Marshall McLuhan - Digital Visionary

Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan's birthday. To commemorate this milestone and recognize McLuhan's ongoing relevance to communication and media theory, various organizations and people have been holding events or writing about McLuhan. Although McLuhan is generally regarded as Canada's preeminent communication scholar and is still well known for his theories and concepts such "The medium is the message" and the "global village", his role as predictor and shaper of digital technology is less well known.

At a McLuhan event last evening a colleague and friend of McLuhan's, Prof. Bob Logan, related McLuhan's visions of future technology that has been realized. Logan's paper, McLuhan Misunderstood: Setting the Record Straight, addresses this topic and clarifyies other issues about McLuhan. The work is publised in full on the website McLuhan Galaxy, but Prof. Logan has allowed me to excerpt the passages regarding McLuhan's contributions and predictions to our digital culture.

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So many of McLuhan’s pronouncements about the effects of electric media are prophetic because it seems as though he was aware of the coming of the Net, the Web and other digital media. A simple example of his prescience is that he, in fact, through his writing foreshadowed the Internet. William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer, certainly deserves credit for coining the term cyberspace but long before Neuromancer was written or even conceived of, McLuhan (1967, p. 67) described the Internet in the following passage in response to being asked "How is the computer affecting education" McLuhan’s response was an almost exact description of the Internet:

The computer in education is in a very tentative state but it does represent basically speeded up access to information and when it is applied to the telephone and to Xerox it permits access to the libraries of the world, almost immediately, without delay. And so the immediate effect of the computer is to pull up the walls of the subjects and divisions of knowledge in favor of over-all field, total awareness – Gestalt.

McLuhan description of the Internet was complete with the exception of packet switching if you allow Xeroxing to represent the reproduction of a hard copy by a printer. And he opined this description two full years before the development of ARPANET in 1969, the forerunner of the Internet.

An even earlier remark by McLuhan (1962) in the Gutenberg Galaxy also foreshadows the Internet:

A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve individual encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.

One can also interpret without too much of a stretch the retrieval of "individual encyclopedic function" in the above quote as a foreshadowing of Wikipedia as Derrick de Kerckhove once did (http://www.blogger.com/www.utoronto.ca/mcluhan/marshal.htm).

McLuhan not only foreshadowed the Internet and Wikipedia, but he also foreshadowed Innocentive.com, a Web site that connects companies that have a problem to solve with experts that Innocentive has aggregated. They call the process "Open Innovation," which they describe as follows:

Open Innovation allows many people from different disciplines to tackle the same problem simultaneously and not sequentially. Anyone can participate with collaborative technology and Open Innovation training. When many minds are working on the same problem, it will take less time to solve it.

McLuhan (1971 – with my emphasis) in a convocation address at the University of Alberta said:

The university and school of the future must be a means of total community participation, not in the consumption of available knowledge, but in the creation of completely unavailable insights. The overwhelming obstacle to such community participation in problem solving and research at the top levels, is the reluctance to admit, and to describe, in detail their difficulties and their ignorance. There is no kind of problem that baffles one or a dozen experts that cannot be solved at once by a million minds that are given a chance simultaneously to tackle a problem. The satisfaction of individual prestige, which we formerly derived from the possession of expertise, must now yield to the much greater satisfactions of dialogue and group discovery. The task yields to the task force.

McLuhan not only foreshadowed the development of the Internet and crowd sourcing he with his co-author George B. Leonard in an article in the popular magazine Look also explained why the digital media would be so compelling to young people and to a certain degree their elders. They suggested that the age of print and the fragmentation that it encouraged was over (McLuhan and Leonard, 1967).

More swiftly than we can realize, we are moving into an era dazzlingly different. Fragmentation, specialization and sameness will be replaced by wholeness, diversity and, above all, a deep involvement... To be involved means to be drawn in, to interact. To go on interacting, the student must get some-where. In other words, the student and the learning environment (a person, a group of people, a book, a programmed course, an electronic learning console or whatever) must respond to each other in a pleasing and purposeful interplay. When a situation of involvement is set up, the student finds it hard to drag himself away.

He and Leonard (ibid.) also predicted that the relationship to humankind’s knowledge would change with electrically configured information as we are beginning to see in this the Internet Age.

When computers are properly used, in fact, they are almost certain to increase individual diversity. A worldwide network of computers will make all of mankind’s factual knowledge available to students everywhere in a matter of minutes or seconds. Then, the human brain will not have to serve as a repository of specific facts, and the uses of memory will shift in the new education, breaking the timeworn, rigid chains of memory may have greater priority than forging new links. New materials may be learned just as were the great myths of [p. 25] past cultures-as fully integrated systems that resonate on several levels and share the qualities of poetry and song.

Still another foreshadowing of McLuhan was that of the smart phone as described by his biographer Phillip Marchand (1989, p. 170).

He told an audience in New York City shortly after the publication of Understanding Media that there might come a day when we would all have portable computers, about the size of a hearing aid, to help mesh our personal experiences with the experience of the great wired brain of the outer world.

What makes this prediction even more amazing is that there were no personal computers at the time, no cell phones and no Internet (i.e. "the great wired brain of the outer world").

The notion of the need for keeping messages short and hence the power of the one-liner foreshadows in our digital era texting, instant messaging and Twitter.

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I believe that I have only scratched the surface in explaining the ideas of this great thinker. No article can do justice to the ideas that Marshall McLuhan engendered. I hope that my essay helps the reader in their approach to McLuhan. However, the only way to understand McLuhan is to read him directly and figure out what he means for you for as he said “the user is the content.”

