Background Information, Birkerts and McLuhan

The readings by Birkerts and McLuhan complete our focus, which began with Chartier, on theories of new communications media, and complete our unit as well on Visions, Histories, and Criticisms of Communications Technologies (appropriately titled "The Medium is the Message?"), taking us to midterm. Both McLuhan and Birkerts discuss technologies new to their respective time periods; McLuhan analyzes television, and Birkerts addresses internet communications. Both writers urge caution, as well, in light of the technologies in question. But whereas Birkerts mourns the fate of reading that he identifies computer technologies as whittling away, McLuhan advocates caution in a slightly different manner. Like Birkerts, McLuhan indicts electronic media--specifically, television-as eroding the desire for reading among schoolchildren. In the readings from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, however, McLuhan does not disparage television for what later slang terms such as the "idiot box," the "boob tube," or the "thought vampire" imply. Rather than suggesting that television stultifies viewers-a suggestion that Updike makes as well in Roger's Version in the reference to Richie watching Saturday morning cartoons, his face turned toward the set like a flower to the sun, and bathed in the "moronic glow"-McLuhan suggests that those who disparage television for its pacifying qualities have misunderstood how the medium works. McLuhan argues that only by understanding media of communication themselves, rather than simply the content of those media, can we fully understand the ways in which how we convey information affects us as much as what we say.

McLuhan. McLuhan, a sociologist from the University of Toronto, is most famous for the phrases "the global village" and "the medium is the message." Having begun his studies in the humanities, and having become an anomaly among sociologists, both for the subject matter of his studies, and for the density of some of his prose, McLuhan nonetheless became well known by the popular news media, peaking in fame in the late 1960s. Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, published in 1964, just two years after The Gutenberg Galaxy, is one of the books that launched McLuhan's popularity. (In 1967, McLuhan would co-publish the pictoriographic, decidedly "cool" book that expanded on his thesis from Understanding Media entitled "The Medium is the Massage.") The chapters we're reading outline how "The Medium Is the Message," as well as McLuhan's thesis about "hot" and "cool" media. The chapters about radio and television then offer case studies about one "hot" medium, radio, and its considerably cooler cousin, television.

In the introduction to the paperback edition of Understanding Media, McLuhan quotes Jack Paar as asking teenagers why they used the term "cool" to signify things about which they were passionate. The answer he received? That older generations had already taken the term "hot" (v). The passage illustrates not only the deceptiveness of the slang term, but also of McLuhan's own terminology, "cool" media signifying expressions that elict increased involvement from the hearer or viewer, and "hot" media signifying expressions the require less interaction. From the chapters, then, for next week, and from other examples in Understanding Media, I've pieced together a diagram of hot and cold media on the lines of the diagram that Haraway included in her Cyborg Manifesto.

Although before his death in 1980, McLuhan could not have imagined the boom that internet culture would undergo, McLuhan has nonetheless resurfaced in fame largely because of his attention to new communications media. In 1996, for example, the editors of Wired magazine proclaimed that they were "channeling" McLuhan's spirit, complete with an "e-mail" interview with the deceased McLuhan, and quirky detail about McLuhan's conservative politics, relationship to the press, and conversion to Catholicism. (The editors deemed him the magazine's "patron saint" and a wisdom-pronouncing "holy fool").

A question or two for Thursday (or for your responses, if you're interested): where would you locate the World Wide Web on the scale of "hot" or "cool"? VCRs? DOS or Unix? Macintosh environments or Windows? Are the Wired editors deluded in finding McLuhan's writing so ameniable to their work?

Birkerts. Birkerts, writing, like McLuhan, for a popular audience, and playing on McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy in the title of his own book, is often discussed in the same breath with McLuhan. Birkerts' book, however, takes the form of an autobiographical history of reading and interaction with books, coupled with the argument that with the waning of the book, something precious is passing.

A specialist in the literature of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and their modernist contemporaries-the kind of literature that demands close and multiple readings-Birkerts himself writes through carefully crafted, albeit dense prose, while progressing to the "Faustian pact" that he finally exhorts readers to refuse (the characterization of that pact very possibly being one reason why Birkerts is regularly regaled in the pages of Wired). A discussion of literacy, as much as interaction with new technologies, Birkerts's discussion on ways of reading segues nicely with publications on literacy in fledgling book culture (such as those by David Cressy listed below). Touching, in his first chapter, on the apparent paradox between being college students and non-readers, Birkerts not only echoes McLuhan's analysis of what happens when users of "cool" media enter school, but also expresses a concern elaborated on by Mark Edmunson in the Harper's article below. In his discussion of hypertext, as well, Birkerts addresses a topic analyzed quite differently by George Landow.

Along with McLuhan, Birkerts has provoked a great deal of media response (see the "related links" portion of our class site for some online reviews of The Gutenberg Elegies, as well as other sites of interest), and offers a cautionary voice that resonates with the David Noble book that Ryan and Kevin reviewed Friday.

Works Cited

Asterisks designate source being on reserve at Moellering Library.

Cressy, David. Literacy and the Social Order : Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge UP, 1980.

---Education in Tudor and Stuart England . New York : St. Martin's Press, 1975.

Edmunson, Mark. "On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students." Harpers September 1997, 39-49. * (Will be placed on reserve Mon, 9/27.

Landow, George. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

McLuhan, Eric, and Frank Zingrone. Essential McLuhan. HarperCollins, 1996.*

McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage. Basic Books, 1987.

Wolf, Gary. "Channelling McLuhan." Wired. January 1996, 122 ff.

-------"The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool." Wired. January 1996, 128 ff.

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