Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore
Penguin 1967
Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore
Penguin 1967
ISBN 140028161 (paper)
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No, it isn't a typo, it really does say massage not message. McLuhan's title, suitably misquoted, is by now far better known than his book, and at least that much of his message got across.
As with other prophetic books, such as Henry Dreyfuss' Designing for People, the examples and arguments often seem obvious today, and as the student said when reading Shakespeare, the book is full of quotations. This is what happens when someone predicts the future correctly.
It must at once be said that this is also an obviously dated book -- and the magnificently Whatever is That Woman Wearing? cover image is a precise guide to the visual style of the book's contents, and a dreadful warning against trying to be trendy.
Behind the absurd glitz and the hang-loose, man typography and imagery (a pretty young female cellist carrying her instrument through a messy hall, wearing some nearly-transparent chiffon), are the stark truths that McLuhan correctly sensed were the true spirit of the age. The tiny integrated circuit perched on someone's finger - never mind that it seems to contain less than 50 components, and no-one has invented the term microchip yet - seems a truism, yet it is a newcomer, and at the time McLuhan was writing, had only been in existence five years or so. The image of the naked shaman telling a story to a close circle of African villagers is titled 'The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village'. How modern this sounds! How much like current political claptrap! How self-evident! Yet in the 1960s, when cheap jet travel was just beginning, and the villages of southern Europe were as wild and mediaeval as any in the poorest parts of the world today, this was a daring statement.
So to the title. McLuhan understood that the way that information is presented works the audience over as a masseur relaxes his client. If you download some news from the web, you know the information will be new and fragmentary, and you will read only a page or two of it, mostly by skimming. If you watch the news on television, you know it will consist mostly of a well-groomed presenter reading something professionally, and trying to make a joke of the last item which will finish precisely on time.
Amidst this confusion of means and ends, McLuhan presents some shattering truths. '"The major advances in civilization are processses that all but wreck the societies in which they occur." - A. N. Whitehead' is printed in bold white on a black double-page spread on pages 5 and 6, with the huge words 'and how!' above them. The electronic media are about to reshape everything you do (as Sven Birkerts so gently and persuasively argues). In the 1960s, if you wanted to make a book you (or your secretary) typed it on a mechanical typewriter (grandad's Imperial, with keys that you had to push, remember?), sent the script to a publisher, who paid a typesetter to set every single letter you had typed again, in metal, and which you then had to correct. Both the typewriter and the typesetting industry have been swept away, and so quickly: along with the typing pool, and the ritual of submitting handwritten manuscripts to be typed. And those are just the most obvious changes. The global village... McLuhan was more than right about the devastating impact that electronic communications would have on the structure of societies across the globe.
Is there a special message for the engineer in all this? Well, yes. You can't specify a system without considering its context, its environment; and all the significant innovations of the last generation -- since McLuhan -- have altered the environment, intentionally or not. Engineering generally intends to change the world, for the better of course; McLuhan's "Inventory of Effects" illustrates, oddly before it happened, the nature of the shock.
The dimensions of the shock's effects are material, political, social, intellectual and indeed spiritual (as Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies shows). Can engineers do anything about it in their work? Well, we surely can't halt the flood; but perhaps we requirements people can get people to think a little more carefully about who is involved and who will be affected by new systems, and what the effects will be.
© Ian Alexander 2003