The Medium is the Mustache: a Mission Statement
Style it or shave it, just don't ignore it.
Many recall the quotes and new concepts heard over a lifetime like the last 50-70 years:
“The medium is the message.”
”Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Global village.
“The medium is the massage.”
Surfing (in the sense of scanning information rapidly)
Global Theater.
Cultural Anarchy.
Memories of who uttered what are based on who made the phrases and concepts popular, but in reality, the person who coined all of them was a Canadian English professor, Marshall McLuhan, even the phrase most associate with Timothy Leary.
McLuhan observed that with changes in the way humans communicate come differences in behavior by people and their societies. As communication differences occurred, the world has moved from oral face-to-face messaging to the phonetic alphabet, the introduction of movable type, the introduction of electronic messaging (the telegraph), radio, movies, television, the internet. It will further evolve into robotics with Artificial Intelligence which is happening now.
McLuhan studied all that preceded him through the introduction of computers (he died in 1980) but also foresaw the coming of the world wide web, robotics and AI.
>> In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, Leary stated that the slogan was "given to him" by McLuhan during a lunch in New York City. Leary said McLuhan "was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, 'Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that’s a lot,' to the tune of a Pepsi commercial. Then he started going, 'Tune in, turn on, and drop out.'" <<
( from pp. 337-338 of the book by Strauss, Neil (2011). Everybody Loves You When You're Dead: Journeys into Fame and Madness. New York: HarperCollins.)
He drew from an array of intellects: other media analyzers, sociologists like Margaret Mead, historians, philosophers, authors of fiction and non-fiction, politicians like Pierre Trudeau and Jerry Brown, with references made to a range that included scientific studies, sci-fi and comic books.
No other scholar of the study of media is as well known or as impactful on the topic, though he’s not well known in popular culture today. But his books Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) and his bestseller The Medium Is The Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967) brought more attention to the field by a broader public in the 1960s and 1970s than any media scholar has achieved since.
Rather than view new communication methods as good or bad, he felt it more important that we observe how people change in response to the different stimuli. Moving from face to face oral, into the visual of print, back to the auditory with radio, then combining both (audiovisual) with movies and television were changes that affect our consciousness and our subsequent interactions with others. And McLuhan felt the different senses we employ at each change also interact with our memories. So we adapt to the communication changes while looking backward, often wistfully.
The Medium Is The Massage (1967): “The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backward into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land.”
It’s fair to say McLuhan was also a sociologist. He believed changes in mediums had side effects that have to be observed, understood and even predicted. That way any negative consequences on human interactions could be foreseen and corrected. One only needs to start weighing the impact of Birth of a Nation (movies), Father Coughlin (radio), Charlie Chan/Al Jolson/multiple Black butlers (movies), news coverage of the Civil Rights era and the Vietnam War (television), Rush Limbaugh and his knockoffs (hate radio), a broad array of topical forums (www), Craigslist’s impact on media revenues & business models, and the currently obvious capacities of one man to govern by tweet and aggressive pom-pom rallies (see Trump, Donald). The way we respond to these requires constant study if societies strive for comfort, stability, and civility beyond core survivalist instinct.
McLuhan studied changes like individualism, tribalism, aggression, centralization and decentralization, nationalism, globalism without emphasis on contemporary politicians as he thought his messages about messages could be overwhelmed by politics.
His first book was about persuasion and advertising (in 1951). In his second, in 1962, he wrote of perceptions and how the media altered our individual cognitive organization which would impact our collective social organization. And predicted visual print would soon be replaced by "electronic interdependence." Four years before the development of the Arpanet that would evolve into today’s internet.
>> “The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.” << (from The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962)
He died in 1980, a year before MTV debuted. Given its adoption of music videos and VJs followed by reality TV shows, followed by the emergence of social media giant YouTube, his capacity to understand where communication media was moving to was as important to his conviction that it’s necessary to measure its impact on societies, including politics, business and our environment.
Today, he’d surely be able to define Twitter, Q-Anon, and conspiracy-think as well, too.
Cliche to Archetype (1970): “Pascal, in the seventeenth century, tells us that the heart has many reasons of which the head knows nothing. The Theater of the Absurd is essentially a communicating to the head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it has tried to forget all about. In the seventeenth century world the languages of the heart were pushed down into the unconscious by the dominant print cliché.”
He defined the emerging dynamic in that last book as ‘global theater’.
The principle flaw that critics point to in his works is the notion that changes in media matters more than the content of the media that results. I’d agree that both matter, and both need to be observed, defined and corrected. Without correction, we might not like the result of Cultural Anarchy.
