to be listed later). It seems he writes largely to counter Marshall McLuhan’s conception of technological determinism, in which the technology just kind of pops into existence and has certain effects that are largely disconnected from the culture in which the technology exists. Williams, on the other hand, says that we need to return intention, history, and context to the discussion of television and its effects.

Williams tracks the history of the development of the technology that would lead, eventually, to television and then traces the way that other technologies were results of social needs (tele-phony/graphy as a way of communicating brief information across long distances quickly as a result of a growing desire to organize military and capitalist maneuvers) as a way of setting up how television, which is centrally produced but distributed broadly to individual homes, allows for a similar social requirement to be met. That social requirement is the need for distribution of information (and, less importantly but still crucially, entertainment) to a people who are increasingly separated from a sense of community that had once held society together. As societies get bigger and more spread out thanks to industrial practices and pressures, television (and radio before it) became a way to redeploy the kinds of things that might have been accomplished via town meetings or even public gatherings.

Williams then turns to examining who controls the production and dissemination of television programming, which, he notes, was always secondary to the fact that the signal existed in the first place. It was not that there were tv shows sitting around waiting for a technology to allow them to be broadcast into people’s homes, but that once that signal existed there was then a need for something to send over it. By looking at several British and American tv stations, he looks at what it means to have publicly owned stations and privately owned stations, both what that means for the kinds of shows that are being produced and shown on the channels and what it means for the way that the channels are being run financially. Williams later notes that as technologies of dissemination continue to develop, these signals will soon be able to reach around the world, which will have various additional effects of cultural imperialism and further consolidation of power.

Williams then investigates the way television works on a programming level. Here is his most famous concept from this book, that of flow as the dominant mode of televisual communication. He outlines how tv shows flow into one another, how within those shows there is a flow from scene to scene (or from show to commercial and back) and how within those smaller units there is still a continual flow of visual and aural information. This, he claims, is what makes it hard to turn the tv off, and what makes television seem insidious to those who would classify it as a means of society’s degradation. Even though we might switch between channels to find alternate programming, there is still an experience of flow from one channel to the next. It’s everywhere!

Williams then investigates the effects of television. Here is where he makes his strongest case against McLuhan, who he claims is treating the television as an ideology rather than a technology that has been made and used by a society. Television isn’t pushing the things on tv, society is via the television. Looked at this way, Williams claims, we can see how television was developed to help facilitation communication between those in power and those who have power over them, but also how others can co-opt that system for their own ends. Here lies the realm of pirate radio and tv stations, which exist fully within the boundaries of what is made possible with the technology even if they are not an intended effect of that technology. This kind of thing seems crucial to understanding the rest of William’s project, which projects the current (for 1974) situation of television into the future and in which Williams largely predicts the internet, in concept if not explicit detail.

Williams lays out how the continual development of technology related to broadcasting will soon create an international network of competing and conflicting distribution methods, aka the internet. Williams sees two ways of this working out. On the one hand, if arguments can be made that there should remain some level of local control over what is sent across these new means of broadcasting, there might be a real democratization of information and communication. On the other hand, if corporations are able to influence the development of these technologies enough, they might be able to manipulate the course of events towards a situation where the corporations are able to control what is seen as acceptable and possible within their neigh-unescapable grasp. It seems clear to me that Williams, in creating this binary of possible outcomes, hit exactly on what has happened, in that the internet has allowed for a greater ability for people to communicate with each other and learn about the world, but that corporations still largely control the ways in which those people use that information and lay out patterns of thought that those people still largely follow. There are cracks in the system because both of these outcomes happened at once and the corporate control is not nearly as all-encompassing as it would have needed to be to create that full dystopia and is indeed largely in control of the ways people communicate, but still those pirate messages are possible and even likely within this system. Perhaps it is utopian after all.

