McLuhan was concerned about how human beings extend themselves and wrote about this in Understanding Media: The extensions of man. An 'extension' occurs when an individual or society makes or uses something in a way that extends the range of the human body and mind in a fashion that is new. McLuhan says (:99) '...all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed'. This in turn brings about social change. For example, a car is an extension of the feet. It allows travel, like feet, but in a different way. McLuhan warns against such thinking, i.e. the assumption we make that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one. This causes us to underestimate the power of the new medium (perhaps in our context, the internet).
What McLuhan is trying to point out is that with every extension an amputation may occur. McLuhan wonders whether we are aware of the amputations, some of which could be dangerous yet go unnoticed. The extension is obvious, but what about the amputation, and what is the long lasting effect of the amputation? In the case of a motor car the amputation, one could say, is the fact the people are now unfit, there is little contact with the natural surroundings when one drives a car and cars also emit dangerous gases which have damaging effects on the environment and human beings. McLuhan was concerned with the subtle structural changes a new medium brings over a period of time which we may not have noticed in the beginning and yet ones which shape our world view and behaviour. Sometimes we look back, over a period of time, and notice some effects which we were unaware of from the outset.
McLuhan also distinguished between 'a hot medium' and 'a cool medium'. A hot medium is one in which one extends one single sense in a 'high definition' way. 'High definition' is a 'state of being well filled with data' (1964: 31). Hot media do not leave much to be filled in or completed by the listener; cool media indicates that little is given and much has to be filled in by the listener. He gives the example of a photograph as a hot medium - it is visually high definition. A telephone, on the other hand, is a cool medium of low definition in which much has to be filled in by the listener (:31).
McLuhan was also concerned with what he termed 'discarnate man' - which concerns itself with being everywhere at once. 'The human being on the air, on the phone (and now online) "has a very weak awareness of private identity," ... "and has been relieved of all commitments to law and morals" ' (Levinson 2001: 57).
McLuhan saw the loss of personal identity and urban violence as a result of the amoral media state. He suggested that 'all the fantasy and violence of TV is a reminder that the violence of the real world is motivated by people questioning their lost identity' (:57).
Levinson points out that what McLuhan said regarding television and identity really finds fulfilment in the online digital world '- where personal identity can indeed be easily jettisoned, albeit with no necessary increase in violence' (:58). Levinson, quoting
Carpenter, says that 'electricity has made angels of us all' but goes on to qualify that this is 'not angels in the Sunday school sense'. Rather, this is 'spirit freed from flesh, capable of instant transportation anywhere' (:57). Besides violence, the internet does have the capability of doing just that: dissolving personal identity but also allowing people to build a fantasy identity (a good example of this might be a fantasy identity in chat rooms, on- line dating sites, Second Life avatars, etc.) which, in contemporary culture, is often constructed from fashions and images portrayed by the advertising giants who use the media in a powerful way to achieve their ends. Constructing yourself as 'kewP, and doing so in the image that is acceptable to society based on what the advertisers and so called 'celebrities' project, is enabled in a multi-media environment and enhanced by the ability to get whatever you want whenever you want online.
Albert Borgmann (whose works, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. A Philosophical Inquiry and Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the turn of the Millennium, I look at in more detail below) suggests that what is more worrying is when people enter cyberspace and reduce themselves to the shallow, disjointed and cliche-ridden persona that can be mimicked by information technology and then become co-conspirators of their confusions about who is who. The digital world certainly does bring the ability to project and maintain a false identity which, although not immediately
obvious, must have an impact on the society which it subtly creates, one in which - we could argue - mistrust, violence, disjointedness and confusion would all be present.
McLuhan also noted that we look at the present through what he called a 'rear-view mirror' (Levinson 2001: 171). By this he means that older media become the content for newer media. Levinson explains:
The telephone was first called the talking telegraph; the automobile the horseless carriage; the radio the wireless. In each of these cases the proximate effect of the rear-view mirror was to obscure some of the most important revolutionary functions of the new medium. Thus, although the telephone of course indeed talked, it was situated inside the home, a privatisation and personalisation of the telegraph that transformed family and business - not even hinted at in the label
"talking," which can occur just as easily outside as inside the home. Although the automobile was horseless, this negative appellation said nothing specific about the combustible engine that would go on to make oil among the most precious and contested commodities in the twentieth century. Nor did the name "wireless"
- although radio indeed had none - suggest in the slightest the simultaneous mass audience which radio would bring into being. ... Thus, McLuhan's notion of old media becoming content for newer media, and therein becoming more visible to the point of being mistaken for the newer media, is but a rendition of the rear- view mirror, and its redirection of our gaze ahead to the just-passed (:174).
Levinson goes on to critique McLuhan's view and explain why it is difficult to see every new medium in the rear-view mirror of old media. He says that this closes our eyes to the ways in which new media are not like old media and do bring and start something new.
McLuhan developed a scientific basis for his thought around what he termed the tetrad.
This allowed him to apply four laws to a wide spectrum of human work and thereby give us a tool for looking at our culture. Briefly, these are: first; what does it (the medium of
technology) extend? Second; what does it make obsolete? Third; what is retrieved?
Fourth; what does the technology revert into if it is over-extended?
Levinson offers a clear example of how one may use this framework developed by McLuhan. Reflecting on radio, he says that radio extends the human voice and makes print as the primary means of mass media obsolete. It retrieves or recovers the town crier who made important announcements before print came into being and it, when extended to its limits, reverts into audio-visual television. Hence, Levinson says, the process ends but we see the next medium, television in this example, shifting into place. This process begins again, and when television is extended to its limits, we have the screen of the computer taking over (: 189-90).
McLuhan offers some useful insights into communications media and also points to a number of other effects a change in media can have on society. He was concerned with not only what the new media may bring about but also what was/is lost in the shift from one dominant medium to another and how this subtly engineers social change and society.