Abstract
Canadians of a certain age cut our teeth on McLuhan’s form-breaking texts that embodied and enacted theory in and of themselves, modeling for us a reflexive appreciation of and responsible engagement with studies of media forms and functions, that might wake us up from what McLuhan (2005[1955]: np) described as ‘the habits of rigid perspective induced by three centuries of print hypnosis’. Understanding Media, though entirely conventionally print-based and not the hybrid multi-modal forms other key works assumed, was even so a book that greatly extended beyond its covers.
My own dog-eared copy was purchased, second hand, for 75 cents in 1970. Second only to Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato, it has probably had the greatest influence on my work, despite a parting for the couple of decades it took me to get over its ‘extensions of man’ aspects. To be generous here – it was a bit of a challenge for a young would-be feminist to own an allegiance to McLuhan, and this had to do not only with the literal language of the times, in which man stood, purportedly but rarely in actuality, for (but mostly on) all those ‘subordinates’ that McLuhan blithely invokes: ‘the negro’, ‘women’, ‘children’, ‘the Indians’, ‘primitive tribes’. Indeed the medium was its message for us, the subordinated ones. And although the joy of the work was its fearless interweaving of literary classics with contemporary conditions ranging from neuroscience to pop art, its unashamed embrace of every possible topic that helped us to tear off the straitjackets of disciplinarity, the medium, recall, was a tall, white, heterosexual, Christian academic, tenured at Canada’s top university, in suit, white shirt and tie who spoke in that distinctively ‘educated Canadian’ accent that sounds almost British to contemporary ears, a man whose self-representation was so staunchly conservative as to repel self-styled student radicals of the underclass. In one short ‘art’ film, we see McLuhan lying in the grass as young females dressed as airline stewardesses pranced around him presumably to attend to His every need as the Great Man reflects, pontificates, reflects again. So, yes, that was more than a little contradictory, and Marshall and I had a lengthy separation during which time things germinated, got remixed and admixed and resurfaced in ways that only in hindsight can I acknowledge came from the patriarchal wellspring that was the long-repudiated McLuhan.
A further object-lesson in the inseparability of medium from message, while the task of recollecting Understanding Media did in the end catalyze all kinds of ways that the book was a conceptual, pedagogical and methodological ‘backbone’ to my own work, the (often handwritten) texts, course syllabi, research papers and such, in which those connections were made evident are no longer retrievable, simply because they are not in digital form. And none of those old papers, to the extent I have kept them anywhere at all, are any longer in the same physical space from which I am writing, so it is as if they have never been at all.
Still, since all reading is interpretive, and all writing, authorial, probably it doesn’t matter that much of that paper-based ‘historical record’ has now to be imagined and made up.
Time is short, cut to the chase: this one fragment has been my bedrock for understanding how epistemology and ethics converge – former German Armaments minister Albert Speer, in a speech at the Nuremberg trials, made some bitter remarks about the effects of electric media on German life:
The telephone, the teleprinter and the wireless made it possible for orders from the highest levels to be given direct to the lowest levels, where, on account of the absolute authority behind them, they were carried out uncritically … (McLuhan, 1964: 277)
I work in educational media studies, focusing now on digital games and learning. The question driving my work is properly McLuhan’s: what are the epistemological impacts of media on what counts as knowledge – specifically on what counts as ‘educational’ knowledge? What differences are made to knowledge – how we think about and act in relation to its pursuit – by changes in the media of its representation and reception? How is ‘school knowledge’, in its insistently textual preferences, formulated, communicated, evaluated, and ‘accredited’. Necessarily, such a trajectory of inquiry soon becomes a critique of educational systems and institutional definitions of ‘curriculum’, ‘pedagogy’, ‘development’, and ‘achievement’, because in so little of what is done now, just as when McLuhan was writing, is attention seriously given to the media in and through which we teach and learn. David Olson, himself a past director of the McLuhan Center at the University of Toronto, remarking on the ease with which we mistake linguistic fluency for cognitive competence, remarked that we often see as intellectual accomplishment what is in fact merely mastery of a particular form of language (Olson, 1977).
We continue to rely even today on textual affordances to conduct and to assess education’s work, and so the public school remains largely unaware of the ways the literate and linguistic forms it privileges for knowledge transmission and knowledge display are partial, experientially incomplete and only differentially accessible, nor does public education often acknowledge or appreciate what these forms make impossible and invisible. This is a failure to realize that educational communication is always both an epistemological and an ethical engagement. When we ignore the school’s privileging of very particular, very limited forms of legitimate communication, and fail to pay attention to the ways these forms work against inclusion and equity, we ourselves continue through our studied ignorance and inactivity, actively to effect a continuance of traditional educational inequalities. That being so, there is a responsibility, one both epistemological and ethical, to make oneself rhetorically accountable. As educators, as scholars and researchers we are responsible for knowing that – even if we do not always know how – each medium imposes its own grammatical constraints, its own ethical inclinations, its own ideological tendencies. The communicative forms we use and require in education all come with a price tag in terms of what can be said, how and by whom.
Conclusion? Woodbugs!
And so it happened that, circa 1990, I had my class of graduate students searching the web for images of woodbugs to insert into the webpages they were assigned to create for their ‘doctoral seminar in contemporary curriculum theory’. In a kind of Nietzschean transvaluation of values, all their well-honed skills of sophisticated verbal artistry were sidelined in favor of images of woodbugs in the form of lines of code. By the next decade, we were creating paper prototypes of digital games about pond life, and home-made.GIF animations of aliens and flying cows. Presentations using multiple overhead projectors, and recorded sound punctuated by words to which those images bore no obvious relation routinely confused and annoyed audiences accustomed to the soporific drone of literal and linear texts paradigmatic for scholarly talks. Then came multi-modal research tool-development to enable the analysis of video clips of children at the zoo from which language was prohibited in order to concentrate on children’s experience in multi-sensorial terms, and building videogames about mad scientists and dogs navigating the world through smell.
Thus for me has theory, pedagogy and research d/evolved from scholarly literate finessing into playing with pictures and gestures, technologies, games and gizmos, remixing pirated sounds and animations, studying children as if they were animals, listening attentively to their grunts and laughter and watching the ways their bodies move and touch one another and their world. New technologies like digital games have been invaluable for seeing how the school’s fidelity to traditional ways and means of educating, its traditional ‘textual preferences’, once advanced, but now limit its educational work. And as for ‘Understanding Media’, we are very far away from that even now. Education has indeed taken up new media and new technologies, but in all seriousness and, indeed ‘with a vengeance‘ as programmed learning and ‘expert systems’ drive students senseless with boredom cultivating the most literal and superficial kinds of ‘knowledge’ all neatly expressible in words and numbers. Truth is, we are just beginning to understand media in education, and our best hope for progress to that end is not to fetishize and sanctify Man’s [sic] extensions, but with irreligious gay abandon, to play, play, play, because, as someone once said, anyone who thinks games aren’t educational doesn’t know a thing about either.