References:

Marchand, Philip. 1989. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. Toronto: Random House.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1967. “The New Education.” The Basilian Teacher, Vol. 11 (2), pp. 66-73.

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Thanks to Bob Logan for permission to use this.

Disney World - From Analog to Digital

I got back last week from a week-long family vacation at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. My first trip there was when it first opened in 1971. We were the first family in the small town where I was born to go to Disney World, so that family trip made it into the local paper (complete with a picture of me in a highchair happily sporting the trademark mouse-ears). Since that visit I have been back to Disney at least once every decade.

Disney World has always made use of cutting-edge technology to deliver entertainment. It was just this past trip, however, that the dramatic technological shift with their attractions became apparent to me. Analog may still remain supreme there, but the future appears to be digital.

Analog experiences are still aplenty at Disney. My daughter's favourite experiences were the theatrical shows, costumed characters, decorations, and dark rides . She also loved the log flume ride and I loved the rollercoasters. But rollercoasters are still rollercoasters (albeit greatly enhanced at Disney by special effects and art direction). Although the motion simulator and immersive experience of Mission: Space is an experience completely unique (and the only ride ever to almost make me vomit).

But, I love how old school tech still holds up well at Disney. Haunted Mansion is a great example of the excellent use of projectors, smoke, and mirrors. Disney perfected the dark ride (a term I didn't know until recently either, according to Wikipedia it is a enclosed ride with animatronics, manequins in tableaux, and special lighting and sound effects) and they are still crowd-pleasers. Haunted Mansion was my daughter's second favourite ride as it was mine when I was a kid (her favourite was Splash Mountain, mine was, and still is, Space Mountain).

Our two favourite parts of Haunted Mansion were ghostly apparitions both achieved via mirrors (including a technique called "Pepper's Ghost" from the 1850s). Okay, I had no idea what Pepper's Ghost was before reading it on Wikipedia but my point is the analog techniques are still effective. (Less so with Country Bear Jamboree and Tiki Room as the animatronics seem like something from the old scifi flick Westworld).

It was my 1992 visit, that I noticed a big switch in entertainment styles at Disney World. A year earlier MuppetVision opened at Hollywood Studios. MuppetVision was my first effective 3D experience (the ones on TV in the 80s didn't really cut it) and it was my first experience with 4D (i.e. combining 3D film with physical events in the theatre). It was Disney's second 4D experience (Michael Jackson's Captain Eo in 1986 was the first). The technology worked incredibly for me. I had never seen such a vivid 3D film before and I hadn't even conceived of 4D (although putting buzzers in people's seats to shock them during pivotal scenes was done in the 60s). 4D was so new to me that when a bubble smacked me in the face, when explosions went off in the theatre, and when a costumed-actor burst into the crowd - it rocked my world!

4D still rocks but is now getting less thrilling with its ubiquity. There is one per Disney park, i.e. Mickey's PhilharMagic in Magic Kingdom, It's Tough to Be a Bug at Animal Kingdom, and Soarin' at Epcot) and we've encountered them at Ontario Place and Niagara Falls. (BTW, I'd like to start a campaign to use the Ontario 4D film at Ontario Place to replace the dreadful show at the Canada pavilion at Epcot.)

3D/4D may use computers in production and digital projection, but it still seems like an analog experience. The real fundamental switch to a completely different type of experience was Toy Story Midway Mania! - a completely digital experience.

There were digital predecessors at Disney. The dark ride Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin (opened in 1998) allowed riders to shoot lazers at targets with scores tabulated instantly on the rider's car. And the lame-o ride Spaceship Earth had a redo in 2008 that added interactive, digital components. The traditional dark ride components (the lame-o part) is augmented by an interactive component that uses a photograph of the rider and user-supplied choices to create a customized, futuristic vision video (which can then be emailed).

The epitome of digital at Disney World, however, is Toy Story Midway Mania. It opened 2008 at a cost of $80M. It is much-hyped and immensely popular - by noon at their slowest time of year they ran out of fast passes and the queue was well over an hour. Basically, the attraction is a series of 3D shooting games (modelled on old-style midway attractions such as darts and ring toss). Riders are transported from game to game in a vehicle and a running score is displayed in the car. There are 4D special effects such as wind blowing at you if you pop a balloon, but they are infrequent and minor.

According to some Disney travel writers, they believe this type of attraction is the future. I can see its appeal to the company as updating them is much simpler and cheaper. Instead of tearing down existing structures and scenes and building new ones, they can just install a new program. Despite the hype, however, it didn't seem that much better than at-home games. It seemed frenetic and lacked the charm or immersiveness of other Disney attractions.

A Disney attraction that I do think has tremendous potential and I believe will be more common among amusement parks and tourist destinations is the Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure. Guests pick up a mobile device from a mission kiosk and then go to one of the country pavillons to unravel a mystery. The mobile plays clue videos and allows individual input based on the players' real-world findings. It also makes use of the device's camera and positioning functionality. Based on successful gamer responses, it triggers real-world action, such as sound effects and the motion of sets or statues. Overall, I loved it! But it wasn't a tremendous hit with my daughter. The storyline was a little too complicated, long and hard to hear. Still I think the Kim Possible game combines analog and digital experiences in a really vivid, interactive and compelling way.

My family already wants to go back to Disney, but it may be awhile before we actually return. When I do return, I'll be eager to see whether digital has indeed taken over or whether analog holds strong.