McLuhan’s Decalogue

I

With two short sentences, page 158 of the 1962 edition of the Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan had already set the stage for the next 50 years, that is, today:

The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness (1) – will include television as its content, not as its environment (2), and will transform television into an art form (3). A computer as a research and communication instrument (4) could enhance retrieval (5), obsolesce mass library organization (6), retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function (7) and flip it into a private line (8) to speedily tailored data (9) of a saleable kind (10).

I call this quote that is presently repeated and commented on over 15,000 times on Google. ‘McLuhan’s Decalogue’. I use it to try to set the stage for the next 50 years with my students.

D

Beside the fact that the above is stunningly predictive of what is actually going on today with YouTube (TV as artform), Wikipedia (our encyclopedic function) or tags (the new global library organization), the surprise is that the structure of the reasoning could be McLuhan’s earliest and most successful ‘tetrad’. The four stages of the tetrad are clearly evident: Extension of consciousness, Obsolescence of television, Retrieval of encyclopedic function and Reversal or flip into an economy. McLuhan would present the stages as a succession of effects of the medium, but he also affirmed that they were simultaneous. The tetrad is not logical, it is perceptual. McLuhan is introducing here a method for 3D thinking, a kind of Rubik’s cube of media effects. It is a matter of sensing – rather than seeing – all the effects rising from the ground up so to speak, electricity being that ground. That is quite difficult for a literate mind, which is why I always have difficulties with tetrads. I was never very good at it, but, to be honest, in view of the above I have to recognize that it deserves the name of ‘method’.

The method I prefer, one that McLuhan taught me in his classes, I am using right here. IDEMP stands for the five parts of rhetoric proposed by Cicero about how to make a point. First Inventio, what are you talking about, then Dispositio, or how you plan to talk about it, followed by Elocutio, now you are talking about it, Memoria, the most important, why you are talking about it, and finally Pronunciatio, you make your point.

E

So, we’re talking 50 years. What is going on today that could qualify as a strong signal heralding the next 50 years? Let me risk a tetrad, taking electricity as the medium: electricity extends the central nervous system, obsolesces privacy, retrieves aristocracy, and flips into global responsibility.

I had two short but unforgettable discussions with McLuhan about private identity. The first one was pivotal. I was about to drop out of university altogether, frustrated by six years of vain attempts to get past the 15th page of my doctoral dissertation about the decadence of French tragedy. In a five-minute conversation McLuhan turned the whole situation around. ‘I see your problem’, he said, ‘you think that tragedy is an artform.’ So what is it then? ‘Tragedy is a strategy invented by the Greeks to overcome a profound social crisis provoked by the Greek alphabet. I call it QUID i.e., “quest for identity”.’ Four months later, my thesis was done. In my Cartesian-trained way, I would go on to study the structural relationships between the alphabet and the brain. And I would eventually establish that only a fully alphabetical writing system could allow the user complete control over language and thus forge private opinions and points of view, as well as a strong sense of one’s individuality. Text wrests control from context.

The second discussion was an argument about the impact of computers on private identity and selfhood. I maintained that they would reverse what McLuhan saw as television’s tendency to wipe them out. I suggested that using computers would allow us to recover power over the screen. McLuhan objected that electricity was no friend of private anything and that it would eventually engulf our little selves like a tidal wave. Until recently, I thought that we had pulled a draw on the issue. But the news about PRISM and other military or police initiatives globally tracing and reaping our digital unconscious, that is, all the data collected about each one of our moves, reminds me of Marshall’s prophetic quip: ‘The more they know about you, the less you exist.’ Add to this that our kids are pouring their profiles into social media and you have the conditions for a kind of transparency that could indeed wipe out private identity.

M

Considering that private identity has probably been a product of one technology, we can reasonably assume that over the next 50 years, total transparency could arise from the progress of digital and other children of electricity. Transparency would bring up the moral and social value of everyone and generate a new form of aristocracy based on reputation and social responsibility. That would spell the return of a shame culture globally. Furthermore a transparent society would have to evolve political checks and balances to avoid tyranny. The system could only work if everyone was mutually accountable.

P

Two relevant quotes from Understanding Media (McLuhan, 1964) seem to point in that direction. One is from the Introduction: ‘Electric speed, in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion, has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree’ (p. 5). And the other is the last sentence of chapter 4, and perhaps the most profound of McLuhan’s insights: ‘In the electric age, we wear all mankind as our skin’ (p. 47). There is no question in my mind that that is indeed where, eventually, albeit with a fair bit of global suffering in between, we are going to end up in 50 years.