What Would Marshall McLuhan say?

Tobin Trevarthen

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.

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.

This article is featured in O'Dwyer's Nov. '15 Technology PR Magazine

“We look at the present through a rear-view 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 McLuhan 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 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 McLuhan’s phrase — doesn’t postulate consciousness of anything in particular”.

Lapman further states “ ... Again as McLuhan 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.