1970-1980 (part I)

...I will now offer six of McLuhan’s more striking images of the 1970s (which I have not attempted to put in any “pattern” — logical or analogical — on the grounds that, while tempting, this kind of speculative enterprise would involve us in countless misunderstandings). To some readers McLuhan’s diagnosis in the following may appear to be science fiction.[1] It is not irrelevant that McLuhan had claimed that “we live science fiction” in both his review of The Naked Lunch and Nova Express,[2] and also in The Gutenberg Galaxy:

People of literary and critical bias find the shrill vehemence of de Chardin as disconcerting as his uncritical enthusiasm for the cosmic membrane that has been snapped around the globe by the electric dilation of our various senses. This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the “noosphere” or technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.[3]

1. Emergence of New Figures
We can get a sense for how McLuhan saw what was to be the last decade of his life by examining his predictions for the 1980s. They emerge from his observation of patterns already present in his day, extrapolated via figure-ground analysis:

The figure is what appears and the ground is always subliminal. Changes occur in the ground before they occur in the figure. We can project both figure and ground as images of the future using the ground as subplot of subliminal patterns and pressures and effects which actually come before the more or less final figures to which we normally direct our interest.[4]

The 1980s, McLuhan predicted, will see a host of new figures:[5] (1) a society of contented non-achievers, (2) the end of Chinese culture,[6] (3) the end of identity, (4) the emergence of a new multi-sub-cultural mosaic, (4) literacy for an elite only, (5) education in an age of amnesia, (6) cubism in sports,[7] (7) the imminent arrival of the computer for home shopping and voting, and (8) the collapse of representative government.[8]

2. “Media” as Unmoved Mover
In “Living at the Speed of Light,” in which McLuhan predicted the figures of the 1980s we have just mentioned, McLuhan also predicts the invention of “anti-gravity” as a possible new energy source. Arguably, his ability to make such a claim is that he saw that, during the software age, the “principles” of anti-gravity were already operative. As the only “machine” that consumes and produces the same “material” (information), computers were creating more information than they were being “fed.” In short, the computer-satellite matrix, the ‘software” environment, was exhibiting characteristics that are analogous to the proposed “hardware” “free-energy” generators. In view of these and other similar observations, McLuhan begins to stress that the “media” themselves are becoming autonomous.[9] Perhaps the crux of the matter is expressed in a letter to Jim Davey where McLuhan suggests that the “media” were assuming a character analogous to deity:

I have only just discovered that St. Thomas Aquinas’ idea of instrumentality is that of the “unmoved mover.” All media change us and their surround without in any way being changed themselves. In other words, Aquinas also said “the medium is the message,” just as he said the user or the cognitive agent is the content…[10]