While a controversial figure in the academic world, Marshall McLuhan’s writings endure to this day and have, naturally, resurfaced given the increasingly important discussions happening on topics of connectivity, globalised society and how digital media are reshaping human relationships. Before diving into part of his ideas, I would like to make clear my personal relationship with his writings.

I’ve come to see McLuhan’s texts akin to prophecies by Nostradamus. They’re fascinating since one may see his work as a prediction of late 20th and 21st-century communications technologies — they seem to be slogans, or “aphoristic probes” as James C. Morrison Jr. calls them, for a new digital age.^10 11 McLuhan’s mosaic mode of writing is extremely enigmatic and, though coated with what may seem like valid scholarly research, many of the criticisms towards McLuhan acknowledge that his ideas are barely justified and sometimes even blatantly wrong. This leaves them very much open to interpretation and misinterpretation. Donald Fishman writes:

“Support for his contentions has to be culled carefully from McLuhan’s work because the author tended to write in an elliptical style. There is a stream-of-consciousness style of writing to McLuhan’s work that is interesting but distinctly off putting. It is not an argumentative or scholarly approach to discourse. In fact, the evidence for his contentions is neither self-evident nor presented in a logical fashion.” ¹²

I would first like to discuss an area of McLuhan’s writings which I find problematic, relating to his formulation of “sense ratios”, before considering two aspects of his work that do seem relevant.

Sense ratios and "Tribal Man"

In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding media (1964), McLuhan analyses how new media have changed human senses and forms of interaction, even tracing the change back to the invention of the printing press. In Understanding media, McLuhan hints that post-revolution France was able to become a single nation by utilising the printing press and typography as an aid for the unification of the French people. Feudal and oral traditions were replaced by “principles of uniformity, continuity, and lineality.”¹³ By using modes of communication methods as a framework, McLuhan then divides history in oral, written and electronic phases. These are characterised by their own “sense ratios”, meaning that when communicating with, for example, the written language, humans give more importance to their vision than other senses.¹⁴

For McLuhan, the “tribal man” is a person who has not been tainted by an imbalance in sense ratios, resulting from a lack of interaction with written language or other forms of abstract representation of thought. According to him, oral societies are close-knit, highly interdependent and lack individualism. Conversely, McLuhan “claims that writing and (...) print, break through the tribal balance, give oral people an ‘eye for an ear’ (...)” resulting in an ability for an individual to engage with “introspective, rational and individualistic” thought, which then is able to unfold into fully abstract thinking.¹⁵ The “tribal man” becomes the “rational man”, who is now specialised in a certain area of expertise.

Though interesting to think about how modern technologies favour different senses and how we’re modified by them, the distinction between “tribal man” and “rational man” is

While McLuhan’s writings are ambitious given their place in history, one must be critical of ideas constructed in a setting that does not share the same ethical code as our current one - particularly when that code has changed to acknowledge the hardships of marginalised groups. This attitude is analogous to realising that extremely popular and iconic TV shows like “Friends” and “How I met your mother” still made jokes which were misogynistic, fatphobic or queerphobic in nature. This does not devalue their relevance but simply reflects the accepted norms of the period.¹⁸ While in conversation with his friend Tom Langan, McLuhan stated with regards to television:

“Do you really want to know what I think of that thing? If you want to save one shred of Hebrao-Greco-Roman-Medieval-Renaissance-Enlightenment-Modern-Western civilization, you’d better get an axe and smash all the sets.”¹⁹

The blog article where I came across the previous quote - which itself comes from W. T. Gordon’s biographic book on McLuhan - acknowledges that McLuhan never took a clear stance on the relationship between new media, social issues and the counterculture movement of the 60s.²⁰ However, it undoubtedly sheds light on which culture McLuhan had in mind when he spoke of “saving” human beings - Western civilization. It is also relevant to note that he never spoke of humans or people throughout his writings. He spoke of man and men. Taking this into account I would, however, like to mention two interconnected aspects of his works (or prophecies) which have influenced my thought: “the medium is the message” and “media as extensions of humans”.²¹

The medium is the message

“Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which [people] communicate than by the content of the communication. The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak.”²²

“The medium is the message” (or “massage”) puts forth the idea that the media we engage with shapes our beliefs, perspectives and attitudes towards the world that surrounds us. The way we, as human beings, receive information, shapes how we actively engage with the world. McLuhan goes as far as to say that the message contained in the medium becomes almost irrelevant. This trope works mostly as a call for us as everyday users of information-disseminating tools to be aware of the impact that they have upon us. Lizzy van Winsen says that “(...) we should open our eyes to the abilities that these extensions give [to people] to shape communication, and not be blinded by the content they offer.”²³

Our choice of interfaces dictates how we engage with the enormous flow of information we receive on a daily basis. In the artistic world, this is comparable to the choices we make on how and why we determine the most suitable medium to present our work. Using my previously discussed work Twitch_Plays_Max as an example: the whole work could have been presented in a live setting as an installation, by setting up tablets in an exhibition space with which the audience could interact. This manner of creating audience interactivity is not new and with the development of “off-the-shelf” technologies (Arduino,

Media as extensions of humans

“All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical. The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye. Clothing, an extension of the skin. Electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.”²⁵