In fact, I’d argue we’ve already witnessed how polarizing that can be when Dark Money and money laundering and tax shelters, troll farms, data-mining and microtargeting (see Cambridge Analytica) and funded conspiracy promotion have caused us outrage and alarm at the cray-cray tiki-torch crowd, the rise of militias, plots to kidnap and eliminate elected officials and thwart the conduct of government, etc.
At the same time, the advent of smartphones that can instantly transmit text, pictures and video has had a tremendous impact on our understanding of racism and sexism and the need for more corrective action there as well.
This newsletter has a point beyond the introduction or revisit to McCluhan’s influential work.
I observed these news items in the past two days that define what new social and cultural practices evolve that impact media:
The suppression of news media coverage
The security classification methods employed to hide what our military and politicians are actually doing
The rise of a Big Lie called ‘cancel culture’. It’s become a kneejerk fallback position for a third of the electorate currently defined as ‘elected Republicans’. Economic boycotts that proved successful in reigning in farmworker exploitation, environmental damage due to pesticide and herbicide use, civil rights struggles and more now are attacked as ‘cancel culture.’ The toppling of statues that highlight slavers and colonizers as heroes is called the same. So is the decision to re-title a plastic toy potato so it’s gender-neutral and the excessive handwringing over something so minor.
The GOP concludes its epic embrace of the notion that these events are ‘liberal-driven’ outcomes by claiming liberal Democrats are responsible for a publisher holding the copyright to an author’s works making a decision to quit publishing a few works that a long conversation determined were insulting and hurtful to people of color or with different ethnicities. Adding irony and chutzpah to the outrage du jour, the NRCC and others have caused a run on the purchase of all the author’s books for children, not just the few that won’t be published anymore. The NRCC has purchased a number of them, added a hefty surcharge and will dispense them to people ‘donating’ to their coffers when the people can obtain them much cheaper directly from the same badly-maligned publisher that the NRCC bought them from.
Republicans long attacked Theodore Geisel as a commie for his political comics denouncing nationalism and fascism. Now they’re marketing his books and fleecing their followers by making mountains out of molehills.
The Internet provides me photos of a murdered and badly mangled young boy (Emmett Till), and more of a young man’s body (Trayvon Martin) after he was killed by his stalker who claimed he acted in self defense. I can find video of police dogs and billyclubs being loosed on peaceful civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettis bridge, of the beating of Rodney King and the strangling of George Floyd by other police, and dozens of other audiovisual or visual presentations of lives being cancelled. Fred Hampton. Malcolm X. Martin Luther King, Jr. Heather Heyer. People that were at or in the US Capitol Building on January 6th. These are far more important examples of cancelling.
What about the cancellation of voting rights represented by over 250 vote suppression bills in 43 states being introduced in the past 4 months since the last election?
What media can be trusted when videos can be altered and pictures Photoshopped to be used as political propaganda? This should not be about whether one party messages better than the other. It should be about analyzing Big Lie techniques and practitioners, the exploitation of the weak by the powerful using all forms of media, the adoption of catchphrase terms like ‘cancel culture’ that ignore the shattered bone and flesh of citizens and provoke outrage at the horror of a potato lacking a gender when Barbie and others have lacked sex organs for half a century.
We need more Marshall McLuhans studying this.
In an era of information overload and the personal isolations of a global village under siege in a pandemic, where do we turn for factual news and science sources? Which op-ed sources build their arguments on facts rooted out via thorough research and real investigative journalism and which are pushing a propaganda line defined by fake saviours in politics, business and religious extremism?
This is the mission statement of this Streams of Consciousness newsletter: I pursue political and cultural events that I believe will define us as societies, separating the imagined threats from the real, providing essential review of a range of media analysts and critics, plus the added emotional balance gained from popular culture creators and stylists in arts & music & literature. With intermittent displays of nerdiness, cynicism-dripping satire, optimism and uplift, plus cheap knockoffs that bear some resemblance to humor.
Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of peaceful assembly and the broad expansion of voting rights are essential to the healthy functioning of a representative democracy. Repression of those rights, fabrications invented, distributed and amplified with malicious intent requires our greatest scrutiny.
That’s what I do. And I consider it imperative to listen to others. Your input and sharing of this newsletter is also essential to my better use of this medium to inform and entertain. Your critical thinking, wit and analysis helps refine and influence my output. If it’s boring, full of shit or contains factual error, say so. I make no pretense that I’m a perfect savant or saviour dispensing all that is essential. I’m biased towards critical thought, effective messaging and pragmatic endeavors to build stable and civil social interactions.
I hope to encourage your participation in these discussions and endeavors.Your expertise, wit and humor better informs mine.
I also convey aspects of exceptionalism, not just the American kind. All societies can benefit by acknowledging it all over the world, not only from ivory towers but from urban and rural environments and the natural world.
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