The Mass Age is the Message: Cyberspace, Indigeneity, Art and Just-Plain-Wrong Eurocentric Ideas of “Progress” and “Modernity”

In his best-selling 1967 book titled The Medium is the Message, and later erroneously published as The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan asserts that, in the age of new media, the content and the form this content is presented in are increasingly intertwined and cannot be separated. This concept is explored over the course of the book – whether it is the content or the form that defines ideas present and developing in these new technologies. McLuhan’s book combines the use of images and text to demonstrate the symbiotic and sometimes competing ideas of form and content. In this blog post I seek to explore concepts from McLuhan’s book, including the way he discusses the environment as a medium, the written alphabet and the “tribal man” and “global village”. Intersecting with these discussions, I also will include several points that Steven Loft makes in his essay “Mediacosmology”. Loft takes some of McLuhan’s broader ideas and recontextualizes as they may apply to Indigeneity and cyberspace in particular – a concept far beyond the 1967 world of McLuhan’s book. Overall, I seek to discuss critically the intersections between Indigenous traditional knowledge, Indigenization of cyberspace, and McLuhan’s broad ideas surrounding new media and cyberspace. At the end of this post I will discuss several of the shortcomings of the McLuhan piece, especially in its application of Eurocentric thought and ideas surrounding “progress” and technology. I will be using images –  to punctuate each idea, and hopefully to add context and depth to McLuhan’s and Loft’s theoretical discussions.

One of the main concepts to come out of McLuhan’s book is in its highly interpretable title(s). In the case of the original title Medium is the Message, this is a reoccurring theme throughout the book and is fairly obvious where he chooses to discuss technology as the medium and also as the message that is expressed through this media. More interesting to consider, in my opinion, is the choice of McLuhan himself to leave the book titled medium is the “massage” rather than the message, and what that means for the content of the book. As McLuhan is explaining his introductory statements about medium being the message, he makes several statements that seem to hint at “massage”. For example, he states that “media works us over completely” (McLuhan 1967, p. 26), this statement accompanied by images of feet and toes that illustrate new media as an “interface” that is an extension of the human body. As discussed in class, the play on words is present in so that massage can be seen as “mass age”, hinting at the concepts that McLuhan later discusses surrounding the “global village” that new media might create.

On the topic of the “global village”, McLuhan complacently uses several pervasive ideas that commonly exist in colonial narratives. A “global village” refers to a post-globalization society where humanity has both “progressed” and “regressed” into a state similar to a pre-technology world that functions using a group mentality. McLuhan describes this world as “boundless, directionless” and as relying on “primordial intuition” to guide the society (McLuhan, p.48). It is very difficult to understand at this section what McLuhan’s opinion is on this society that is a result of new media. After my first reading, it seems apparent that he sees the creation of a “global village” as a distinct “regression” of society, using words such as ‘primordial’ which cast a negative tone over the subject, however he romanticizes the “tribal man” as also a figure of natural “progress”. Loft describes this as the romantic trope of the “noble savage”, still a pervasive in some of today’s ideologies. Mostly, McLuhan separates the ideas of ‘modernity’ and Indigeneity (though he does not use this word, it is heavily implied by McLuhan’s use of “tribal”) into categories that cannot coexist. For this reason, when applying any of these concepts to contemporary understandings of Indigeneity as it applies to digital spaces created through the Internet and cyberspace, readers must be extremely aware that McLuhan falls into this false dichotomy.

Another example of this false dichotomy – something which is also pointed out in Steven Loft’s article – is in McLuhan’s statements surrounding writing and the written alphabet. McLuhan considers the adoption or creation of a written alphabet to be a defining moment for any society, while appearing to be unaware of societies outside Europe. For him, a written alphabet is a milestone of “progress”, separating the “modern” societies from their “primordial” pasts or separating “modern” cultures from “tribal” ones. Such ideas are now considered to be overtly racist, beyond that, McLuhan’s observations are also overly simplified and incorrect. Loft argues that Indigenous languages exist in many complex non-oral forms, specifically citing the existence of Aztec codices and the Haudenosaunee wampum. Wampum is usually a string of beads made from the purple or white interior of a seashell, its arrangement signifying an important event or agreement. The most fascinating idea put forward by Loft’s article was the conceptualization of wampum – with the capacity to create a ‘database’ of stored collective memory – as a precursor to a digitally-based hypertext. In this way, other Indigenous groups in North America – including those using petroglyphs and other pictorial representations – have a claim to digital space as it is inherently an Indigenous space. As a person who grew up in a digital world, the cyberspace I was aware of was overwhelmingly marketed to a colonial male-bodied person even as race, class and gender are not obvious in the digital space. Thinking about cyberspace as a pre-existing Indigenous way of thinking, even before we had technological tools to access the space, is a very useful way to frame my own understanding of the (re-)Indiginization of cyberspace that has been occurring since the discovery of the Internet.

Lastly, I want to end by discussing some of artist Skawennati’s work on the subject of Indigenous cyberspace as demonstrated through CyberPowWow and several other SecondLife projects (hyperlink). Skawennati emphasizes the importance of imagining Indigenous bodies and Indigenous issues in the future, and therefore as part of the digital age rather than opposed to it inherently. What her work – and discussion of this work – showcases is the more physical Indigenous presence in the development of the new media, a key piece not explicitly explored by McLuhan or Loft. In cohesion with Loft’s more theoretical article, her digital art spaces provide a physical basis to the claim for inherent Indigenous cyberspace, rather than Indigeneity working within a digital colonial framework.

Overall, McLuhan provides an early contextual history of the digital age, even if he did not fully understand cyberspace or a digital age, the context of Indigeneity, or how the two ideas may interact in the years to follow. McLuhan provides more general insight into the way that new environments are constantly at play, so I feel that in a few ways this book is still accessible and relevant. Loft provides a more comprehensive analysis of Indigeneity and cyberspace. Loft also offers a contemporary critique of McLuhan as his views miss the mark in terms of Indigenous issues in a digital age, introducing the theoretical basis for understanding Indigenous cyberspace and what that might mean. Lastly, I think that Skawennati and other artists who focus on digital art and Indigenous cyberspace are doing incredibly important work bringing Indigenous new media and combining the old technology with the new in ways that McLuhan could not imagine.