Lindbergh’s book reads like a prequel to the digital age. Connectedness had ramped up dramatically, and, as today, it was turning life into a slog. But notice that she, too, focused on the content of her busyness—the various “demands” that arrive “through” media and other sources—rather than the technologies themselves.
Thus, on two different planes—the macro (sociopolitical life) and the micro (private life)—there was a broad sense that, in an increasingly crowded world, people were less free to be themselves. Whether they were surrendering their minds to a charismatic ideologue on the radio or simply unable to keep up with everyday demands and distractions, the effect was the same: they were losing their autonomy, becoming creatures of the outward world. And, the thinking went, this was all the result of incoming messages and ideas, of content.
Few stopped to consider the gadgets that connected everyone in the first place—radio, television, and so on—and what role those might be playing, quite apart from the content they conveyed. That’s where McLuhan came in. In 1962, with his groundbreaking book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, he proposed a completely new way of thinking about this question. He argued that the technologies themselves have a more powerful impact on human beings than the content they carry. This, he explained, is because our tools are really extensions of our bodies.
Written language, for example, is an extension of our sense of sight: it extends our vision out into the world, allowing us to pull back information in the form of letters and words. Whenever a new connective device is added to the toolbox, it extends another part of us outward. The telephone gave our ears global reach, while television extended both eyes and ears in a new way. According to McLuhan, every time this happens it alters how we perceive and process reality, in effect creating a new environment for the mind and for our lives. We inhabit a reality shaped fundamentally by our tools. Thus the medium is the message, far more than the content it carries.
This outward extension of the self through tools had been going on since the dawn of human history, and because it involved a fundamental rearrangement of one’s mental life—the old expression “rock my world” neatly sums up the effect—it was always stressful. “Man the tool-making animal, whether in speech or in writing or in radio, has long been engaged in extending one or another of his sense organs in such a manner as to disturb all of his other senses and faculties,” McLuhan wrote.
He took it a step further, contending that when a truly momentous new device appears, such as the printing press, the inner environmental change is so dramatic that it produces a new kind of human being. So, in addition to the medium being the message, the user is the content. We ourselves are changed by our devices, and because we’re changed, society changes, too. Gutenberg’s invention had created what McLuhan called Typographic Man, whose mind operated in a linear, objective fashion that fostered individualism. Equipped with this left-brain way of thinking, this being had thrived for centuries and built up Western civilization.
But McLuhan said he was about to be replaced. Because mass electronic media work on us in a different way from print, those technologies were creating a new person whose mind was less linear and individualistic, more group-oriented. In the future, he predicted, our minds would operate more like the oral mind of Socrates’ era. In fact, he said, this new age had already arrived, which was why everyone was feeling so anxious and full of doubt. Print had given human beings the “inner direction” that Riesman had talked about in The Lonely Crowd, and now they felt it slipping away. The old boundary between the inward self and the outward world had been permanently breached by electronic technology. Inner direction would now be much harder to come by.
He traced this shift back to the nineteenth century, when, he said, the telegraph had, in effect, extended the entire central nervous system, including the brain, out into the world. Suddenly, human beings were immersed in what he called “a total field of interacting events in which all men participate,” i.e., everything happening at any given moment on the planet. By the mid–twentieth century, telephones, radio, and television had made this brain-taxing environment all the more intense. According to McLuhan, this was the true source of the stress and unhappiness people were feeling, the sense of the mind being under siege and paralyzed. His biographer W. Terrence Gordon summarized McLuhan’s view: “Technologies create new environments, the new environments create pain, and the body’s nervous system shuts down to block the pain.”
However, there was a way to avoid the pain and thrive in the global village. McLuhan said it was a matter of understanding that you were living in this new world and then adjusting to it. Though he believed that the new gadgets were the source of our trouble, he didn’t blame them. He placed the ultimate responsibility with human beings. If our technologies are driving us nuts, it’s our fault for not paying attention to what they’re doing to us. Why should we allow tools that are supposed to be making us happy to make us miserable? We should take control of the new technologies “instead of being pushed around by them.”
His next book opened with the motto “The medium is the message,” and it made him an authentic pop-culture icon. It was an unlikely fate for a fifty-two-year-old brainiac given to quoting James Joyce and Charles Baudelaire. But it was a moment when people were desperate to make sense of a crowded world, and he offered a fresh approach. To promote it, he deftly used the technologies he wrote about, appearing widely in the media, including on TV talk shows. Sometimes he would discuss his theories, but often he was just another famous-for-being-famous celebrity. On the kooky comedy show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, the question “Marshall McLuhan, what are ya’ doin’?” became a running gag.
