The High Priest of Pop-Culture In this article we will begin an examination of someone who most people do not know,

but who is considered by many to be the first father and leading prophet of the electronic age, Marshall McLuhan. A Canadian born in 1911, McLuhan became a Christian through the influence of G.K. Chesterton in 1937. He wrote his monumental work, one of twelve books and hundreds of articles,Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in 1964. The subject that would occupy most of McLuhan's career was the task of understanding the effects of technology as it related to popular culture, and how this in turn affected human beings and their relations with one another in communities. Because he was one of the first to sound the alarm, McLuhan has gained the status of a cult hero and "high priest of pop-culture".{1} This status is not undeserved, and McLuhan said many things that are still pertinent today. His thought, though voluminous, is frequently reduced to one-liners, and small sound bites, which sum up the more complicated content of his probing and rigorous examination of the media, a word that he coined. Concerning the new status of man in technological, and media-dominated society, he said: If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?{2} In statements like this, McLuhan both announces the existence of a global village, another word he is credited for coining, and predicts the intensification of the world community to its present expression. All of this was done in the early 1960s at a time when television was still in its infancy, and the personal computer was almost twenty years into the future. McLuhan is announcing what Lewis H. Lapham says is a world of people who worship the objects of their own invention in the form of fax machines and high speed computers, and accept the blessings of Coca-Cola and dresses by Donna Karan as the mark of divinity.{3} The fact that more people watch television than go to church is nothing new to us, but it was one of the tell-tale signs of a cultural shift in history for McLuhan; a shift which has been imperceptible to most, and devastating to all. If anyone doubts McLuhan's warning that "we become what we behold," he should reflect on the consuming desire of many average teenagers to be like Michael Jordan, Madonna, or Britney Spears: a desire that has resulted in a culture of plastic surgery and drive-by shootings to obtain tennis shoes. Objects of Desire In our continuing examination of Marshall McLuhan, the patriarch of media criticism, we will explore the totalitarian techniques of American advertising and market research on the unsuspecting consumer.{4} How this is accomplished, and the effects it has, were

outlined in The Mechanical Bride, first published in 1951. The book dealt with the influence of print media on the male and female psyche. The objective of advertising men, said McLuhan, is the manipulation, exploitation, and control of the individual.{5} If this is true, then who, one might ask, was doing the controlling, and what was the desired effect? The advertising companies were doing the controlling, and the desired effect was nothing loftier than selling products to unsuspecting customers. Making women into objects of desire by men, and then in turn selling the women the products to help them achieve the effect of desirability, accomplished the entire enterprise. The advertising men succeeded in creating a market where one did not previously exist. The purpose here, and earlier for McLuhan, is not to vilify the advertising industry, rather it is to provide insight into how media functions. One such insight is McLuhan's description of the contemporary mindset of a woman under the influence of advertising geniuses. He said: To the mind of the modern girl, legs, like busts, are power points, which she has been taught to tailor, but as parts of the success kit rather than erotically or sensuously. She swings her legs from the hip . . . she knows that a "long-legged girl can go places." As such, her legs are not intimately associated with her taste or with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grille on a car. They are date-bated power levers for the management of the male audience.{6} What McLuhan correctly ascertains is not the fact that women try to look attractive for men (presumably women have been doing this for a long time), but the idea of "polishing" each and every part for a kind of optimal performance. The modern woman has been taught through advertising bombardments that every feature of her physical makeup can be enhanced for the specific purposes of gaining a husband, a promotion, or just getting a door opened. As one might suspect, there is a male counterpart to this advertising bombardment. The overwhelming superwoman, the possessor of beauty and grace in degrees hitherto unimaginable, demands an impossibly high standard of virility from her male counterpart. The result says McLuhan, are men who are readily captured by the gentleness and guile of women, but who are also surrounded by a barrage of body parts. The man is not won over, but slugged, and beaten down in defeat.{7} Technology as Extensions of the Human Body In our continuing look at Marshal McLuhan, the man who coined the term "global village" and the phrase "the medium is the message," we will reflect on what he had to say about the various ways human beings extend themselves, and how these extensions affect our relationships with one another. First, we must understand what McLuhan meant by the term "extension(s)." An extension occurs when an individual or society makes or uses something in a way that extends the range of the human body and mind in a fashion that is new. The shovel we

