This week, we’ve got the idea that technologies translate one kind of knowledge into another.
And the use of the metaphor “spelling it out” to mean “making knowledge explicit”—and the view that words are a significant technology (as indeed are the metaphors we craft from them).
All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.
And we’ve got the idea that “alternately grasping and letting go in order to enlarge the scope of action” (as illustrated by “the power of the higher, arboreal apes as compared with those that are on the ground") is a key insight into the power of technology.
I want to note that in addition to enlarging the scope of action1, the idea of swinging around up high in a tree looks more like PLAY than stamping around along the ground to get from place to place. One of my favorite leadership books noted that humans at their worst often end up functionally-limited to the palette of behaviors of reptiles, and that you cannot play with a reptile in the way that you can play with a dog or a horse—an idea that’s stuck with me.
I can’t stop wondering if keeping ones eyes open for “what’s fun” in what we do is a lot more crucial than we think. I think about how if you introduce a 3-YO boy to a bike or trike or one of those kiddie-driveable vehicles, he will be like “this is obviously cool; this is fun; I want to do this.” The whole idea McLuhan is putting forward is that our technologies extend our power, so when a 3-year-old sees a bike or a scooter or a Tonka truck, he’s seeing its power.
The swinging in a tree also involves a component of risk, which is also correlates with fun and with things that provide “an enlarged scope of action.”2
Speaking of things that involve a component of risk… you know what I think a lot about the risks of? Using words. (So does the internet—else why do we tie our hearts and souls in knots over the fear of getting cancelled?) Anyway, I was leading up to this:
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
Risk, but also the potential for power.3
Words as the passkeys to information retrieval:
By means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols, the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant.
Words at scale: Etiquette for interfacing in the interlinked social-media shared consciousness.
McLuhan’s observations about the effect of humans communicating electronically seem a bit ominous.
Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide.
Remember, his two chief characteristics of “electric technology” are that it happens at the speed of light, and that its effect will be like that of a an electric field: because the communications can be delivered to 1000 people or one million people just as “easily” (in some sense) as to 1 person, we must think about these communications hitting the million all at once.
But yeah… “human docility.” “Utter human docility.”
<Looks up the definition of quiescence… before, you know, writing ignorantly or unreflectively about “quiescence of meditation” to a few dozen people—message to be delivered electronically shortly.>
Oh. “Suspension”? “Suspension of meditation.” That does not. look. good.
Wearing ones brain outside ones skull and ones nerves outside ones hide… huh, I could see how, then, they would be exposed… and how that might lead such a one to be cautious.
And, again, in the context of the long-term effects of these electronic communications technologies existing and getting used, we have the thought:
An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness.
Words at a small scale: A moment when you honor a friend in a one-on-one chat.
I enjoyed getting a sense of what hearing “I’ll take a rain check on that” from a friend… might have felt if I’d heard it way back when the metaphor was fresh with its original meaning:
When we say “I’ll take a rain check on that,” we translate a social invitation into a sporting event, stepping up the conventional regret to an image of spontaneous disappointment: “Your invitation is not just one of those casual gestures that I must brush off. It makes me feel all the frustration of a interrupted ball game that I can’t get with it.”
When I hear someone say that, I don’t hear it carrying a heightened sense of their disappointment. It’s just a way of saying the same old “Oh, well! We should get together soon” line which some mean and some don’t.
But McLuhan has more he wants to teach us here. He goes on:
As in all metaphors, there are complex ratios among four parts… It is in this way that by seeing one set of relations through another set that we store and amplify experience in such forms as money.
For money is also a metaphor.
In spite of the fact that it’s as easy as pie for me to hop right onto the bandwagon of carbon-copying some ole’ dead metaphor just because it’s the first thing that popped up on my metaphorical mental radar… maybe, just maybe, I should sometimes try to create something new… …like whoever first came up with “I’ll take rain check” did.
Also—wait— “Money is also a metaphor”?
