Core Response to McLuhan's Understanding Media

In response to the reading from McLuhan’s Understanding Media, I think most of his ideas are easily transferred to the context of Television today. The largest conflict I see is in reconciling the formerly “‘mass’ audience” with the emerging group of diverse, individual and corporate content creators. I think Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture closes this gap by describing the points of convergence between media creators and media consumers. 

The next biggest (and comparably minor) issue I take with McLuhan’s writing is that he is swift to post technologically-dependent barriers between concepts. He describes the Television screen as a mosaic on which a third-dimension may be “superimposed”: “Most of the three-dimensional illusion is a carry-ver of habitual viewing of film and photo. For the TV camera does not have a built-in angle of vision like the movie camera. Eastman Kodak now has a two-dimensional camera that can match the flat effects of the TV camera” (p. 346). I think the division he makes between television and film cameras in regards to dimensionality is unnecessary. He offers perceptual dimensions as a separator of film and televisual media, but he fails to recognize or account for how film’s representation of dimensionality is less “superimposed” than television. 

If we pull this conflict into the context of the 21st century, we may see how little a role the the camera actually plays in distinguishing the mediums. Since “television” came to associate itself so closely with the streaming-based content distribution but also tracing back to cable television services, diverse modes of production have proliferated around content distributors. Production systems were organized around new genres like Reality Television and Music television. Even once-monolithic forms like the situation comedy have shifted modes of production by abandoning laugh tracks and, curiously, operating on single-camera production. 

What McLuhan could not have predicted (although his metaphor of the “Electric Man” hints toward) is that of digital technologies infiltrating every established production process across the television industry and the economy as a whole. The technological difference between the digital cameras used in television and film becomes insignificant when compared to the technological differences of the cameras in McLuhan’s day.