Williams’ concept of television and broadcasting is largely limited to Britain and the US, which does tend to limit his analysis somewhat. I would be curious to read a history of television during this time in other countries to see if the English language examples are as universal as Williams seems to claim they are.

Sarah Palmer watches TV on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Williams really only explicitly debates with McLuhan, who he pretty well takes to task for his technological determinism. Other than that, the biggest bit of context is the period in which Williams is writing. About 20 years after television’s popularity began, and with an ensuing 40+ years of development that has followed had made some of his arguments a little outdated. For instance, he writes about the technological inferiority of television as a visual medium when compared to the cinema. While that still remains true, at least on a level of scale, television is no longer so technologically inferior that it limits what can be shown on it the way it did in Williams’ time. Indeed, televisions can now have more color information than a digital projector at a theater can. This means that tv as a way of transmitting old (or new) movies is no longer a matter of dealing with poorer picture quality for the convenience of home viewing. Still, Williams’ analysis allows room for this change to happen, and even briefly predicts it.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Williams takes the socio-political view of the development of technologies as his main way of understanding how technologies come to be based on desires that needed to be fulfilled. He also examines not just the intended effects of a technology such as television but also their unintended and yet still possible effects. By looking at intentions and then effects, he is able to see why television came to be and what it is doing, and what it could be doing.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Williams methodological choice is largely his rhetoric. Here he argues that technological determinism is a flawed way of understanding the ways technology interacts with societies, and he aptly argues for a fuller understanding of its role as a social tool.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

As the start of my television-theory readings, this works really well to ground me in a way of thinking about tv as a medium. Even though it contains little in the way of theories of television as a medium of drama, where most of my readings will be focused, it still will likely remain foundational to my understanding of what is going on at a societal level with tv.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

television, technological determinism, cause and effect, cause, effect, social, society, broadcasting, flow, commercial, public, technology, medium, programming

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

If the technology is a cause, we can at best modify or seek to control its effects. Or if the technology, as used, is an effect, to what other kinds of cause, and other kinds of action, should we refer and relate our experience of its uses? (2)

[I]n the particular case of television it may be possible to outline a different kind of interpretation, which would allow us to see not only its history but also its uses in a more radical way. Such an interpretation would differ from technological determinism in that it would restore intention to the process of research and development. The technology would be seen, that is to say, as being looked for and developed with certain purposes and practices already in mind. At the same time the interpretation would differ from symptomatic technology and that these purposes and practices would be seen as direct: as known social needs, purposes and practices to which the technology is not marginal but central. (6-7)

The cheap radio receiver is then a significant index of a general condition and response. It was especially welcomed by all those who had least social opportunities of other kinds; who lacked independent mobility or access to the previously diverse places of entertainment and information. Broadcasting could also come to serve, or seem to serve, as a form of unified social intake, at the most general levels. What had been intensively promoted by the radio manufacturing companies thus interlocked with this kind of social need, itself defined within general limits and pressures. (21)

The ‘commercial’ character of television has then to be seen at several levels: as the making of programs for a profit in a known market; as a channel for advertising; and as a cultural and political form directly shaped by and dependent on the norms of a capitalist society, selling both consumer goods and a way of life based on them, in an ethos that is at once locally generated, by domestic capitalist interests and authorities, and internationally organized, as a political project, by the dominant capitalist power. (36-7)

But there has never been a time, until the last fifty years, when a majority of any population had regular and constant access to drama, and used this access. Even within the last half-century, at the peak of popularity of the cinema, figures for Britain indicate an average of less than one attendance a week per head of the adult population. It is difficult to get any precise comparative figures for television. But it seems probable that in societies like Britain and the United States more drama is watched in a week or weekend, by the majority of viewers, then would have been watched in a year or in some cases a lifetime in any previous historical period. […] Whatever the social and cultural reasons may finally be, it is clear that watching dramatic simulation of a wide range of experiences is now an essential part of our modern cultural pattern. Or, to put it categorically, most people spend more time watching various kinds of drama than in preparing and eating food. (56)

