Understanding Media

McLuhan always privileged the connection between the immediacy and simultaneity of electric circuitry and “blind, all-hearing Homer.” This was a “humanism” which wagered itself on a desperate encounter with the “objects” of the technological order. In Understanding Media, Counter Blast, and The Medium is the Massage, there emerges an almost cruel description of the technological sensorium as a sign-system to which the human mind is exteriorized. Electric technology, this latest sensation of the “genus sensation”, implies that we are now “outered” or “ablated” into a machine-processed world of information. It is the human destiny in the modern age to be programmed by an information order which operates on the basis of algorithmic and digital logic, and which, far from conscious human intervention, continues to move through the whirring of its own servomechanisms. Thus, in Understanding Media, McLuhan noted:

By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily controls – all such extensions of our bodies, including cities – will be translated into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as now befits an organism that wears its brains outside its hide and its nerves outside its skin.

And of this “semiological wash” through the technostructure, McLuhan said simply but starkly,

Man becomes as it were the sex organ of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine-world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely by providing him with wealth.