Communications & New Media Nov 2015 Vol 29 No 11

FEATURE
What would Marshall McLuhan say?
As we speed into a future characterized by “moments” created by Twitter, or a “news feed” created
by Facebook, or the stream of constructed content and re-distributed “copy” created by HuffPo and
Buzzfeed, the more I find myself turning to the prescient views of Marshall McLuhan for purpose and
meaning. A visionary who predicted much of our present landscape in the 1960s, McLuhan’ s views on
media and narrative are more critical than ever in today’s streaming communications world.
By Tobin Trevarthen
McLuhan’s work, dating back to the
1964 release of “Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man,”
and 1967’s “The Message is the Medium,”
offer an eerily accurate portrayal for how
we, as a society, are shaping our worldviews,
one tiny screen at a time.
“We look at the present through a rearview
mirror. We march backwards into the
future,” was a famous quote that referred to
the need to attach ourselves to a framework
of comfort from a recent past.
You can see that play out in the emergence
of digital media and the evolution
of change from desktop to tablet to smartphone.
What once was the provenance of
appointment reading, listening and viewing
edited for our consumption, is now
giving way to a world awash in unedited —
yet highly personalized — streams.
In McLuhan’s era, “the railway radically
altered the personal outlooks and patterns
of social interdependence. It bred and nurtured
the American Dream. It created totally
urban, social and family worlds. New
ways of work. New ways of management.
New legislation.”
In our era, the “always-on” flow of overwhelming
amounts of manipulated information
via the cloud, airwaves and Wi-Fi
are breeding new ways of work.
New ways of management. New legislation.
McLuhan referred to this phenomenon
as, “the circuited city of the future will not
be the huge hunk of real estate created by
the railway. It will take on a totally new
meaning under conditions of very rapid
movement. It will become an information
megalopolis”.
As we cope with how to derive meaning
from our new information megalopolis,
the idea of narrative takes on deeper importance.
We have, for generations since
the beginning of man, relied on storytelling
to build our societies, mores, myth and
folklore. Stories have always held a place in
our evolution. They provided meaning and
context. Albeit, as John Hagel would note,
stories are constructed with “beginnings,
middles and ends.”
Stories are about me, not you.
When a brand tells you its story, it is
based on what it wants you to see and feel
and hold dear. An individual or organization
desires similar outcomes when it expresses
a heartfelt story about its situation
or belief.
As we delve into the subtle difference between
a narrative and a story, we uncover
that a narrative is constructed of multiple
stories and conversations that come together
to create a call to action between an
initiator and responder. A narrative has a
sense of drive, meaning and contrast. It
is about how you and your personal belief
system align with a narrative. Do you want
to accept, act upon or refrain from the narrative.
Hagel states that “narratives have
no end” and is influenced by countering or
accepting views over time.
Hence, McLuhan’s narrative of the American
Dream above was catalyzed by the
emerging technology of the day and our
desire to attach that to a framework of yesteryear
to create a tangible version for the
present state.
McLuhan offers a deeper historical perspective
on tying narrative to the impact
of emerging media, when referring to the
Renaissance Legacy.
He stated, “The Vanishing Point = Self
Effacement. The Detached Observer. No
Involvement. The viewer of Renaissance art
is systematically placed outside the frame
of experience. A piazza for everything and
everything in its piazza. The instantaneous
world of electric informational media involves
all of us, at once. No detachment or
frame is possible.”
In a society where seven, soon to be
eight, billion people are all connected in
an always-on mode, what would Marshall
McLuhan say now? In 1994, Lewis H. Lapman,
authored an introduction to the MIT
Press Edition re-release of “Understanding
Media.” Lapman eloquently decodes Mc-
Luhan dialectic into a series of antonyms
that again paints a picture foreboding our
current state.
Lapman writes, “McLuhan noticed thirty
[now 40] years ago, the accelerated technologies
of the electronic future carry us
backward into the firelight flickering caves
of a Neolithic past. Among people who
worship the objects of
their own invention
(whether in the shape of
the fax machine or the
high-speed computer)
and accept the blessing
of an icon as proof
of divinity (whether
expressed as the Coca
Cola trademark or as
the label on a dress by
Donna Karan), ritual
Tobin Trevarthen
becomes a form of applied knowledge. The
individual voice and singular point of view
disappears into the chorus of a corporate
and collective consciousness, which in Mc-
Luhan’s phrase — doesn’t postulate consciousness
of anything in particular”.
Lapman further states “ ... Again as Mc-
Luhan understood, the habits of the mind
derived from our use of the mass media —
‘we become what we behold’ ... we shape
our tools and afterwards our tools shape us
…”
The self-evidence of this view in 2015 is
reflected in the six second Vine, the multitude
of selfies, the disappearing SnapChat,
the river of photos posted to Instagram and
the ever-streaming ticker on the bottom of
our broadcast news. Our searches and our
news feeds are either filtered by “their algorithms”
or our “personalization filters”.
What was mass media, is now becoming
a filter bubble created by what we behold.
Our tools are shaping us.
I believe what Marshall McLuhan would
say today is that finding meaning and purpose
today will be solved by recognizing
that we are all attached and we are like a
narrative that has no end.
“Ours is a brand new world of allatonceness.
Time has ceased. Space has vanished.
We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous
happening ... Our most impressive
words and thoughts betray us — they refer
us only to the past, not to the present.”
Tobin Trevarthen is Chief Narrative Officer
at Sparkpr in San Francisco.
20 NOVEMBER 2015 | www.ODwyERPR.COM