Money can be what people normally think of it as (unless it’s not, and never was!) and it can be a metaphor as well?
Hey—metaphors are powerful!
Suddenly I sense myself being more interested in thinking about money than I was a minute ago.
Anyway, back to the topic of cultivating pleasant words to make a friend feel honored—like that first “I’ll take rain check” guy (or gal) did—I give you this cool take from Justin Murphy:
Casually dropping a memorized line from Shakespeare while drinking with your friends was a kind of social performance worth optimizing for, whereas public grandstanding about some distant political issue was not. Today it's the opposite. One will put countless hours of effort into writing impressive tweets, but one would never spend 30 minutes learning a dance, or a scene from a play, just to make a friend laugh at dinner.
[NOTE: I do not unequivocally recommend Justin Murphy’s writing, nonononono! But boy does he have some gems. Like that one!]
Back to a larger (or possibly larger) scale: Art, Catharsis.
Perhaps there is a key… in the Freudian idea that when we fail to translate some natural event or experience into conscious art we “repress” it.
Well, that’s interesting. I did spend a lifetime avoiding Freudian ideas, so I don’t know what to tell you, except…
…sounds good. From my own experience, creating art can give me catharsis, and consuming taking in others’ art also can give me catharsis.
It’s a very hopeful possibility that the very piece of art that will heal me in my act of creating it will help others in their acts of consuming receiving it. Has been ever since I first started creating writing as an adult that could leave an effect on others. (Well, writing that was intentionally art.)
It’s the possibility that, even though experiences I would wish to erase cannot be erased, they can be redeemed.
Addendum
This chapter has a whole lot of territory I just did not cover.
It has hilarious AI-generated translation blooper from way back when in the 1960s. (Okay, I don’t know whether that is a real AI-generated blooper, or McLuhan or someone just “got things” enough to anticipate/predict what the form of them might look like.) This is the Mark II he’s talking about with regards to that translation blooper. (which “stands by to rend the masterpieces of literature from any language into any other language")
Not sure if this is the machine in this image is the Mark II or Mark I:
Other thing I didn’t cover, which you’d expect me to… was a reference to George Herbert describing prayer as “reversed thunder”—which McLuhan seemed to be connecting to some point about the transformation of human beings “more and more into the form of information.” And regarding that, I’m not quite sure I discern what McLuhan means by that, of a few possible things he could mean. (And, clearly, I want to have a better grasp of it if I’m going to “play it back” for you.)
(actions that it’s possible to take? actions that one could take at any given moment? speed of actions per minute? all of the above and more?)
Also, note: “enlarge the scope of action” seems to me to have the same rhythm as “and lose the name of action” does in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy and I can’t get that out of my head. McLuhan was keenly aware of poetry—lectured on poetry in the universities before founding this branch of media studies.
If I’m right about the rhythm of each being the same, it’s totally possible that it was something he put there intentionally/consciously.
Additionally, yeah, there’s repeated Shakespeare excerpts in this chapter; I really want this to be intentional.
Btw, how does the use of words involve “letting go” of our environment? I’m not sure I’ve caught on (ha-ha) to what that means yet.
> Risk, but also the potential for power.
This really rhymes with C.S. Lewis' take on technology in "The Abolition of Man": "What we call man's power over nature is really the power of one man over another with nature as an instrument" (possibly paraphrased as I don't have my copy in front of me).
> "By means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols, the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant."
This put me in mind of the perspective on LLMs as a compression of the training corpus.
"... we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information"
"Under electric technology, the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing. In terms of what we still consider an "economy" (the Greek word for a household), this means that all forms of employment become "paid learning," and all forms of wealth result from the movement of information."
These are definitely prescient about the current economy, including the part where so many facets of our lives become commodified as "content" or data points for targetted advertising algos. I think he oversells it a bit--the information economy has been superimposed on the physical economy rather than sweeping it aside, at least so far.