McLuhan's Theories Applied to Television - Essay Example

An Application of McLuhan's Theories to Television. Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1981) was a media analyst whose theories are still considered valid by technocrats and media savvies. His fiorst book was called The Mechanical Bride and contained 59 short pieces on individual 'exhibits' drawn from newspapers, magazines and film posters. McLuhan chose to call it 'the folklore of the industrial man.' His second book The Gutenberg Galaxy lamented that typography encouraged individualism at the cost of downgrading tribalisation. The visual culture introduced by the print relegated the 'audile-tactile' potential of human beings to the background, he wrote. In Understanding Media McLuhan declared that the media are extensions of our senses or faculties. He looks into how each of the media are capable of rearranging our social lives even to the extent of depersonalization and absolute alienation. The Mechanical Bride asserted that the real significance of the media lay in their ability to modify human relationships and perception. Although Understanding Media was published as early as in 1964, McLuhan had predicted along with his famous theory of media as extensions that one day there could be the collectivization and corporatisation of all information. It has been rightly pointed out that the Internet is nothing but an extension of one's powers of cognition. We open the 'home page' of a person the moment we choose to think of him. Then we proceed to click on links if need be. The retrieval of information in good time from the vast store house of the human brain is the pioneer google! Of the many theories that McLuhan has propounded, that of hot and cool media has gathered a lot of attention, especially in the light of the advent of computers which defy McLuhan's classification in the sense that it can be both hot and cold or neither hot nor cold. Before one discusses the complexities involved in the issue, a brief look at what McLuhan actually said in Understanding Media (1964) would be handy: A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition." A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience (23). Communication is an ever growing phenomenon and is commensurate with the ways by which societies evolve. Although one can say that the moon and the tide communicate it has more to do with natural phenomenon than communication; the ant that discovers a drop of honey locks antennae with another that comes its way, but this apparent act of empathic communication is, according to Edward O. Wilson, based purely on genetic programming1 and not on will (the ant cannot choose not to communicate); only man can choose not to communicate, to communicate and yet not communicate, to lie, to imagine. The spectrum of possibility is too numerous to enumerate. So, as long as it is a human being who is the Receiver of the Sender's (mass medium) message, what if the former treats the hot as cool and vice versa. What if the silence from the other end of the telephone is construed as an acceptance of one's invitation to romance What if the very heat of the medium in describing everything makes the viewer turn off his sense/sensibility saying the medium is not cool enough McLuhan's theory sounds original but not comprehensive. It seems to lack an attention to corollaries. McLuhan's other observations that complement the basic premise of hot and cool media are more illuminating. He says that a hot medium can succeed a cool one and the speed with which a hot medium can impede can actually 'tribalise' our lives - make us come together in a ritualistic dance, as it were. " a very much greater speed-up, such as occurs with electricity, may serve to restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement," he writes. Tribalisation is a social activity that brings with it not only a sense of camaraderie but also a revival of tradition. Stripped of the binary opposition of nature/culture that one associates with the term, 'tribe' can stand for that special oneness through which any agenda could be achieved. May be it was this philosophy that inspired Goebbels who, it is said, had canned applause ready when Hitler spoke. The moment Feuhrer punctuated the air with his forefinger, the master communicator of his minister played the applause which the audience thought to be theirs and joined in. Goebbels was actually transforming a crowd into a mass and making 'mass communication' meaningful to suit his end. The very term 'mass communication' has to be looked more intently in this context. The terms 'mass', 'mob' and 'crowd' have distinct collocations. 'Mass' means a group of people who are not defined, a malleable number of people, often submissive or at least passive; 'mob' connotes inflammability, a group of people prone to violence or readied for violence for a cause may be; and 'crowd' is a generic term which could include mobs and mass. So, when one talks of mass communication, one is also talking of communicating to a group which is not capable of responding properly; it is a submissive group. Perhaps it is this vital aspect that is both the merit as well as the demerit of mediated communication. McLuhan, by saying that telephone is a cool medium and the cinema is a hot medium is naively forgetting the nuances of both the media. However, the communicologist is at his best when, towards the end of the second chapter of his classic work, he says: The principle that distinguishes hot and cold media is perfectly embodied in the folk wisdom: "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses." Glasses intensify the outward-going vision, and fill in the feminine image exceedingly. Dark glasses, on the other hand, create the inscrutable and inaccessible image that invites a great deal of participation and completion (31). The girl who wears glasses is hot medium and the one who wears dark glasses is cool for the simple reason that the former has an exceeding sense of vision and the latter, an element of mystery that one may dare to explore. In a recent book called Media Research Methods by Ina Bertrand and Peter Hughes (2005), there is the suggestion of how the interpretation of textual data can be effectively utilized for research. The authors point out that the Freudian psychoanalytic approach to 'texts' (anything from a newspaper report to a movie) could come in handy for effective content analysis. Films and TV serials, for example, could be studied in the light of Freud's theory of dreams ('dreams are the coded ways of understanding our experience'). McLuhan's hot medium of film itself could be converted into cold medium just by submitting the medium to a rigorous parameter of search and re-search. Obvious answers suddenly attenuate; endings become beginnings; characters become apparitions; themes become dreams. According to Bertrand and Hughes This is partly because of the physical circumstances in which films are viewed: our isolation, passivity and immobility as spectators in the dark, with our senses heightened as a result. But it is also more than this physical aspect. The dependence of the film on narrative (that is on fiction), is analogous to Freud's idea of the dependence of the human mind on fantasies, and that films (or at least the classical Hollywood narrative film) function as dreams do by a process of secondary elaboration (that is, by seamless editing, motivated action and camera movement, absence of unexplained activity). Finally, Freud's idea of how dreams function by condensation, displacement and symbolization (can be applied to films) (228). This is only one method of putting McLuhan's assertion to test. The very moment when one gets up from the crowd in a TV kiosk saying that this media package is not my dish for the day, the Canadian theorist's premise wobbles. It seems to be a classic example of hasty generalization or, how could the man who pronounced the ever true aphorism 'medium is the message' crack of hot and cool media at a time when technology was changing apace Works cited McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. London: Routledge, 1995. Wilson, O. Edward. Sociobiology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Bertrand, Ina and Peter Hughes. Medai Research Methods. New York: Macmillan, 2005. Read More