use for digging holes is a kind of extension of the hands and feet. The spade is similar to the cupped hand, only it is stronger, less likely to break, and capable of removing more dirt per scoop than the hand. A microscope, or telescope is a way of seeing that is an extension of the eye. Considering more complicated extensions, one might think of the automobile as an extension of the feet. It allows man to travel places in the same manner as the feet, only faster and with less effort. In addition, this extension enables one to travel in relative comfort in extreme weather conditions. Most individuals already understand the concept of extension, but many are unreflective when it comes to what McLuhan calls "amputations;" the counterpart to extensions. Every extension of mankind, especially technological extensions, have the effect of amputating or modifying some other extension. An example of an amputation would be the loss of archery skills with the development of gunpowder and firearms. The need to be accurate with the new technology of guns made the continued practice of archery obsolete. The extension of a technology like the automobile "amputates" the need for a highly developed walking culture, which in turn causes cities and countries to develop in different ways. The telephone extends the voice, but also amputates the art of penmanship gained through regular correspondence. These are a few examples, and almost everything we can think of is subject to similar observations. McLuhan believed that mankind has always been fascinated and obsessed with these extensions, but too frequently we choose to ignore or minimize the amputations. For example, we praise the advantages of high speed personal travel made available by the automobile, but do not really want to be reminded of the pollution it causes. Additionally, we do not want to be made to think about the time we spend alone in our cars isolated from other humans, or the fact that the resulting amputations from automobiles have made us more obese and generally less healthy. We have become people who regularly praise all extensions, and minimize all amputations. McLuhan believed that we do so at our own peril. The Dangers of Over-extended Technology We have discussed the idea of extensions and amputations caused by new technology, which is introduced into society. The automobile was previously mentioned as an extension of the foot. The car allows one to travel, just as the foot does, only faster and with less effort. The amputations which result would include loss of muscle strength in the under-utilized legs, and the reduction in the quality of air we breathe. Something occurs when a medium like the automobile, used for transportation, becomes over-extended. The resulting amputations such as muscle atrophy, smog, and high-speed fatalities increase at a rate that challenges the benefits initially gained. Automobile fatalities, lung disease, and obesity caused by modern transportation begin to outweigh the benefits of getting to our destinations quicker and with less effort. The final movement is the reversal of the benefits. McLuhan said:

Although it may be true to say that an American is a creature of four wheels, and to point out that American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's-license age than at voting age, it is also true that the car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.{8} To this observation might be added the fact that we train children from a very young age to stand within a few feet of high-speed vehicles without being afraid. Less than two hundred years ago a screaming locomotive or a high speed automobile would have caused a person to flee in terror for their lives. We have slowly conditioned ourselves to not be afraid of something that is in fact extremely dangerous. Similarly, we know that speed limits of twenty miles an hour would almost certainly eliminate most car fatalities, but we also consider the advantages of getting to our destinations quicker to be worth the resulting death rate. Proof of this casual acceptance of the disadvantages of the car could be imagined if one were to consider the fate of a political candidate who ran on a platform of reducing the national speed limit to twenty miles per hour. We know the advantages, even before implementation, but we choose to accept the disadvantages because there is a privileging of all types of technological extension, even deadly and horrific forms. We are now prepared to consider the specific types of extensions realized by the television, mobile phone, and computer. If we take McLuhan's lead then all of these must be simultaneously considered as extensions with both positive and negative amputations of previous technologies. Four Questions Applied to Media We are concluding our considerations of Marshall McLuhan's pertinence with an examination of ideas found in his last work, The Global Village, published in 1989, twenty-five years after his monumental Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In his early works McLuhan focused on the rapid change in the five centuries since the development of the printing press and movable type, and the especially rapid developments of the twentieth-century. McLuhan died in 1980 and was beginning to see the first fruits of the television generations as well as the fulfillment of some of his predictions. He was deeply concerned about man's willful blindness to the downside of technology, yet McLuhan was not an irrational alarmist. In his later years, and partially as a response to his critics, McLuhan developed a scientific basis for his thought around what he termed the tetrad. The tetradallowed McLuhan to apply four laws, framed as questions, to a wide spectrum of mankind's endeavors, and thereby give us a new tool for looking at our culture. The first of these questions or laws is "What does it (the medium or technology) extend?" In the case of a car it would be the foot, in the case a phone it would be the voice. The second question is "What does it make obsolete?" Again, one might answer that the car makes walking obsolete, and the phone makes smoke signals and carrier pigeons unnecessary. The third question asks, "What is retrieved?" The sense of adventure or

