Core Response: Week 2

Last night, Troy Hall and Troy East, two USC dorms, experienced a 6 hour power outage.
As the day grew dark and my laptop battery began to drain, it dawned on me just how much
we required electricity. The scenario brings to mind McLuhan’s concept of “All media are
extensions of some human faculty— psychic or physical,” in the sense that we felt rather
helpless in the absence of media (The Medium Is the Massage, 26). Indeed, McLuhan, as
Plato before him, argues that media takes a part of our human capabilities, relieves us of that
mechanism, and forces us to rely on that medium. The medium is the massage and not the
message because, for McLuhan, media is linked to our very bodies, and in turn must be studied
for their materialistic characteristics rather than for their content. When my optometrist studies
my eyeball, for example, she considers how the light enters my cornea, reflects through my lens,
and hits my optic nerve. She presumably has little interest in exactly what I see (except for maybe
the letters on the wall, which are devoid of social meaning and are meant to reveal the symptoms
of my very poor eyesight). I think it would then be McLuhanesque to claim that the glasses she s
ubsequently provides me are also a form of media. McLuhan holds onto this rather materialistic/
technological analysis in the face of more complex media, arguing that it is the dots of the cathode
ray tube set that creates the essence of TV and its high participatory nature.  

To return to my unfortunate night, we can see how I have extended my eye sight into the electric

light sources in my house, just as I have done so through my glasses, and without them, I am lost.

McLuhan’s claim seems to win in this scenario. What I have always struggled with, however, is what

exactly we extend (and, consequently lose) into more complex social forms such as film and television.

One answer produced by the juxtaposition between this question and Feuer’s piece on liveness and

families could be that television is an extension of one’s closest social connections. Although many

reactionary voices would gladly echo the simplicity of this claim, wouldn’t this claim also require the

very consideration of social context and content, against which McLuhan is so dead-set? Unlike

eyesight, social connection is much more varied, which McLuhan himself admits to with his

problematic profiling of different cultures. Considering these differences, the social connections

extended into TV might also vary. This almost resembles Williams’ consideration of the divergent

social meanings and contexts more so than McLuhan’s sterilized focus on technological form.

This perhaps is McLuhan’s ultimate misstep: to treat what we traditionally see as media the same

as more low-level processes of sensory perception. While the light has extended my vision, television

has extended much more, and therefore requires a more cultural and complex perspective to analyze.