Unfortunately, though his catchphrases caught on, most people never fully grasped the concepts behind them. And that was really McLuhan’s fault. His writing was too theoretical and maddeningly circular. His books were structured as collections of short stand-alone essays presented in what he called “mosaic” fashion, meaning they could be read in any order. It was his effort to break out of the linear thinking he believed was a thing of the past. For readers raised in a left-brain culture, however, it wasn’t a helpful approach, particularly since it was delivered in a medium designed to be read from start to finish, the book. The abstruseness of his work eventually became part of his shtick and the theme of a funny moment in the Woody Allen movie Annie Hall, in which McLuhan plays himself. Even today, with the global village in full swing, reading him, one often feels like Alice in Wonderland trying to decode a barrage of seemingly random statements.
He was not a neuroscientist, and when he tries to describe the workings of the central nervous system, his language can be particularly inscrutable: “My suggestion is that cultural ecology has a reasonably stable base in the human sensorium, and that any extension of the sensorium by technological dilation has a quite appreciable effect in setting up new ratios or proportions among all the senses.” If he’d written more plainly, his theories might be as well known today as his maxims.
Despite these obstacles, McLuhan has endured into this century, for a couple of reasons. First, in the early digital years his work was rediscovered and embraced by fervent fans of the new gadgets, who translated “The medium is the message” to mean “Technology rules!”—the exact opposite of how McLuhan believed the world should work. But this leads to the second reason he’s endured and why he’s so relevant today: he placed human freedom and happiness before technology. Though our devices do have a tremendous influence on us, we should rule.
In his efforts to encourage this, he hit on some important truths about life in an electronic society. Sometimes it really does feel as though your brain is extended so far into the outward world, it’s left your body. When this happens, it’s very difficult to go back inward and be alone with your thoughts. That’s what depth comes down to, really, taking all the stuff your mind has gathered in its travels back inside, to sort through it and see what it all means. To make
it your own. The only way to cultivate a happy inner life is to spend time there, and that’s impossible when you’re constantly attending to the latest distraction. Attention deficit issues, Internet addiction, and other tech-related maladies are all about being stuck in outward gear.
McLuhan’s prescription? He insisted he wasn’t advocating any particular approach and didn’t provide specific instructions about how to apply his work. His ideas are best if used selectively; his most valuable insight is that even though technology is impinging more than ever on our minds, they’re still our minds. You can allow yourself to be led around by technology, or you can take control of your consciousness and thereby your life. He had a way with metaphors, and he had one for each of these options.
He used the Greek myth of Narcissus to explain why people become entranced by tech gadgets. Narcissus is the youth who sees his own reflection in the water and mistakes it for somebody else. “Now the point of this myth,” McLuhan wrote, “is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.” Similarly, he said, we’re fascinated by new technologies because they project us beyond ourselves. But just like Narcissus, we don’t recognize that that’s what the gadget is doing, projecting us, by extending our bodies into the world. The confusion induces a kind of trance. We can’t take our eyes off it, but we don’t understand why.
His nickname for the Narcissus type applies to anyone who has ever been mysteriously spellbound by a screen (i.e., just about everyone): the Gadget Lover. But some people have it really bad. The cure, McLuhan said, “is simply in knowing that the spell can occur immediately upon contact, as in the first bars of a melody.” Feeling the need yet again to stare longingly into the screen? Think of Narcissus and resist.
The second metaphor is about the active, take-charge approach he favored. Being hooked up to the crowd all the time—our central nervous systems “interlinked,” as my friend put it—doesn’t mean we have to surrender our fate to it. To make this point, McLuhan used an Edgar Allan Poe story called “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” about a fisherman whose boat is sucked into an enormous whirlpool. Down he spins into the roaring vortex, certain he’s going to die. Then something strange happens. In his delirium, he relaxes and, to amuse himself, makes a game out of studying how the whirlpool works.
Other boats have been drawn in and demolished, and he notices that the pieces of flotsam flying past behave in different ways depending on their shapes. While most hurtle rapidly downward, cylindrical objects such as barrels aren’t swallowed up as easily. Those linger up near the top of the vortex, closer to the surface. Based on this observation, he decides to lash himself to his own water cask and leap overboard. It works. The boat continues whirling down to its doom, but the clever fisherman doesn’t. “The cask to which I was attached sank very little farther,” he says. Eventually the whirlpool stops whirling and he winds up back on the surface. “The sky was clear, the winds had gone down, and the full moon was setting radiantly in the west.” He’s saved himself.
To McLuhan, the whirlpool stood for life in an electronic world. Here we are, surrounded by a ferocious, disorienting barrage of information and stimuli, seemingly spinning out of control. “How are we to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity?” he asked. His answer was to do what the fisherman did. Instead of panicking, take a deep breath and be resourceful. Study the flotsam of the moment, and grab onto something solid.
Poe’s story was a favorite of McLuhan because, like his philosophy, it came down to the individual. Human ingenuity may have created our whirlpool, but it can also save us, one person at a time. We shouldn’t be paralyzed by the new environment in which we find ourselves, but engaged and creative. “People are cowed by technology,” Kevin McMahon, the director of a documentary film about the philosopher called McLuhan’s Wake, once observed. “The optimistic side of McLuhan’s message is: You’ve built these things, and you can control them if you understand how they affect you. To me, his message is still really important.”
