JULY 27, SUNDAY

MARSHALL MCLUHAN, THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE

This afternoon I read an article that made me wonder. It was an article about Marshall McLuhan and his interpretation of media technology. He argued 60 years ago that technology had changed the way that we relate with and communicate with each other, had even changed who we were. The medium was not only the message, but the massage. He was referring to radio and television and telephone. These media altered us. I read him in the late 50’s, I think, and after growing up in India where there was no radio or tv or telephone or any media at all that directly connected with me, he touched a chord. This article by Nick Ripatrazone in Slate, “He Was Laughed Out of Academica for This Take About Technology. Turns Out He Was Right,” goes further and argues that what McLuhan was aware of then is even more true today.

The other day I was looking at MLS soccer on my Vision Pro Headset. As I was setting up I could see through my goggles everything in the room around me just as it always is without the goggles on. There was my hand in front of me just as it is right now with no goggles, I could reach out to touch it with my other hand.

But what I was seeing was not my hand at all, because the goggles blocked me from actually seeing anything around me. What I was seeing was virtual reality, a video of my hand taken from outward facing cameras on the goggles. It was the same virtual reality that lets me with the same glasses on sit on the moon with the moon craters all around me and far in the distance see the blue earth. In this case it was clear that I was seeing a video of the moon, I was seeing the virtual moon. But also clear that what I was touching with my right hand was my left hand seen as a virtual hand, a video of my hand. It seemed enormously bizarre to me that I could feel my virtual videoed hand. When a virtual dinsaur approached me in an episode on Apple TV, also on the Vision Pro, and sniffed me from a foot away, I knew it was virtual and didn’t shriek. When taking off my goggles it disappeared. But when a butter fly in the same episode landed on my outstretched hand, I couldn’t feel it, because it was my virtual hand and a virtual butterfly that landed on it and then flew away when I flicked my virtual hand, which I could still feel attached to me.

It is this odd feeling of the contrast between my visible self and my virtual self that I think McLuhan was concerned with. As a person I am a body enclosing a brain and all my vital organs. That is me. When you take a picture of me that is what you get. But at the same time I am capable of standing objectively outside myself and seeing myself from an outside perspective. This objective awareness is central to being human, central to knowing where I am in the world and objectively being able to deal the factual world around me. Scientific knowledge is an extension of this. But I am a body, born, then nurtured within a culture, having my own experiences as I make my way through life and die. This was central for Marshall McLuhan according to the article. As a devout Catholic he believed in God made flesh in the body of Jesus Christ.

As bodies we connect in families and in tribes with other human beings. McLuhan centers us for most of our time on earth sitting around a fire telling stories to each other. Our physical presence and stories which share our physical passage through the world guided us and bound us together.

But technology enables something else to happen. It disembodies us. We connect bodiless over the telephone and even on Facetime we know we are talking to a virtual image of a person. Our community is not the people on our street who are all real people with bodies, people we have to get along with daily. Our community becomes disembodied people, many of whom we don’t even know, whose presence we cannot feel, who connect with us more as amplifiers or supporters of our strong loves or hates. We cannot be cruel or threatening to our neighbors without consequences, but we can be rabidly furious with disembodied people whose ideas threaten our own. We become virtual people, but people that we cannot touch or put our arms around.

At least this is what this article makes me wonder about. Socially the people we interact with are not people any more, they become archetypes of beauty, or threats, or envy. We are no longer as much a community of humans.

Of course this is only one way of looking at the effect of media technology. On the other hand we can feel we are in the presence of loved ones half way around the world over FaceTime, something that was impossible when I was a boy. When I was a boy in India without media everything was local. Now local is beginning to disappear and maybe soon everything will be virtual and we won’t know when we can touch someone right in front of us and when we can’t.

And yet when I was in the presence of 100 screaming people at the women’s arm wrestling competition last night making spatial (virtual) movies of the event the actual event with the screaming, the room hot as could be, everyone sweating, very real women strutting around in front of me (and probably Covid in the air which you can’t catch virtually) it was an exhilerating evening. It was back to hunter gatherers sitting around a campfire, shoulder to shoulder, enjoying the presence of each other’s bodies which my 3D videos can mimic but not replicate. All I can show someone else is the virtual event.

I’ll quit. I am a human being stumbling along in a body that responds to the world in all sorts of inherited ways, just feeling along in visceral ways. But somehow there is a difference between this and the disembodied life of the internet and virtual reality and this difference seems to change us and how we connect with the world. So I’ll keep wondering about it.