Abstract
The telephone is a theme of deep interest in Marshall McLuhan’s (1994[1964]: 265–274) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. This is for numerous reasons: its place on his varying program concerning the form and character of the telephone; a theoretical concern with the telephone as a form of shared participation; and an historical interest in teletechnologies and the question of human lives led inside an implosion.
According to McLuhan, the form and nature of the telephone are marked by its abolition of place, which activates unforeseen socio-cultural consequences, such as the creation of new subjectivities like the ‘call girl’, and, as with all ‘electric technology’, appears fully formed as a singular, stunning, event (p. 266). Yet the force of the telephone for McLuhan derives from its ability to decentralize each and every operation, which has been sensed but not altogether comprehended by everyone even today. McLuhan’s additional move, associated with the Bell Telephone research department especially, seeks to rewrite ‘book-oriented’ definitions of the telephone (p. 267). He does so by turning to the form of the telephone as inspiration for a counter-discourse to the study of media content and as an alternative telephonic imaginary (or the function of the form of the telephone as form) to contest the arid deserts of Information and Game Theory. For McLuhan, Information and Game Theory are problematic because they disregard the mental and socio-cultural transformations ensuing from the form of the telephone, which have altered the totality of our existence.
A further claim of McLuhan’s concerns the telephone as a form of shared participation within the small town, specifically in the first phase of the commercial telephone in the early 20th century. He signals the small town as a key issue as the ‘back fence’ is substituted for the ‘heated participation of the party line’, which reminds us that, once upon a time, the telephone was a new machine used more for amusement than for the state or for commerce (p. 268). These and McLuhan’s subsequent claims about the telephone rendering speech visible and electric technology uniting with the domain of speech and language from the dawn of electricity reveal deep connections between the mass media of the spoken word and electric technology, the first and second great extensions of our central nervous system, and other, perhaps more threatening, telephonic alignments in the contemporary form and character of the telephone such as wire-tapping.
Edward Snowden, previously an American contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency, for example, recently left the United States after disclosing to the media details of widespread telephone surveillance by American intelligence as a covert form of shared participation in the big city’s contemporary, commercial, and overheated digital party line (BBC News US & Canada, 2013: 1–2). Rendering speech visible to the US state and to big business thus presently entails the invention of another new machine, the US’s National Security Agency’s (NSA) machine that clandestinely gathers the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans through electric technology. The technological convergence of the realm of speech and language today therefore exposes profound electronic links between telecommunications companies such as Verizon and the electric technology of the US state, given that Verizon was directed by secret court order to relinquish all its telephone data on a continuing daily basis to the NSA. Perhaps in the late 21st century, then, this third great extension of our central nervous system will menace even non-telephonic arrangements in its future form and character as the telephonic imaginary shifts beyond wiretapping and internet server tapping to wi-fi tracking small town non-commercial offline everyday communications in a surveillance program known as ‘Back Fence’.
Meanwhile, certain media theorists opposed to McLuhan’s media theory, such as Paul Virilio, who live beyond the overheated participants of the digital party line, are intensifying their contemporary opposition to the telephone not as a new-fangled machine but as an ‘electronic straitjacket’ and distancing themselves from its ‘universal remote control’ directed by the state and telecommunications corporations (Armitage, 2012: 82–83). While accusing the NSA and the telecommunications industry of inducing a conformity to the remote-controlled time and space of the terrorphone, for instance, we might claim a right to rendering speech invisible or electric technology breaking with the field of speech and language or the associations between the mass media and the dictatorship of individualized relentless telephone interaction. A more spatiotemporally, rather materially positioned viewpoint, developing but not entirely renouncing McLuhan’s interpretations of the spoken word and electric technology, might acknowledge how the telephone – far from being a great extension of our central nervous system – is in fact a danger to it. No longer left with any free time for extended contemplation, we increasingly and publicly subcontract our bodily sense impressions and the most banal of personal emotions (‘I’m on the train’). In other words, the contemporary teletechnological form and socio-cultural character of the telephone is imploding into a new kind of plague of electronic eavesdropping; the virus of an information gathering once controlled, now overwhelmed with the ecstasy of infinite surveillance programs, illegal communications, and (de)classified intelligence that the whistleblowers of American intelligence of the 21st century have exposed.