Overheating, flipping out: Power, terror, and some guns
If you’re going to start reading Marshall McLuhan—and you should; he’s deeply underappreciated, grossly misunderstood, and wildly perception-changing, once you start digging him—you’ll want to begin with Understanding Media. It’s simultaneously shorter and more expansive than his previous book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and cheaper than the book before that, The Mechanical Bride (used paperbacks are going for $24.50 or more on Amazon as of right now, which is why I haven’t picked up a copy yet myself). And anything that came afterward you won’t really appreciate without having digested Understanding Media first. (OK, The Medium is the Massage is pretty cute, but even it’s a bit off-putting if you don’t know what you’re getting into.) Anyway, Media is the book where McLuhan debuts his now-famous phrase “the medium is the message,” which may or may not give you some idea of how momentous the shit is.
The first section of the book is devoted to a quick rundown of the effects and analysis of media in general—”media” being technology, and “technology” meaning a lot more than the computers, wires, metal, and plastic that typically flash through your brain when you hear that word. McLuhan is talking about anything and everything we humans use to interact with the world—computers and television and the like, yes, but also languages, the calculus, cigarettes, petroleum, the technique of perspective in painting, and so on and so forth. That’s why he uses the word “media”—because he’s talking about things that act as mediators between our senses and the universe. He always chooses his words carefully because he was (1) an English lit professor and (2) an artist in his own right, I would argue.
But enough of the intro (for now). One phenomenon he describes* is what he terms “the reversal of the overheated medium”: When a technology reaches a point where it’s “heated up” enough—where it’s broken up and disseminated throughout the world, so that there’s both more instances of it and it’s being used more and more often (it’s spread out and faster; imagine molecules as you add heat to them)—it eventually “flips over” into a new medium whose effects run counter to those of the original.
So you have (to use the example on which Understanding Media is based, because it’s the most fundamental one) mechanical technology, which moved people farther and farther around the world and apart from each other at increasingly faster rates, suddenly leading to electric technology, which (terrifically quickly, compared with how many thousands of years it took us to get from fire to steamships) reconnected the entire planet’s population (or will soon, anyway) at close to the speed of light. An explosion that took millennia became an implosion in a handful of decades.
The reversal of the overheated medium applies on smaller scales, too, of course. A personal favorite example is how rock’n'roll (white-people music “stolen” from blacks, in which the songs function as standalone pieces) reversed after a few years into hip-hop (black-people music “stolen” back from whites, a key element of which is a deeply involved jargon, a language or even universe of its own, peopled with characters and names you have to know to fully appreciate the songs). But yesterday, I thought of the reversal of the overheated medium first in conjunction with terrorism (which is nearly always on my mind, since my mind lives with the rest of poor mortal me in New York City) and then later when I saw CNN reporting on the shootings in Omaha.
Power used to be primarily distributed in center-margin structures: One person, plus a handful of his (it was usually a he) closest associates, had the bulk of the power, which they exercised in a radius emanating from their home base as far as they could. Power was tied to places, because you could only exercise it as fast as you could move information (you might be an emperor who could order one of your governors to do anything you wanted, but you had to get the orders to him first)—and information could only move as fast as people could, since someone had to carry it.** Obviously, if you were the person with the power in the first place, most of the time you had access to more people, and so you retained it. The power stayed at the center.
Electric technology decentralizes. Hierarchies stop being feasible, because information doesn’t have to go from the emperor to his designated courier to the governor anymore—even back in the 19th century, if a poor shoe shiner overheard important news given to the robber baron whose boots he was polishing, the shoe shiner could telegraph it across the country before the robber baron did, disrupting the more powerful man’s plans (technically—obviously, practically speaking it might not be as easy as all that for the shoe shiner).
The breakdown of hierarchy is one of the myriad of interrelated reasons the American government functions as poorly as it appears to now, too, but that’s a topic for another time. I thought of terrorism yesterday because one consequence of the reversal of the overheated medium is that destructive power, which used to be directly proportional to the number of people doing the destructing, can now be condensed into such a small space. Consider how much matériel and how many WWI-era soldiers it would take to take out Manhattan, how long it would take, and how incomplete the job would be. Then consider how much damage a dirty nuke small enough to fit in a car could do, and how instantaneously.
The reversal of the overheated medium took place along with the decentralization afforded by electric technology, of course—you don’t even have to be a “real” soldier backed by a powerful government anymore to make war on a grand scale. You just have to have the equipment. And this is the flip side of the vaunted “democratizing” powers of new media that the Web gurus and bloggers are always telling us are so great for humanity. Sorry, the sword cuts both ways.
So that’s where my thoughts went as far as terrorism goes. I thought of it all again when I saw the news about the shooter in Omaha because it amounts to the same thing on a smaller scale. Here’s this young guy who besides suffering from some kind of serious mental issues has, like all of us, the whole world pressing in on him on all sides, all the time. Which is a recent development. Even a century ago, who cared what was happening in the Middle East or North Korea or China, if it didn’t directly involve you? And what could you do about it anyway?
The first part has changed—we’re supposed to care—but the second hasn’t, because how much can you do? Our increased connection to the rest of the world only highlights our inadequacy as individuals, or at least as individuals who follow the traditional rules.
But if you’re willing to break those rules—well, then how much can you do? You can bet that the gunman, Robert Hawkins, had a pretty good idea that even if he wasn’t going to be around to see it, millions of people would hear his name and know who he was before the night was out. And we already know he’s not the only person those ideas have occurred to, and that some of those people have weapons a lot worse than a high-powered rifle.
Now we need to figure out what to do about it. To do that, we have to look more closely at what’s actually going on in this crazy thing called Life. And we ought to get on that, real soon.
—j
*If “describes” is the right word—I guess it literally is, but McLuhan isn’t into quote-unquote clear-cut explanations.
**Detailed information, obviously. You could of course send simple messages by way of, say, smoke signals or fires or drums.
