We can make some sense of the extent and pervasiveness of our present environmental problems by considering the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher and media theorist who died in 1980. In describing the effects on ourselves of the things that we invent, he coined the expression “the medium is the message”, which was playfully modified to “the medium is the massage”. He summarized the process by saying, “We invent things, thereafter they invent us.” He also aptly described the effect of instantaneous electronic communication as having created the “global village”.
McLuhan argued that the initial content of a new medium—be it print, radio, television or the internet—is the culture that preceded it. For example, the first content of print was the oral stories that came before it. The first content of radio was the material in the written word. The first content of television was the movie. Then the internet made everyone into a movie star. Consequently, as McLuhan explained, we interpret the present in terms of the past, or to use his metaphor, “We drive into the future looking through the rear-view mirror.”
This idea isn’t so strange once we give it a moment of thought. The medium through which we get information transforms the shape of that information into the character of the medium that is presenting it. Print created what we would call the individual as a self-contained identity, someone with the impression that a complete life could be lived without making compromises to social pressures. Radio exaggerated the importance of the human voice; television the importance of the face. But we don’t usually notice these transformations until we eventually become familiar enough with the effects of the new medium to recognize how its distinctive character is affecting us. But once this happens, then we can begin to exploit its capabilities. As a simple example, no one could successfully advertise salad until the arrival of colour in printing and television—salad does not look appetizing in black and shades of grey.
The raw sensations that we get from experiencing our immediate surroundings have to be interpreted for us to make sense of them. To do this, we need some kind of a mental construct to give it order. In every culture, this is the primary function of mythology. It is the template that we place over raw sensory input to organize it into meaningful experiences. Media has the same effect. The extent to which we get information through media is the extent to which it “massages” our experience into a reality that is based on its particular character. Except for direct experience, which is difficult to get without freeing ourselves from all cultural and media biases, much of the reality we experience has been mediated by some sort of process.
By understanding these mediating processes, we can discern how we are being affected and what they convey about the world around us. For example, thanks in large measure to the empiricism of science, nature is being understood directly without the cultural interference of mythology. Ominously though, according to media theory, the existence of nature as the subject of documentaries is an indication that we are moving into a post-nature phase, a process confirmed by the plummeting populations of wild species. And when weather starts to become a source of entertainment on a TV channel or the internet, this is also an indication of trouble.
We don’t usually notice the ordinary. When nature was intact and everywhere, we did not need parks to remind us what it was because we were always in it. Feelings became the subject of the Romantics during the Industrial Revolution because people were being depersonalized by mechanization. Sadly, the existence of nature documentaries and nature tourism foreshadows the end of nature.
The future is really unfolding in the present, but what is coming usually surprises us because we don’t know how to read the signs that are heralding its arrival. If we can angle our awareness appropriately, the rear-view mirror of the moment will come very close to telling us what is about to happen.
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra
Top image credit: A truck appears in the rear-view mirror of a driver on the Dalton Highway, Alaska – Photo by Craig McCaa, BLM Alaska via Wikimedia (Public Domain)