Understanding McLuhan: Television and the Creation of the Global Village

Abstract

A spectre haunts the infosphere. Marshall McLuhan, who died in 1980, still informs fast-forward-looking disc-course. Wired Magazine (and its on-line version, HotWired) list Marshall McLuhan on their mastheads as patron saint. New editions of his books appear. His probing theories have become the focus (to use an optical/mechanical metaphor) of several often-visited web sites and newsgroups. A revaluation seems warranted (even if presented in the retrograde medium of print) ... JK For Marshall McLuhan, electronic technologies represented contradiction, they constitute the future. With their advent, he hypothesized, they would become a threat to phonetic literacy because, as extensions of our nervous systems rather than our corporeal bodies, they turn us inside out. For that reason these technologies are, in contrast to the linear-mechanical ones, all encompassing, organismic, circular, tactile, emotional, and affective. In that sense they are cool media: there is low definition input to all the senses rather than just one, meaning information is necessarily incomplete. This leaves the participant to in the gaps. As such, these new technologies must, by necessity, lead to unstoppable changes to individual and societal thinking and behavior. Progress in this direction will continue with or without permission or consciousness of the effects it will bring to Western society. (1) McLuhan argued that those changes would lead to implosion, not explosion. The world, he said, would fall in on itself. The globe would become joined through the blood system of electric wires that would shrink the planet into a single community with an all-inclusive nowness. And a smaller world obviates time - its relevance no longer important to a worldwide society where nothing or no one ever stops. Time and space become timelessness and spacelessness. The result is a Global Village based on a single consciousness in the preliterate oral tradition. Television, for many, is still the ultimate in electric progress. (2) But, if television is bringing the changes hypothesized by McLuhan, how exactly is it achieving these ends? How does participation in the cool medium of television effect changes in viewers and therefore society? How does the involvement necessary to fill in the gaps lead to changes in behavior at a level most are not even aware of? This paper will attempt to answer those questions as follows: first, by ascertaining how the Global Village may actually be developing by relying on the ideas of Joshua Meyrowitz, Erving Goffman and Edward Hall; second, by drawing a link between watching television and interpersonal interaction; and finally, by explaining why viewers pay attention to television in the first place. I. THE GLOBAL VILLAGE: LIVING IN A PLACELESS AND SPACELESS WORLD a. Frames and Situational Behavior Defined McLuhan argued that the previous mechanical technologies based upon visual linearity had made man essentially physically and socially static. (3) However, electric technologies such as television were seen as catalysts toward an interconnected, organismic, and holistic Global Village. Television can achieve this end because it radically and permanently alters situational definitions and their consequent behaviors with global uniformity as the inevitable result. Situational definitions, or framing, is a formulation developed by sociologist Erving Goffman. He hypothesized that in every physical and place-based situation, all the individuals contained therein will in some fashion ask themselves What is it that's going on here? (4) Each individual will try to answer that question by framing the situation in a manner that makes the interpersonal encounter understandable. Similarly, every time the situation shifts, an individual will have to shift frames appropriately. Frames allow a quick and easy way to put useful personal and meanings to events. Mass communication scholars define them as social or personal definitions of situations that are used to organize actions in those situations. …