The “Media as extensions of humans” aphorism seems to suggest that all technological creation, before or after the digital revolution, is intrinsically linked to our own bodies and serves to amplify our physical capabilities. This entails that technologies are not merely tools we use and live side-by-side with. They permeate us and “work us over completely”, thus modifying how we perceive our own bodies, and, according to McLuhan, causing a disconnect with the physical world.²⁶ McLuhan gives an alternate reading of the myth of Narcissus in which Narcissus did not fall in love with his own reflection, but was instead in a state of trance due to a numbness created by the externalised body experience created by the reflection. According to McLuhan, this was brought about by Narcissus' failure to recognize his own image on the water. He leaves us then with a warning: when extending our body with the aid of technology, “the original body part is being brought to a state of numbness.”²⁷ Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, artist and philosopher, makes the same warning when speaking about computer intelligence. He implies that instead of making machines smarter we are instead allowing our human intelligence to lower in order to cater to machines and better create the illusion that computers are actually getting smarter:

“If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?”²⁸

very problematic. This mutually exclusive duality clearly reflects a Western European-centric view on what “tribal” cultures were, are or could be. This statement is an oversimplification of preprint cultures and completely dismisses the variety of existing (or erased) non-Western societies.¹⁶ Furthermore, the fetishisation of “tribal culture” as something to strive for and return to is fallacious. Firstly, it ignores the work that needs to be done concerning indigenous and native communities in the present time who are still targets of erasure. It seems a bit odd to praise the reliance on oral tradition of these cultures without acknowledging the fact that colonial powers have done their best to destroy the traces of such orality. It is known that the prohibition of indigenous languages was a common tool for the forced assimilation of colonised peoples.¹⁷ Secondly, contemporary society is not necessarily in opposition to a preliterate one regarding specialisation. Hence, this doesn’t per se reflect a wish in contemporary society to become more individualistic. It might, however, reflect the need to maintain a complex social structure derived from the growth of the global economy. Specialisation can and has been, nonetheless, taken advantage of by our current capitalist and neo-liberal society. What could be seen as a tool to create better conditions for human life is often subverted by pitting us against one another, in exchange for material goods or power. I see this as the true cause of the overwhelming individualism present in contemporary society. McLuhan made a fair point when criticising individualism but I would suggest that instead of targeting the true enemy of cohesive social structures - the competitive neo-liberal context in which we live in - he opted to simply blame the media with which we interact.

Though wrapped in warnings, this slogan could already be seen materialised in works in the 1960s. Lara Schrijver, professor of architecture, describes the work of Archigram, a British group of architects who became known for their pieces regarding portable living homes. The Cushicle (1964, created by Michael Webb) was a home within a backpack that could be unfolded at any time to reveal “(...) a comfortable, enclosed personal space. Consisting of a chassis for appliances and an inflatable envelope, the Cushicle also includes a projection television and heating.”²⁹ The same group later created The Suitaloon (1968, also designed by Michael Webb), an improvement upon The Cushicle which consisted of an inflatable membrane which became a reclining chair and a bubble with walls strong enough to hold ordinary household apparatuses. Its slogan was “if it wasn’t for my Suitaloon I would have to buy a house”.

Raspberry PI, Teensy) and accompanying software, it is much simpler to develop such interactive systems. With the help of large online communities and specialised libraries, an artist doesn’t even have to become a coding wizard anymore. The Dutch jazz trio Tin Men And The Telephone, for instance, are known for having developed an interactive performance practice outside of the contemporary art/music bubble. The band created the app Tinmendo, which is freely available in app stores, with the purpose of giving the audience the power to shape their own shows.

However, the core of Twitch_Plays_Max was not dependent on its use of an interactive artifice. The work was very much “of its own time”, that is to say, it was made with the Corona Pandemic and the general global situation in mind. It is important to clarify that in the creation process the idea of using the internet as a medium came first, reflecting upon distanced-performances came second and the interactive element came last, as the natural outcome of relating the first two ideas. If I transposed the work to another medium, after its debut as an internet-based work, I don’t believe it would have the same effect. To me, its meaning (or message) would have been diluted and it would have turned into a run-of-the-mill interactive sound piece.²⁴ Moreover, it is important to acknowledge that the choice of using the internet, and more specifically Twitch, as a performance space brought limitations which contributed to shaping the piece. In the end, having chosen this medium was in itself a compositional tool, and implied equatable compositional hindrances as those that exist when writing for acoustic instruments.

Shrijver also touches upon Constant Nieuwenhuys’ work. New Babylon (1959-1974) was a project in which the citizens of a living complex would be responsible for building their own spaces, thus “encouraging their creative appropriation of its spaces” and “the need to work [would be] replaced by a nomadic lifestyle of creative play.”³⁰

The essential point to note in these three architectural works is the fixation on the idea of the future human as a nomadic being who is engaged in a symbiotic relationship between body, living space and technology.³¹ The human from the future should be able to bring everything with them, in a tight and compact object, easily accessible and configurable according to the desires of the user/wearer. John Maeda, a technologist and designer at Microsoft, describes modern digital devices as cybermachines of a million tentacles that when grasped by a user can perform tasks beyond natural human ability.³² Schrijver saw these architectural works as direct premonitions of technologies like the iPod and smartphone. She writes:

“(...) the technological gadgetry (...) is posed as an interface between us and the world[.] (...) These projects offer early visions of the world of iPods and cell phones, defining the space around them not by enclosure but by mediation. This mediation may still allow us to recede from the world, but our own physical presence as well as that of the built environment remains something to be contended with.”³³