quest is retrieved with the car, and the sense of community returns with the spread of telephone service. One might consider the rise of the cross-country vacation that accompanied the spread of automobile ownership. The fourth question asks, "What does the technology reverse into if it is over-extended?" An over-extended automobile culture longs for the pedestrian lifestyle, and the over-extension of phone culture engenders a need for solitude. With the radio and television we have simultaneous access to events on the entire planet. However, television culture diminishes, or amputates, many of the close ties of family life based on oral communication. The simple act of turning on a television can reduce a room of people to silence. What is retrieved is the tribal or interrelated view of man. What it becomes or returns to is the global theater, where people are actors on a stage. One need only witness the event status of an airplane crash or weather disaster. On McLuhan's gravestone are the words "The Truth Shall Make You Free." We do not have to like or even agree with everything that McLuhan said, but we should nevertheless remember that his life was dedicated to showing men the truth about the world they live in, and the hidden consequences of the technologies he develops. Notes 1. 1969 interview in Playboy magazine originally titled "A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media," pp. 53-74, in The Essential McLuhan, Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (ed.), (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp.233-69. 2. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), p.61 3. Lewis H. Lapham in the introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition ofUnderstanding Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), pp.xx-xi. 4. See McLuhan's work The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951). This is an intensive examination of the effects of advertising and comics in producing new perceptions about what we should and do desire, as well as why we believe these things will bring us happiness. 5. "The Mechanical Bride," in The Essential McLuhan, Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (ed.), (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p.21. 6. "The Mechanical Bride," in The Essential McLuhan, p.24. 7. Ibid. p.25. 8. The Essential McLuhan, p.217. 2001 Probe Ministries International The Medium is the Message Summary by Sarah Wilson Text: McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Message. Understanding Media, pp. 7-21.

McLuhans work with literature and culture produced the revolutionary thought that the medium is the message. In other words, cultures are changed not only by the content of technology, but also by the technology itself. The basic content of technology is easy to recognize. The content of the railway would seem to be transportation; the content of the Internet would seem to be information. But McLuhans idea that the medium proclaiming the content is itself the message is a hard one to understand. In the example of the railway, he says that [t]he railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure (8). In other words, in addition to providing fast and available transportation for people, the railway also fundamentally restructured society. People were able to travel, see new things, have new experiences, realize that there are people living lives very different from their own. A farmer in the country and a doctor in Philadelphia suddenly both had the ability to travel the country by train and enlarge their views of American society as a result. The railway united citizens across the country and created a new sense of nationalism. (Of course, as with most technology, there were social class restrictions involved with the availability of railway travel, but that point is not relevant to McLuhans argument.) Societys views of work changed with the railway as well. One no longer had to live in a city in order to work there. It could likely be argued that this created American suburbia as we know it today. McLuhans argument holds that beyond transportation, the railway had tremendous psychic and social consequences on society (8). Another example McLuhan offers is a particularly good one: the electric light (9). Many would believe that the light has no content unless it is spelling something such as Open, or Miller Light. But McLuhan says that the electric light itself communicates a message. The invention of the electric light restructured the way our society thought of day and night. Work no longer had to stop when the sun went down--one only had to turn on a light to continue work indoors. Light also has psychological effects. Low lighting in a restaurant communicates a message of quietness and perhaps romance, whereas the bright fluorescent lighting in a classroom communicates activity, promotes attention. Perhaps it is no wonder that to calm down an elementary school class after recess, the teacher often turns off the lights--she is communicating a message to her students through the technology of the electric light. In order to recognize and understand the social and psychological effects of technology as exemplified by the railway and electric light illustrations, one must conside[r] not only the content but the medium and the cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates (11). McLuhan claims that all technology can be analyzed this way; but many researchers have studied only the effects of the content of technology on our society and neglected to look at it within the cultural matrix.

