Electricity is the Medium
When McLuhan says “the medium is the message” the meaning is clear enough: television, radio, film, etc. are all types of media through a message is transmitted. When McLuhan writes that electric light “is a medium without a message” the meaning is much murkier and requires explanation. Fortunately, imagery is engaged to simplify and clarify:
“The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no `content.’ And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all. For it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium. Then it is not the light but the `content’ (or what is really another medium) that is noticed.”
Cultural Collapse
It is vital to understand that when McLuhan refers to media, he is thinking well beyond the reaches of information transmission. Indeed, his broad definition of media can even extend to tools not necessarily immediately considered technological in nature. The story of how axes caused cultural collapse among an indigenous population is illustrative and illuminating:
“When Australian natives were given steel axes by the missionaries, their culture, based on the stone axe, collapsed. The stone axe had not only been scarce but had always been a basic status symbol of male importance. Th e missionaries provided quantities of sharp steel axes and gave them to women and children. The men had even to borrow these from the women, causing a collapse of male dignity.”
The TV President
A significant chunk if text is devoted to analyzing how television was essential to the election of John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon in 1960. The fundamental premise, as always, is that Kennedy became the first “TV” President and that he would never have defeated Nixon in the age of radio.
“President Kennedy did not look like a rich man or like a politician. He could have been anything from a grocer or a professor to a football coach. He was not too precise or too ready of speech in such a way as to spoil his pleasantly tweedy blur of countenance and outline. He went from palace to log cabin, from wealth to the White House, in a pattern of T V reversal and upset.”
Electrification and Walls
Back to the concept of electricity as a medium, McLuhan reveals that all the technological achievements associated with the twentieth century are interrelated and inextricably linked to each other. What’s more, they also have something very concrete in common which he conveys through an almost poetic imagery:
“The telephone: speech without walls.
The phonograph: music hall without walls.
The photograph: museum without walls.
The electric light: space without walls.
The movie, radio, and TV : classroom without walls.”
