I think that McLuhan’s claim
that the “‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace
or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” is pretty well-understood by
readers of the modern age. It looks like the book this excerpt is from was
published in 1964, a year in an interesting era for the movies and television. In
the movie industry, films in the 1960s and ‘70s were just exiting the dominance
of the Classical Hollywood style that focused on narrative, good triumphing
over evil, and continuous time. Films in the Hollywood Renaissance started to
acknowledge the constructedness of the medium (which de-prioritized the
narrative), often had uncertain, irresolute endings and started breaking away
from the linear structure of older films. The breakdown of structure is often
at least partly attributed to the social and political context in which these
films were made, in the midst of Vietnam and the various political scandals and
riots occurring in the United States. At the same time, the film medium itself
changed, with the advent of smaller and more portable cameras that aided the
spread of observational documentary. The simplification of filming also meant
that non-professionals could take to the streets with cameras, spreading the
technology to the masses. I think these points are relevant to McLuhan’s piece
about the medium being the message because these bits of history show that the changes
in the style of film and in the creation of it reflect the upheavals reverberating
through society at the time, and have themselves affected the way we think of
film. For example, it’s no longer a given that movies will avoid breaking the
fourth wall, or that the main character will always survive; we just can’t
imagine that to be real anymore because film has restructured itself that way.
It’s interesting to consider whether that means we as a society see life and
social relations as more fragmented or if they actually are more fragmented.
This reading made me think of
two different things, one a scientific study and the other a video. A study was
conducted in May 2003 by C. Shawn Green and Daphne Bavalier of the University
of Rochester (!) examining the effects of videogame playing on subjects’ visual
attention. They found that videogame players had higher attentional capacity in
that, compared to non-gamers: they can group objects (like numbers) together
more efficiently so they can remember more of them, they can unerringly
apprehend a higher number of visual items, they have an enhanced allocation of
spatial attention all over the visual field, and have higher task-switching
abilities. Additionally, and this is what I find most interesting: training
non-gamers on an action game increased the capacity of their visual attention,
spatial distribution, and temporal resolution (task-switching). This study goes
to show that the different way of spreading attention that videogame playing
requires does in fact change the way we perceive the world. It’s, in my
opinion, a perfect complement to McLuhan’s assertion that “the effects of
technology…alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without
any resistance.”
I
also thought about a video from The Onion where panelists can see audience
reactions to what they say in real time, so they adjust accordingly. Not only
is it amusing, it goes to show that the instant-ification of the way we get our
news changes what kind of news we get and how we interpret that news.