To illustrate this type of research, McLuhan cites a study by Professor Wilbur Schramm, Television in the Lives of Our Children, in which he compared children growing up with TV and children growing up without it. McLuhan states: Since he made no study of the peculiar nature of the TV image, his tests were of content preferences, viewing time, and vocabulary counts. In a word, his approach to the problem was a literary one, albeit unconsciously so. Consequently, he had nothing to report . . . Program and content analysis offer no clues to the magic of these media or to their subliminal charge (19-20). The effect of TV on a society cannot be measured by such a study as Schramms because it neglects to acknowledge that children are being affected by the TV itself, and not only the words that they hear from it. Children raised watching a lot of TV may expect the people in their lives (teachers, parents) to entertain them, they may be more likely to tune out because they can catch the "rerun," and they may subconsciously assume that the people talking to them can't see them, like television actors and anchors don't see them. For researchers who study technology from Schramms approach, technology like [t]he electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no content (9). In order to understand our culture, it is important to recognize the medium as the message because technology creates a cultural grammar, a system on which messages operate. The technology of print brought tremendous psychological and social changes to society, creating individualism and nationalism among other things (19-20). McLuhan says that Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to master the grammar of print and typography, the first to understand print as a message itself that structures society (13). Professor Schramm did not have this foundation when he tested the effects of TV on children, and therefore, according to McLuhan, [h]ad his methods been employed in 1500 A.D. to discover the effects of the printed book in the lives of children or adults, he could have found out nothing of the changes in human and social psychology resulting from typography (19). But with the understanding that the medium is the message as the approach of his research, de Tocqueville claimed that it was the printed word that, achieving cultural saturation in the eighteenth century, had homogenized the French nation and was fundamentally connected to if not essentially responsible for the French Revolution (14). De Tocqueville realized that the typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society and empowered the formerly illiterate peasants with a sense of unity that led to their uprising against the upper class (14). When the peasant people were able to read, they read about other peoples points of view and experiences, and they were willing to fight to change their society as they knew it. Currently, our society is changing again with the onslaught of electric media, namely computers and the Internet. We must continue to analyze this technology with the realization that the medium is the message, or else we will never fully understand our culture or the effect of technology on it and on our lives.

The Medium is the Massage was written in 1967 (two years before I was born) and in it McLuhan discusses voice, writing, and electric media (esp. television) and their effects on individuals, cognition and society. The graphic design of this book is said to have been the basis for the design ofWired magazine [1]. He says Societies have been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication (p. 9). The book seems to be at least partly a reaction against the printed word, with its rationality and linearity, with its emphasis of the visual at the expense of the auditory and tactile, and with its encouragement to people to go off and be individuals and abandon the company of their fellows as opposed to electronic medias global village. I think McLuhan is strongly emphasizing the participatory role of information technology (primarily electronic communication) in some cases, and its mass media broadcast role in others. Electronic communication technology lessens distance (by reducing the time it takes to talk) between people and thus weakens social boundaries. McLuhan is believed to have coined the term global village, [1] meaning this is both in the sense of community (p. 10) and in the sense of it takes a village to raise a child (p. 13); electronic data storage and communication allows people to access information that their peers, family and locality dont have. Different media use our senses (sight, sound, touch, (smell, taste?)) in different ways, and this in turn affects the way we think and view the world, which in turn affects the environment we build for ourselves. Thats the massage in the title. The environment we live in is invisible to us, embedded in it as we are. One purpose of art is to draw our attention to the world we live in. Disruptive technologies can be incomprehensible to an established environment. People try to use the new technologies to keep doing what they did with the old one (p. 74) (single loop) while not seeing that the new tech fundamentally changes what can be done (double loop). New media emphasizes a holistic rather than reductionistic way of living: roles rather than goals. The printing press helped bring about individualism in ways that the copied book (copied by monks) or the oral tradition (bards) could not. Printing technology created copyright, and electronic media may change how that is implemented. He says that the idea of copyright came with the advent of printing technology (p. 122), because the effort of copying texts was so great that there was no public readership, no public. Texts were shared among a small group of scholars and there was no commercial aspect. Printing technology created public readership, and suddenly you could sell your books. Fighting piracy became important, and thus copyright. He starts to consider the effect of cheap reproduction (Xeroxing) on copyright and how it becomes easier to get around it (p. 123) Summary of Medium is the message Medium on another perspective refers to things that are not obvious. According to Marshall Mcluhan, medium or media are extensions of human bodies, minds and senses. The things around us would not be a medium not unless it does its function. It let us travel around the world in just one sitting.