But the cultural importance of the serial, as an essentially new form, ought not to be limited to this kind of traditional ratification. Few forms on television have the potential importance of the original serial. If the form has been overlaid, understandably, by the ‘classic’ emphasis, and more generally by the stock formulas of crime and illness, that is a particular cultural mediation, which it is necessary to understand and look for ways beyond. (58)

What is being offered is not, in older terms, a program of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of program items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real ‘broadcasting’. (91)

The flow offered can also, and perhaps more fundamentally, be related to the television experience itself. Two common observations bear on this. As has already been noted, most of us say, in describing the experience, that we have been ‘watching television’, rather than that we have watched ‘the news’ or ‘a play’ or ‘the football’ ‘on television’. Certainly we sometimes say both, but the fact that we say the former at all is already significant. Then again it is a widely if 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 ‘program’, we find ourselves watching the one after it and the one after that. The way in which the flow is now organized, without definite intervals, in any case encourages this. (94)

Especially in advanced industrial societies the near universality and general social visibility of television have attracted simple cause-and-effect identifications of its agency in social and cultural change. […] What is really significant is the direction of attention to certain selected issues – on the one hand ‘sex’ and ‘violence’, on the other hand ‘political manipulation’ and ‘cultural degradation’ – which are of so general a kind that it ought to be obvious that they cannot be specialized to an isolated medium but, in so far as television bears on them, have to be seen in a whole social and cultural process. Some part of the study of television’s effects has then to be seen as an ideology: a way of interpreting general change through a displaced and abstracted cause. (121-2)

[McLuhan’s conception of the media] is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism: a determinism, that is to say, which ratifies the society and culture we now have, and especially its most powerful internal directions. For if the medium – weather print or television – is the cause, all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to effects. Similarly, what are elsewhere seen as effects, and as such subject to social, cultural, psychological and moral questioning, are excluded as irrelevant by comparison with the direct physiological and therefore ‘psychic’ effects of the media as such. The initial formulation – ‘the medium is the message’ – was a simple formalism. The subsequent formulation – ‘the medium is the massage’ – is a direct and functioning ideology. (130)

All technologies have been developed and improved to help with known human practices or with foreseen and desired practices. […] There will be in many cases unforeseen uses and unforeseen effects which are again a real qualification of the original intention. […] While we have to reject technological determinism, in all its forms, we must be careful not to substitute for it the notion of a determined technology. […] We have to think of determination not as a single force, or a single abstraction of forces, but as a process in which real determining factors – the distribution of power or of capital, social and physical inheritance, relations of scale and size between groups – set limits and exert pressures, but neither wholly control nor wholly predict the outcome of complex activity within or at these limits, and under or against these pressures. (132-3)

The unique factor of broadcasting – first in sound, then even more clearly in television – has been that its communication is accessible to normal social development; it requires no specific training which brings people within the orbit of public authority. If we can watch and listen to people in our immediate circle, we can watch and listen to television. (135)

All this will take time and prolonged effort. The struggle will reach into every corner of society. But that is precisely what is at stake: a new universal accessibility. Over a wide range from general television through commercial advertising to centralized information and data-processing systems, the technology that is now or is becoming available can be used to affect, to alter, and in some cases to control our whole social process. And it is ironic that the uses offer such extreme social choices. We could have inexpensive, locally based yet internationally extended television systems, making possible communication and information sharing on a scale that not long ago would have seemed utopian. These are the contemporary tools of the long revolution towards an educated and participatory democracy, and of the recovery of effective communication in complex urban and industrial societies. But they are also the tools of what would be, in context, a short and successful counter-revolution, in which, under the cover of talk about choice and competition, a few para-national corporations, with their attendant states and agencies, could reach farther into our lives, at every level from news to psychodrama, until individual and collective response to many different kinds of experience and problem became almost limited to choice between their programmed possibilities. (156-7)