Part 3 The Influence of Marshall McLuhan
To this point, I have been looking at images personally and philosophically. The real effect of images is cultural as a way to convey messages to the masses. My billboard experiment is a tiny slice of a much bigger question about images.
In Part 3, I’m going to look at the perspective of Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Message) and Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle). Then in Part 4, we’ll explore Jean Baudrillard’s understand of the culture of simulation.
During my American Studies seminar mentioned previously, we read Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: Extensions of Man. I still have my copy. It is a collection of essays including The Medium is the Message, Media Hot and Cold, The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis, and The Photograph: The Brothel-without-Walls.
“Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.”
It was McLuhan through whom I gained a kind of benign skepticism about what I see. The image is never the whole story. It is like when people say, “the map is not the territory.” Well, “the image is not the whole picture.”
McLuhan made a distinction that I think is valuable between Hot Medium and Cool Medium.
“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.”
These distinctions by McLuhan were laying the ground for understanding the digital age of social media. The effect is a blending of the hot and the cool. While we participate, we are, at the same time, excluded from filling in the blanks. More importantly, the medium, whether hot or cool, matters more than the content. McLuhan describes.
“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 in our affairs by each extension of ourselves or by any new technology.”
McLuhan was writing in the early 1960s. He was already anticipating what would happen when the digital age emerged decades later. At this point in time, there were no personal computers. There were no mobile phones. There were no streaming services. There was no Wikipedia, Amazon, or Google, Facebook, or TikTok. If you are a digital native, then you may wonder what we did with our time. We played outside. We read books. We built treehouses out of scrap lumber. We explored the underdeveloped parts of our neighborhood. We ate meals together.
“The restructuring of human work and association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine technology. It is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships.
The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, ‘What is the content of speech?,’ it is necessary to say, ‘It is an actual process of thought, which is itself nonverbal.’ “
If we believe that rational thought is the height of human functioning, we then must ask what is the medium of this thought process. Is it the smartphone in my hand? Is it the video that I edited in iMovie? Is it when I click like or leave an emoji in response to an Instagram image?
If the screen is the medium, what is the message? You can see where this goes. We are no longer communicating my words, strung together into sentences, formed into paragraphs, and posted in a comment block. We are communicating by images.
Take the current controversy related to transperson Dylan Mulvaney and his status as the hot new face of Bud Light and other brands. Dylan was made for advertising. He is the medium that best fits the medium of the screen. The reality of this spectacle of corporate social justice is that McLuhan’s idea that the medium is the message is far more complex than he could have understood sixty years ago.
Words still matter, as the conservative provocateur Matt Walsh continues to ask, “What is a woman?” In this debate, there are two answers. Matt Walsh understands that the digital medium of social media is one of images. His strategy reverses the medium’s polarity from appearance to that of rational debate. Can he win the debate when the medium is the vehicle for the culture of appearances?
The digital medium has had the effect of emptying the former analog medium of its utility. Analog is a cool medium. Digital is a hot medium. Analog requires participation to fill in the gaps that require time and physical space to include. Those gaps are filled with words and rational arguments.
The digital medium already has everything that is needed to communicate its message. It only requires the participant to subscribe and hit the like button. No words. No arguments. Just the validation of a like button. You can see why attempts to limit free speech are so significant to the future of social media. Where the Spectacle of the Real reigns, individual critical thinking is the last thing that they want to encourage. This is why the most powerful social media platform, in my opinion, TikTok, is built on 10-15-second messages.
Anheuser Bush thought the image of Dylan Mulvaney lying in a bubble bath with a Bud Lite required no explanation. It has provided an association to TikTok where Dylan has become a star. What they didn’t realize is that McLuhan’s framework of hot and cool mediums as the message does not operate in some pristine, purified, controlled environment. It is complex and messy. Careers are won and lost in this setting.
The two mediums of the digital and the analog, correspond to the philosophic contrast between material reality and immaterial reality. In the transgender debate that has now flowed over into corporate advertising, the philosophical difference between the material reality of being a biological woman and the immaterial reality of being a self-referentially perceived woman reveals that when the medium becomes a spectacle of the real, the difference between these two philosophic perspectives ultimately clashes.
The Society of the Spectacle
In The Spectacle of the Real, I quote from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.
"In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. ...
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. ...
The concept of "spectacle" unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena. The diversity and the contrasts are appearances of a socially organized appearance, the general truth of which must itself be recognized. Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life, as a negation of life which has become visible."
Instead of life experienced directly, it is mediated through images. The image boundary keeps us from fully engaging in the kind of activities where we learn our true capabilities.
As a society, whether national or global, we are managed through the use of the spectacle. Events are presented to us in a particular way because whether they are our government leaders or corporate leaders, their purpose is to secure the environment that supports them.
It should be no surprise to anyone that the idea of the public servant rarely applies to our elected officials. It is the same with corporations that supply us with the consumer products that we need and want. As the world has become more complex, I see this as an expected transition. None of us should be surprised that the face of government and business is manufactured for us to believe whatever they tell us.
Our contemporary situation, then, is not as simple as Guy Debord describes
“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
Instead, it is where technological progress has taken us. The spectacle is a means of communicating to the broadest spectrum of people simple ideas that satisfy the naive curiosity of the largest number of people. It is not surprising, then, that the use of the spectacle has the effect of pacifying peoples’ will and silencing their voices.
We live in a society of the spectacle where images, rather than ideas, are the means of social control. These images are not just on the screen. They are in the car, in virtual games, in the gym, and wherever the experience is presented to us. In a direct experience, we create the experience.
The spectacle, therefore, is an event that captures our attention and seduces us into believing that something authentic is happening. We have a choice as to how we approach these situations. We can passively accept what we see as real or we can become curious, hold our judgment, and begin to look deeper into what we are being told.
How do we learn to do this?
I think we have to be shown.
When I moved to Jackson Hole in 2015, a immediately became a volunteer at the National Museum of Wildlife Art. One day I was asked to take a group of elementary school students through a new exhibit. At one point, I had the children sit on the floor. After a brief introduction to the painting, I said look carefully at the painting. Don’t talk. Just observe. After a minute, I began to ask questions of what was in the painting. A child would raise her hand, and answer my question. I’d say, come up here and show us what you see. I was teaching them to observe what is in front of them.
The spectacle's purpose is to disengage us from reality and accept the storyline being presented to us by the commentators on the screen. Debord, in his follow-up book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, writes,
“With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media’s professionals to give the answer, with a frew respectful rectifications or remonstrations. And they are hardly extravagant, even with these, for besides their extreme ignorance, their personal and professional solidarity with the spectacle’s overall authority and the society it expresses makes it their duty, and their pleasure, never to diverge from that authority whose majesty must not be threatened. It must not be forgotten that every media professional is bound by wages and other rewards and recompenses to a master, and sometimes to several; and that every one of them knows he is dispensable.
All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organisation. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassureance. “
The spectacle, essentially, is an event of psychological manipulation intended to reassure the public that the experts are knowledgeable and have their best interests in mind. These events intensify the significance of the event, and the pattern of behavior that follows is that there is never a moment that is not part of some spectacle.
Part 4 Life as Simulation
The essays in this series are a 10th-anniversary reflection on the original publishing of The Spectacle of the Real in May 2013.
I hesitate to hit the "like" button after reading this... Our culture is absolutely becoming more self-referential, and solipsistic in the sense that it can't imagine anything other than itself.