For an instance, you are watching television and you tend to switch different channels since you are looking for a good show. By changing channels, it makes you feel that you are in different destinations. Through the use of remote, you extend yourself to the television and experience reaching out the whole world. It affects and changes lives because we are surrounded by medium. Like it or not, from the moment we wake up until we prepare to sleep, everything is all about medium. But it needs participation in order to prove that medium is an extension of our lives. Im using media every now and then, I have to admit that its par of my life now and I cant see myself without it. When I wake up, I check my phone for messages. I watch television to update myself from what was happening and etc. Same with computers that its hard to live without it since I spend majority of my time in Internet. I just love magazines. I have a deep respect for the medium not only because I want to work in a magazine company someday but I really appreciate it. Its not easy to finish a magazine alone but its a product of effort. I have to admit that I really care for magazines and keep my magazines looking good at all times. Thats why Im getting irritated for some people who take magazines for granted and especially for those who dont handle it carefully. Internet, though it has a danger side, I still admire how it gives an impact to the whole world. I just appreciate how it makes my life as a student better not only through education, but recreation purpose too. What I like about Internet is that I can be able to keep in touch with people and get to know them better. Just like what Mcluhan is talking about, in just one click or another, we can reach people anywhere. I can be able to know each culture and each beliefs in one way or another. By the way, I can play and play a lot of games too. Newpapers on the other hand is a good source of information too. Although my favorite sections are the lifestyle only, still its a good source of assignments for advertisements. Of course television is also a big deal for me because when I was still younger, I straightly watched television. I still carry that habit until now and no one can stop me from that. It creates a big impact for me and for my generation because for sure, the next generation will be more intellectual with handling and dealing with these things. I and the rest of my classmates will be venturing ourselves in advertising someday and with enough knowledge from Marshall Mcluhan, it will remind us that medium is a big factor for everything. If medium was message, would mcluhan like powerpoint? Marshall McLuhan was one of the earliest scholars to discuss the changing nature of media in the electronic age and today would have been his 100th birthday. Famous for coining the phrase the medium is the message, he devoted a great deal of attention to explaining how television changed the way the audience understands and participates in

content. In his commentary on the landing of Sputnik, he called this new type of viewer a simultaneous man who prefers flexibility and diversity and lives in a global theatre. On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew. He unpacked some of these ideas on the television program Our World in 1967. McLuhans ideas have recently resurfaced, as many are now applying his theories to the proliferation of electronic media forms. If television once created a generational gap between parents and their children, one can only wonder what McLuhan would have thought of the internet and the new era of transmedia storytelling. In McLuhans posthumous work Laws of Media, he argued that all forms of media have a tetrad of effects, or four different types of influence on society. He posed these effects as questions: What does the medium enhance? What does the medium make obsolete? What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced? What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes? Although McLuhan focused most of his writing on television, it is worth thinking about how his ideas intersect with another medium the presentation. Unlike television, presentations often include a combination of in-person communication and electronic media that offers good presenters an opportunity to use their medium to engage their audience. But how do presentations fit into McLuhans tetrad? The answer may depend on what the presenter does well. For presenters who give thought to how to use their slides successfully, presentations can enhance communication, and form a connection that causes the audience to embrace the speakers goals. They can retrieve the spoken word from seeming obsolescence in our visually focused culture (TED talks come to mind). For presenters who use technology poorly, however, mediums like PowerPoint run the danger of making the speaker themself obsolete as the audience focuses on the slides instead of the story. Taken to the extreme, they may ultimately flip PowerPoint into obscurity as bored audiences try to find ways of avoiding yet another bad slideshow. In order to prevent this fate, presenters should consider taking McLuhans advice and embrace the needs of simultaneous man: flexibility, diversity, and a need to be engaged in a meaningful way. To explore more of McLuhans ideas, this great commemorative site celebrates his life. Many examples of his work are now available electronically, marking his part in our cultural zeitgeist. He even appeared as himself in the film Annie Hall.