Media Determinism and Media Theory

Resource: Media Culture Bibliography  

 

I: Defining the media determinism thesis: changes in media have a determining effect upon culture

 

Many forms of this thesis: from high theory to histories of media to Sunday Supplement articles to vernacular theory: McLuhan's liked to compare changes in media to changes in the global living environment: both require adaptation by those who would survive.

 

Example of extreme media determinism: Video: Call It Sleep: the Spectacle

 

Rhetoric of determinism:

  • black and white graphics;
  • gloomy authoritative over-voice;
  • the phatic aphoristic pronouncements from on high;
  • the deployment of an enigmatic concept (“Spectacle”) as a global term that explains all;
  • history reduced to caricature ….

What is the intellectual genealogy of the media theory found in "Call It Sleep"?

 

1: Marx on commodity fetishism: Capital I:1:4: social labor is embedded in things during their production, then forgotten as they circulate on the market: the commodity acquires the glow of a false idol

2: Lukacs on reification of labor in the factory: the "thingification" of movements of the body on the assembly line produces alienated labor, subordinated to the logic of Capital

3: Frankfurt School on the “Culture Industry”: scandal: culture (Kultur) as grounded in aesthetic autonomy and critique has been turned into an “industry” motivated by profit and deploying mechanical production in the one arena that was exempt from mechanization--culture; media becomes an ad for the status quo. [analogy of liberal capitalism with fascism and communism: the former used the concentrated spectacle, but capitalism uses the diffuse spectacle]  

4: Guy Debord: Spectacle is a global and totalizing term for products produced and consumed by people, for the ideology "they produce" and consumers accept, and the spectacular “world” they find themselves dwelling within

 

This intellectual trajectory implies an increasingly powerful enclosure of the subjects of media within the apparatus of media (as Capital) (market…factory…culture industry …Spectacle);

Question: what are the entertainment value of such a theory? in The Matrix, in The Truman Show?

 

 

II: Critiques of media determinism

  1. by laying bare the arbitrary choices the lie behind the institution of new media forms often visible through comparative media studies (e.g. the institution of TV in different countries);
  2. by questioning the motives behind the media determinism thesis:
    a) the self-interested delusions of grandeur harbored by media industries(e.g. David Sarnoff on radio);
    b) challenging the high cultural bias that often motivates cultural critique (e.g. Adorno on Jazz; BBC programming);
    c) noting the history of a discipline like Communications: it starts with the study of propaganda, and evolves into the science of influencing consumers
  3. by insisting upon the active constitutive role of culture before, during and after the institution of new media;

A move Implicit in many of critiques of media determinism: inscribing media theory into history

In my book on the 18th century novel, Licensing Entertainment : I noted the similaritiy of 18th century debates about the dangerous effects of absorptive, solitary novel reading upon young women and men to contemporary debates about media:

  • not so important to decide who was “right” or “wrong” when it came to media determinism
  • instead understand how the terms and forms of those debates comes to structure the media forms and practices developed in their wake
  • example of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding rewriting the novels of amorous intrigue of Behn, Manley and Haywood so as to invent the modern, critical, elevating morally responsible novel

III: McLuhan as the prophet of media determinism in the age of TV

Behind both Debord and the early McLuhan lies the worry about the social implications of TV’s structure:

  • global in reach (by the 60s TV it was becoming international) but it is controlled from a few centers;
  • essentially non-interactive (even radio had its early interactive form);
  • various and ductile compared to film but almost as absorptive (it could include many formats, genres, etc):
  • produces historically unprecedented asymmetries of power (e.g. McLuhan as a Canadian worrying thei inflence of American TV beamed over the border)
  • the passive spectator becomes the alternative to the politically engaged citizen

 

Cover of Society of the Spectacle
What is the rhetoric of this image? How does the spectacle acquire the power to fashion the audience into a homogeous "mass?"

 

If you look at media theory purveyed in this video, or Guy Debord's book, you see a contradiction at the heart of media determinism: the theory that argues media determinism also suggests the critic’s freedom of the determinism described. Thus, the makers "Call It Sleep", like Guy Debord, use “found media” so as to redirect its meaning, it uses the spectacle against itself (in French “detournment”), so as to develop a critique of media culture.

 

Is the same contradiction at work in McLuhan?

central myth: in the beginning was the (oral) Word in the village….
then there was the “fall” into linear, rational Print…
media have always entailed an extention of the body:
 
and now, through the miracle of (cool) electronic media, we can shed our old resistances, we can enjoy the spontaneous pleasures of playing in an expanded electronic media sphere
Paradox: McLuhan's media theory seeks to use electronic media to return original place of self-presence, identity, community—the global village, but this appears to be (in its Romantic appeal to nature) beyond mediation
Question 1: should media be viewed as environment (or “media-sphere”)à and thus as a container or confining limit of what life can be?
Question 2: should we seek, as McLuhan does, to determine the essence or ontology of each medium? what are the implicit groundrules of such a typology of media, for example by distinguishing hot from cool media?