{"id":1,"date":"2016-09-19T06:15:38","date_gmt":"2016-09-19T06:15:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/clara401f\/?p=1"},"modified":"2016-09-26T17:21:42","modified_gmt":"2016-09-27T00:21:42","slug":"mcluhan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/clara401f\/2016\/09\/19\/mcluhan\/","title":{"rendered":"What do we do with Mcluhan?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The medium is the message. The medium is the massage. Even if you have never heard of Marshal Mcluhan before, you are likely familiar with this phrase. Even if you are not familiar with it, you have undoubtedly lived it out: proven it time and again with the way you use media, the way you communicate, the way you think, the way you are surrounded by embedded attitudes that are so much a part of the fabric of society that you are not even aware you might be carrying them around. Mcluhan’s ideas are so entrenched around us that we can no longer see them.<\/p>\n

How does a fish know it is in water?<\/p>\n

\"salmon-gif\"

A salmon swims upstream.<\/p><\/div>\n

Ironically, I thought this phrase was a good metaphor and only when I googled it did I realize Marshal Mcluhan originally said it. Case and point.<\/p>\n

Mcluhan is a big deal. It is impossible to talk about new media without talking about his ideas. I mean, the guy predicted the world wide web thirty years before it happened for goodness sake.<\/p>\n

But you also can\u2019t read Mcluhan without being confronted and jarred by his racist notions of Indigeniety. There are his diminishing attitudes towards oral cultures:<\/p>\n

\u201cUntil writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror\u201d. \u2013 Marshal Mcluhan<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Bathwater<\/strong><\/p>\n

This attitude prevails today and is consistently pushing against Indigenous resurgence. One example is the hesitancy of Canadian courts to recognize oral history as evidence, something that happened only in 1997 with\u00a0Delgamuukw v British Columbia<\/a> and remains misunderstood to this day<\/a>. Another is the \u2018remarkable\u2019 recent discovery of Sir John Franklin’s failed expeditions on The Erabus and The Terror, despite the Inuit people having known the ships location all along<\/a> due to their tradition of oral history.<\/p>\n

\"erebus\"

HMS Erebus and HMS Terror (courtesy of The Star).<\/p><\/div>\n

Yet Mcluhan then goes on to elevate our \u201cemerging\u201d auditory culture <\/em>in a manner that dangerously romanticizes Indigenous cultures. In Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, <\/em>\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00adSteven Loft asserts that Mcluhan is invoking notions of the \u2018noble savage\u2019, which dehumanizes very real, here-and-now cultures by mythologizing them and creating an abyss between the \u2018back then\u2019 and the present moment that they occupy. This is dangerous because it leads to what Thomas King calls \u2018Dead Indian<\/a>\u2019 thinking. Think Disney’s Pocahontas<\/em> and this list of white actors playing Indigenous characters<\/a> in films.<\/p>\n

Against this backdrop, Mcluhan\u2019s comment that \u201cHolywood is often a fomenter of anti-colonialist revolutions\u201d, seems absurd.\u00a0It is moments like these, amongst others, that make us say\u2026.<\/p>\n

\"srsly-marshal\"

Feel free to share your favourite \u201csrsly Marshal\u201d moments in the comments below.<\/p><\/div>\n

This aspect of Mcluhan \u2013 conceited colonialism, white male privilege, academic egotism, absolute after absolute \u2013 is what we might call the bathwater. But there is still a baby to be found in Mcluhan’s work.<\/p>\n

The Baby: Time & Space<\/strong><\/p>\n

While Loft notes Mcluhan\u2019s problematic language and views, he actually focuses most of his chapter about \u201cMediacosmology\u201d on what Mcluhan got right.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am still amazed at his insight into an area into which other Western theorists fear to tread. And sometimes he just nails it\u201d. \u2013 Steven Loft<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So what did Mcluhan get right in his infamous phrase \u2018the medium is the message?\u2019<\/p>\n

