This article was first published in the July 2009 issue of Universitas.
A leading theorist of mass communication once asked a leading practitioner in the same field how he got his start. “I heard Elvis Presley,” John Lennon told Marshall McLuhan. Presley’s success hinged on mannerisms and petty habits with his infamous pelvic gyrations, the outlandish clothes and pompadoured hair, and the lopsided grin. Luckily, unlike Presley, The Beatles evolved and produced content that has proven timeless.
But what is more interesting here is how Lennon’s answer demonstrated McLuhan’s thesis, ‘the medium is the message.’ Coincidentally, just a year after Lennon demonstrated McLuhan’s point, Lennon himself, was slated to follow the Elvis track when he embarked on his solo career and packaged himself as a peace icon. As his son Julian wrote on the 25th anniversary of his death, “That peace and love never came home to me.” Because ‘the medium is the message,’ 30 years after McLuhan received proof of his thesis, the evidence has grown.
The significance and necessity of becoming media-literate is immense; and while the success of Presley may seem all too frivolous, the framework governing his success is not, because it is the same framework governing most messages in the popular media.
Since the origin of the popular media at the turn of the 19th century, and more so with the birth of commercial television in the 1950s, the peripheral aspects of a message have become the main focus of man’s pursuit for knowledge and wisdom. This phenomenon is not new. The ancient Greeks dealt with a similar outlook with the growing popularity of the Sophists and their penchant for shallow rhetoric. Even at the onset of modernity, with the period known as the Enlightenment, the focus on reason was often artificial, ignited by pure passion alone. Reason was replaced by “rationalizing,” a mere derivative of reason meant to merely justify various perspectives. Misguided passion fueled countless other “isms” and revolutions that rocked the world—from the French Revolution to the pursuit of the American Dream to Fascism, Bolshevik socialism, and consumerism, the world has been in constant but directionless flux.
Revolutions are often flamed by ideas, and the speed and manner at which ideas are disseminated have directed the course of history. With the reign of popular media, the misguided passion prevalent since the Enlightenment has been magnified. McLuhan believed that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself.
Among the various technologies devoted to communication and information since the invention of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, television has by far been the most powerful. Moreover, it has also been the medium that has imbibed most of the potentially damaging characteristics of misguided passion and has often undermined the necessity and essence of reason and logic. In fact, all other communication technologies have imbibed TV’s nature and popular character. Popular TV dramas such as Grey’s Anatomy and Brothers and Sisters, for instance, focus on the imperfections of man, implying that it is our unregulated emotion that makes us wonderfully human. Fighting and bickering are central themes, with characters often creating problems that can be avoided, making mountains out of molehills. Human folly has transformed from struggle to becoming the essence of life.
Even among genres that both the media and many viewers regard as intelligent and compelling, ‘the medium is the message’ framework reigns. In the popular medical drama House, the audience is given a taste of a Sherlock Holmes medical mystery, with what is presented as complex medical problems for a team of doctors specializing in cutting-edge medicine. While the basic idea and plot is interesting, its producers and directors focus less on content governed by logic and reason; instead, focus on the main character’s dysfunctional and annoying attitude, portraying it as an ideal to aspire for.
This growing trend of depicting the right as wrong and staging the wrong as right is a natural consequence of McLuhan’s thesis. It is best observed in the critically acclaimed reimagined Battlestar Galactica (BSG). Touted as the new face of science fiction, BSG reimagined transformed an old 1980s TV show based on hope, spiritual faith, and family as a show of despair, sexuality, and human dysfunction. The worst aspects and tendencies of a human being are magnified, celebrated, and sold as entertainment. It has been regarded as intellectually stimulating, challenging viewer imagination; but what it really is, is a twisted interpretation of reality, based on broken rules of logic and reason. Monotheism is depicted as religious fundamentalism, and what is alluded to as the Christian God is associated with the number six, with angels looking like mafia lords and Vegas hosts.
While we can resist the influence of media, its pervasiveness, power, and complexity make that very difficult. From entertainment to news, and even the food, toys, and gadgets we purchase and use, McLuhan’s thesis has become the thrust of communication. In the late 1970s throughout the 1980s, a war broke out that would further ferment this idea. Before Steve Jobs introduced Apple at the end of the 1970s, IBM lorded it all and computers were largely utilized for office applications. Jobs changed the communication landscape with his new interface and catapulted the idea of computers as toys of the technically gifted nerd (with MS-DOS) to the avant-garde, cool and visually oriented and self-proclaimed artistic genius’ religion and lifestyle. It further evolved from a business tool to the hobbyist’s toy to virtually anyone’s staple commodity. A traditionally gifted nerd figured this out and beat Jobs at his own game when he introduced Windows, the operating system (OS) that owes its stamp to Jobs’ OS. But Jobs believed that Gates would never succeed because his Apple OS was better. But since ‘the medium is the message’, Gates knew that it would not matter. And it will continue to not matter if communication and information literacy are not taken seriously, rendering human reason almost incapable of exercising freedom.#
Banner photo by Chiara F on Unsplash.
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