McLuhan, Ong

This week’s readings were the introduction and fourth chapter from Walter Ong’s book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word and Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message as well as McLuhan’s 1969 interview with Playboy magazine. For the purpose of this week’s blog I would like to focus on McLuhan’s work.

Marshall McLuhan is a very intelligent individual and I struggled quite a bit understanding all of his intertwining thought processes in The Medium. . . Fortunately, his Playboy interview was a bit easier to understand than the work he himself authored. I think one of the primary reasons it was an easier read was that the Playboy interviewer was there to ask those “Can you explain what you mean by that?” kind of questions. I was left with the impression that had I been a student in a McLuhan class, I would probably have had hand up for the entire duration.

For example: McLuhan contends that watching television requires heavy usage of tactile sense. He postulates that sense of touch, rather than sense of sight, is the primary way one absorbs the medium of television. The reason, he argues, is the “low density or definition [of television] offers no detailed information about specific objects but instead involves the active participation of the viewer.” I assume he means that the viewer must “fill in the blanks” and react to the vague sensibility of a television program rather than “to specific objects.” I would argue, however, that this is not necessarily the case. Although I have never had the experience of viewing television programming in the 1960s, I certainly know what it is like in the 1990 and now in the 2000s. Today, watching television requires little to no effort or participation on the part of its audience. Certainly, other critics (for example, Theodor Adorno in On Television) have argued that television is characterized by an audience’s lack of participation in the events on-screen.

With the benefit of several generations of evolution in the technology of TV, I would argue that big screens and high definition programming and equipment has hardly changed the viewing experience in regards to whether or not the experience is tactile rather than visual.

Today, most programming currently broadcast could be characterized by as mindless television (and a lot of it is just garbage). Unless I am just missing his point, I think McLuhan was wrong in postulating that television viewing at that time required “short, intense participation and (was characterized by) low definition.”

Another point he made that I found interesting was the contrast he made between television and radio. Clearly, these two mediums are extremely different but the reasons he found them to be different were unconventional. As I mentioned above, he said that television is requires intensive participation and is low definition and he called this a “cool” experience. To contrast, he said radio is “essentially ‘hot,’ or high definition-low participation.” I would argue, however, that is no longer true. I think of television as our primary “hot” medium and now the internet/digital communication is our primary “cool” medium. It certainly requires participation on the part of the user. The interactive element is part of the message of that medium. Again, I would not maintain he was wrong in saying these things at the time, only he would be wrong if he said them now.

One this same note, McLuhan himself stated that he has “no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory” and would likely have evolved his understanding of television as a medium as soon as that understanding was no longer relevant. In short, to argue that the point he made in 1969 is no longer a relevant argument is something he would surely have concluded himself. In fact, another point he made was that “today, television is the most significant of the electric media because it permeates nearly every home in the country.” I would be interested to hear his thoughts on the internet because that is quite a pervasive medium now and certainly very different from the mediums he was acquainted with.