The medium is the message means that how <\/em>we communicate is often more important than what <\/em>we communicate. But it goes beyond that as well.<\/strong> It means that our modes of communication, more so than the content we communicate, shapes our society, our worldview and our perception of self and others. One of the ways that it does this is blurring our conceptions of time and space. Medium is message and medium is Mass Age.<\/p>\n

Mcluhan observes the erasure of time and space as one of the major \u2018effects\u2019 of new electric circuitry. I tweeted this observation of his on a forum that marks the exact date that I posted it…<\/p>\n

\"tweet\"<\/p>\n

Where it will exist forever on the internet where the most prominent button is usually the ‘home’ button.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, Mcluhan states that electric circuitry “has overthrown the regime of \u2018time and \u2018space\u2019\u2026 Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism\u2026 Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than \u2018a place for everything and everything in its place’. You can\u2019t go home again<\/strong>\u201d.<\/p>\n

This certainly was revolutionary at the time, and still is today. But only to certain audiences:\u00a0Indigenous people have known this since time immemorial.<\/strong> While Mcluhan says we are \u2018retribalizing\u2019 through our modes of communication, Loft says “there is no \u2018re\u2019 for us\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cCyberspace connects the past to the present and the spiritual to the material in ways that would make our elders laugh. They\u2019ve always known this. It\u2019s in our stories and it\u2019s in our ways of communicating and remembering\u201d. \u2013 Steven Loft<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, there is nothing new under the sun. Mcluhan isn\u2019t discovering something revolutionary that no soul on earth had ever thought of. He is merely stumbling on a way of life that is older than he or I can imagine.\u00a0Media can do what Mcluhan is suggesting, blur time and space, but so can traditional knowledge.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor Aboriginal people, circularity of thinking and concepts of time and space and continuity are intrinsic to the way we see the world and behave toward it\u201d. \u2013 Steven Loft<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s not necessarily that Time and Space are overthrown or don\u2019t exist, it\u2019s merely that our western conceptions of them do not or cannot comprehend how these work beyond our alphabetized worldview.<\/p>\n

By alphabetized worldview, I mean the linear, ultra-rational thinking that Mcluhan believes comes from our mode of writing: the alphabet. He says it has fragmented our thinking.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/em>The fragmenting of activities, our habit of thinking in bits and parts \u2013 \u2018specialism\u2019 \u2013 reflected the step-by-step linear departmentalizing process inherent in the technology of the alphabet\u201d. <\/em>\u2013 Marshall Mcluhan<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The medium is the message indeed.<\/p>\n

\"alphabet\"

Edward Bernard’s “Orbis eruditi”, comparing all known alphabets as of 1689 (courtesy of Wikipedia).<\/p><\/div>\n

The \u00a0s \u00a0y \u00a0m \u00a0b \u00a0o \u00a0l \u00a0s \u00a0we use in the modern alphabet evolved from the Pheonecian alphabet, which is originally derived from Egyptian Hieroglyphs<\/a>. Fast-forward to 2015 and Oxford Dictionary\u2019s Word of the Year<\/a>\u00a0was an emoji. The \u2018tears of joy\u2019 emoji to be precise.<\/p>\n

\"hieroglyphics\"\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 —————> \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"tears-of-joy-emoji\"<\/p>\n

The emoji is a picture that has come to replace alphabetic symbols that once descended from ancient pictographs. We appear to have come full circle. This may be an example of how today\u2019s methods of communication have blurred the relationship between different times and different spaces. Emojis evidently have their problems with representation but I keep wondering, “what will be the effect on our worldview of communicating through pictures once more if the medium really is the message?”<\/p>\n

\"thinking-face\"<\/p>\n

Loft\u2019s example of a medium that transcends time and space is somewhat more significant and certainly more aesthetically pleasing. He refers to the Wampum as part of \u201ca visual language, conceptual, and mystical, transcending the temporality of the written word: a language for the ages, to be constantly recounted and re-inscribed for the generations past, present, and into the future\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"wampum\"