The logical question, then, is: what’s our water cask? Like the fisherman, everyone has to work that out for himself. We’re all different, and there’s no one-size-fits-all way to balance the outward life and the inward one. That has always been true. What matters most is engagement, being conscious that you’re shaping your own experience every moment. If you spend most of your time pressing keys and managing electronic traffic, that’s what your life will be about. Maybe that makes you happy. If not, you have other options.
One helpful McLuhan technique, a refined version of his cure for the Narcissus trance, is to bear in mind that different devices affect us in different ways. To illustrate how this works, he used temperature as metaphor, distinguishing between “hot” and “cool” technologies. A hot technology is intense, overwhelming us with information and stimuli. A cool one is less intense, inviting the user to participate more in the experience, fill in the blanks. “The hot form excludes, and the cool one includes,” he wrote.
He defined radio as a hot medium, because it intensely floods one sense with information, leaving little for the listener to fill in. But he said that television is cool, because it seeks more viewer involvement. These definitions are flexible and can change over time, since new technologies alter how older ones affect us. Today, though digital screens are highly participatory, they’re also overwhelming and, arguably, hot. And radio now seems relatively cool.
The point is that by bearing in mind that gadgets have different effects, you can regulate the climate in your mind. It’s another way of thinking about the continuum of connectedness that we’re always moving along. If six straight hours of screen time has your mind overheated, what will cool it down? Staring at your handheld the entire subway ride home might not do it. Maybe it’s better to just sit quietly and enjoy the ride. Sometimes the coolest device of all is no device. Rather than allowing external forces to define how we feel inside, each of us can be our own thermostat.
As instructive as McLuhan’s ideas remain, even more remarkable in retrospect is how eager the world was to hear them. Half a century ago, there was enough interest in the human dilemmas posed by technology to turn an obscure literature professor into an international celebrity. And by raising consciousness about these questions, McLuhan further broadened that interest. For a time, there was a booming market in self-help for the technologically confused, including Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, with the new term “information overload.” Robert Pirsig’s bestseller, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, offered a new way of thinking about the relationship between human beings and technology, drawing on both Eastern and Western philosophy
Today there’s plenty of chatter about the burden of screens, but not the same kind of critical, constructive engagement. Narcissus? Hot and cool media? Does anyone entertain thoughts remotely like this as they scroll through the inbox, vaguely wondering why their mind feels tapped out? We shrug and accept this as our fate. Instead of celebrity philosophers we have celebrity chefs, dozens of them. But they never talk about how delicious life itself could be if we followed a different recipe. That’s what McLuhan was all about, really, recognizing that the kitchen of the mind is stocked with all the best ingredients. Each of us could be in there every day, cooking up a masterpiece. Why aren’t we?
PART III
IN SEARCH OF DEPTH
Ideas in Practice
Chapter Twelve
NOT SO BUSY
Practical Philosophies for Every Day
Thus far into this new era, we’ve followed a clear-cut approach: we’ve set out to be as connected as possible, all the time. For most of us, this was not a conscious decision. We did it without really thinking about it, not realizing there was any choice in the matter.
We did have a choice and still do. And because how we live with these devices is a choice, this conundrum is really a philosophical one. It’s a matter of the ideas and principles that guide us. If
we continue on the current path, over time the costs of this life will erase all the benefits. The answer, therefore, is to adopt a new set of ideas and use them to live in a more thoughtful, intentional way.
There are clues all around us. Whenever I open a gap between myself and my screens, good things happen. I have time and space to think about my life in the digital realm and all the people and information I encounter there. I have a chance to take the outward experiences of the screen back inward. This happened in a small but memorable way the day I called my mother en route to the airport. It was just a routine call, until I put the phone down. Only then did the experience take on unexpected richness and significance.
Such gaps also allow our awareness to return to the physical world. I’m not just a brain, a pair of eyes, and typing fingers. I’m a person with a living body that moves through space and time. In letting screens run my life, I discount the rest of my existence, effectively renouncing my own wholeness. I live a lesser life and give less back to the world. This problem is not just individual and private; it’s afflicting all our collective endeavors, in business, schools, and government and at every level of society. We’re living less and giving less, and the world is the worse for it.
This is the moment, while the digital age is still young, to recoup these losses, to bring “all that is human around us,” in Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s words, back into the equation.
With that aim, in Part II, I went back into the database of human experience in search of helpful ideas. As the seven philosophers showed, this conundrum is as old as civilization. As human connectedness advances, it always makes life busier, by creating new crowds. And life in the crowd inevitably gives rise to the questions we’re asking right now: Why don’t I have time to think? What’s this lost, restless feeling I can’t seem to shake? Where does the crowd end, and where do I begin? What are these tools doing to us, and can we fix it?
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