In his seminal work “The Medium is the Message” Marshall McLuhan attempts to reformat the traditionally encapsulated approach to media studies as he sees the effects of technology as life changing in a social, cultural and psychological way.
He believes media studies should address not only the “content” of the medium, but also the cultural matrix within each medium operates.
For McLuhan each of human encounters to new media affects us profoundly, being so that our sense ratios are altered and our patterns of perception reconfigured steadily and without resistance, in am involuntary and subliminal manner.
He views any medium as an extension of ourselves, an extension of our senses, which involve us in a state of numbness or blocking of perception. To explain this, he uses the Greek myth of Narcissus (Greek word narcosis or numbness). Narcissus mistook his own reflection on the water for another person and died as a consequence of it. He's own extended or repeated image was so fascinating that numbed the rest of his senses. As medical researchers Hans Selye and Adolphe Jonas sustained in the physical stress of superstimulation the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense of function. Self-amputation forbids self-recognition as produces a generalised numbness or shock. This selection of a single sense for intense stimulus is in part reason of the numbing effect of technology. Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs or extensions of the body.
It's been thought that the effects of technology only occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but McLuhan maintains that we are unable to escape to them as they reconfigure our kinds of perception and organization of experience.
Therefore, McLuhan establishes a fundamental difference between content and message to back up his theory. Until then the line between content and message in media studies was blurry and in most cases the terms were ambivalent. For McLuhan the “content” of any medium is always another medium. That way the content of speech is thought, the content of writing is speech, the content of written word is print, print is the content of the telegraph, the telegraph is the content of press and so on (what any technology do is to add itself to what we already have). For him, the message of any medium is the change of scale or pace or pattern that introduces into human association and action. The medium's message is a social message of form and function as a unity. Before the electric speed and total field it was not obvious that medium is the message and the content was widely misunderstood as the message of any medium.
To illustrate this he points out how E.H. Gombrich in his book “Art and Illusion” was able to see the influence of the electric light in our perception of the world reflected in Cubist art. Cubism drops the illusion of perspective in favour of instant sensory awareness. For him this is a direct consequence of the shift from the fragmentation and sequentiality characteristic of the mechanization to the simultaneous structure and configuration typical of the electrical age. That way, there would be a shift from specialized fields of attention to the total field. Men would be looking then at the whole pattern, form and function as a unity, and cubism is an example of this theory.
He also uses the work of the Alexis de Tocqueville to demonstrate the influence of print and typography as a weapon of social change. Tocqueville's work on the French Revolution explained how the printed word and typographic principles of uniformity, continuity and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society. In England on the contrary the power of oral traditions and common law, backed by the medieval institution of the Parliament, was too strong, hence the discontinuity and unpredictable quality of English culture. From then on, the western and literate man has equate rationality to uniform, continuous and sequential, therefore confusing reason with literacy and rationalism with a single technology. Unaware of our typographic cultural bias we assume that continuous and uniform habits are sings of intelligence rejecting the diverse and the discontinuous, especially the child, the cripple, the woman and the coloured person. As this new world assigns jobs instead of roles, there's no longer space for the different.
McLuhan divides human history in a number of periods or ages marked by the advent of new media: tribal, literacy and mechanization, electric technology and automatation.
In this paper McLuhan tries to analise the role of the phonetic alphabet in creating many basic patterns of culture and uses the greek myth of Cadmus dragon's teeth to exemplify those.
The legend tells that the Phonetician king Cadmus killed the dragon that guarded the spring of Ares (Olympian god of warfare). Athena (goddess of war, civilization, wisdom, strength, strategy, crafts, justice and skill) told him to sow the teeth, from which sprang a group of armed ferocious warriors called the spartoi, who are taken to be the sons of Ares as the dragon was sacred to him. Cadmus is accepted as the bringer of literacy and civilization and he's reputedly responsible for introducing the phonetic alphabet in Greece. The alphabet when combined with the light, cheap and transportable papyrus transferred the monopoly of power and knowledge from the priestly to the military class. The alphabet meant power and authority and control of military structures. In terms of extensions of man, teeth are an obvious agent of power in man and in many animals. Teeth are emphatically visual in their lineal order. Letters are not only like teeth visually but their power of empire-building.
The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology, in which semantically meaningless visual signs are used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds. This division and parallelism between audio and visual had a strong cultural impact. The phonetically written word sacrifices worlds of meaning and perception present in culturally richer forms of writing as the hieroglyph and the Chinese ideogram. It presented a sudden break between the auditory and visual experience of man giving to its user an eye for an ear. As an intensification and extension of the visual function, the phonetic alphabet diminishes the role of other senses like sound, touch and taste in any literate culture.
The phonetic alphabet is the technology that has been the means of creating the “civilised man” were the separate individuals equate to a written code of law.
From the advent of the phonetic alphabet we have regarded consciousness as the mark of a rational being, but there's nothing lineal or sequential to the total field of awareness that exists in any moment of consciousness. David Hume demonstrated in the eighteenth century that there's no causality indicated in any sequence, natural or logical. The sequential is merely additive, not causative. The reason why we tend to think of sequence as “logic” is the pervasive influence of the alphabet. The breaking up of every kind of experience in uniform units in order to produce faster action and change of form has been the secret of western power over man and nature.
Civilization is built on literacy because literacy is an uniform processing of a culture by a visual sense extended in time and space by the alphabet. Alphabetic cultures separate feelings and emotions from actions, as we separate vision from meaning. Separation of sight and sound from semantic and verbal. They act without reacting.
Pictographic and hieroglyphic writing represent and extension of the visual sense. These forms give pictorical expression to oral meanings. They require many signs to express the richness of this data. Each language is unique.
The alphabet is able to encompass all languages as achieves the separation of signs and sounds from its semantic and dramatic meanings. This separation extends to its social and psychological effects as literate man undergoes a separation of his imaginative, emotional and sense life.