Iroquois Wampum belt.<\/p><\/div>\n

It interrupts fragmentation. It blurs time and space. It does what cyberspace did before cyberspace was conceivable. This is why Loft says that cyberspace is Indigenous space. Because it has always existed within their culture.<\/p>\n

We should be cautious though, when thinking about Mcluhan\u2019s assertions of time and space and medium as message, that they do not impede efforts of de-colonization.\u00a0Linear, western notions of time and space have been used as means of colonization: prescriptive maps, arbitrary borders, relocation of communities, residential schools far away from communities, the false binary between \u2018traditional\u2019 and \u2018modern\u2019, settlers who say \u201cit happened so long ago\u201d or \u201cI wasn\u2019t directly involved. I wasn’t there\u201d.<\/p>\n

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z \u00a0 !@#$(*&^ \u00a0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Western culture may well be evolving to a more flexible conception of time and space through the mediums we use. But we cannot let that erase or overshadow the way that the concepts ‘time’ and ‘space’ have previously been perceived and the way that they were and are used to perpetrate violence against Indigenous peoples.<\/p>\n

At the same time, new notions of time and space can challenge parochial and neo-colonial views of \u2018primitive vs. modern\u2019. As our mediums of communication cause western concepts of time to become further stretched and challenged, one can only hope that this will also challenge the binary between modern and \u2018primitive\u2019, traditional and contemporary, urban and rural \u2013 the binaries that play into the problem of the \u2018noble savage\u2019 and \u2018Dead Indian\u2019 discussed earlier.<\/p>\n

\"tom-king\"

Thomas King in “I’m not the Indian you had in mind” (courtesy of the National Screen Institute).<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cNative concepts of history find no gulf between different segments of time. Each time is different, but it does not mean that there is an impenetrable wall because of that difference\u201d. \u2013 Deborah Doxtator<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One can only hope that the worldview articulated by Deborah Doxtator, and to some extent by Mcluhan, can help challenge the settler colonial tendency of using time and space to disassociate themselves from ‘historic’ violence against Indigenous bodies and systems of knowledge.<\/p>\n

Maybe Mcluhan’s articulation of an idea that has been alive and woven into Indigenous societies for millennial can be helpful for this. Maybe it can be helpful in helping setters take off the blinders of linear thinking and the western alphabetized worldview. And maybe this will ultimately help them understand Indigenous conceptions of time and space. Hopefully it will then contribute to decolonizing the psyche and worldview of settlers across North America.<\/p>\n

So don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater just yet.<\/p>\n

While the question of “what do we do with Mcluhan” still rings loud in our ears and I do not claim to have the answers, somewhere deep in the depths of the internet someone has at least made a good start:<\/p>\n

\"mm-gif\"<\/p>\n

Resources:<\/p>\n

Ashifa Kassam<\/a>, The Guardian: Inuit argue for say as Canada and Britain decide fate of HMS Terror wreck\u00a0https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2016\/sep\/16\/inuit-canada-britain-shipwreck-hms-terror-nunavut<\/em><\/p>\n

Katie Hyslop, The Tyee: UBC Professor says Aboriginal Oral History Misunderstood\u00a0http:\/\/thetyee.ca\/Blogs\/TheHook\/Aboriginal-Affairs\/2012\/02\/06\/UBC-profs-say-Aboriginal-oral-history-misunderstood\/<\/p>\n

Lauren Duca, The Huffington Post: A Brief History of White Actors Playing Native Americans\u00a0http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2014\/03\/13\/white-actors-native-americans_n_4957555.html<\/p>\n

Marshal McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage<\/p>\n

Steven Loft, “Mediacosmology” in Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art<\/p>\n

Thomas King, Dead Indians: too heavy to lift http:\/\/hazlitt.net\/feature\/dead-indians-too-heavy-lift<\/p>\n

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