Media definition

We can’t assume that we understand media already! (McLuhan to Harry Skornia, June 9, 1959)1 

You will note that, although these are called Laws of the Media, only a few of them deal with communications media narrowly conceived. Instead, I am talking about “media” in terms of a larger [ground]2 of information and perception which forms our thoughts, structures our experience, and determines our views of the world about us. It is this kind of [vertical] information flow — media — which is responsible for my postulation of a series of insights regarding the impact of certain technological developments.(…) I call them “laws of the media” because the channels and impact of today’s electronic communication systems provide [an illustration of] the informational foundation upon which we order, or structure, these experiential perceptions. (McLuhan’s Laws of the Media, 1975)3

the media themselves, and the whole cultural ground, are forms of language. (Global Village, 1978)

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McLuhan to Harry Skornia, December 1, 1958:

My own approach (…) follows this nuclear pattern of watching for the actual lines of force generated by any medium as it expands, making its own world, yet reciprocally modifying existing forms and being modified by them as well.

McLuhan to Harry Skornia, Sept 3, 1960:

Media are the parameters of all enterprises, whether private or collective. They impose, they are the assumptions. Mostly, therefore, they are subliminal just because they are constitutive and pervasive.  But to a number-sodden age, it may be more effective to say “Media are the parameters” rather than that “the medium is the message”.4 

New Media and the New Education, 1960:5

any new structure for codifying experience and of moving information, be it alphabet or photography, has the power of imposing its structural character and assumptions upon all levels of our private and social lives, even without benefit of concepts or of conscious acceptance. That is what I’ve always meant by “the medium is the message“.

Media, when deeply, not “narrowly”, conceived, are not things like books or gadgets or devices. Nor are they physical senses or combinations of senses. Nor are they a form of language use like orality or literacy. Nor are they a mode of technology like the mechanical or the electrical.  However much they may be like these (just as some physical materials are like chemical elements), media are, instead, “parameters”, “assumptions”, “foundations”, “ideas” or “basic structures” that give shape to “the sending and receiving of information”, the “pattern[s] in which the components [of any communication] co-exist”: “the various lines and levels of force operative in any field of relations”.6

Exchanges within the NAEB project throw further light on McLuhan’s notion of just what media are:

McLuhan to Harry Skornia, January 1, 1959:

I am not an apriorist in these matters — not committed to any doctrinaire approach beyond the assumption that man’s reasoning equipment is what we are seeking to elicit and strengthen in education.7 But I don’t think of reason as divorced from our total sensibilities.8

McLuhan to Harry Skornia March 30, 1959:

Apropos of recent telephone comment about my “philosophical approach”.  Remember that when one approaches the intelligible aspects of media patterns one is in danger of philosophy.  But my concern is with light through the media onto our situation, not light on the media from our theories. But unified field of awareness of inter-action of media does need some verbalized articulation. Has not the effect of media over the centuries been kept at the sub-verbal level precisely by such philosophical assumptions [such as underlie the Gutenberg galaxy]…?

McLuhan to Harry Skornia June 5, 1959:

Media are “ideas” in action. That is, any technological pattern or grouping of human know-how has the mark of our minds built into it. The media dynamics are, therefore, parallel to those of our ideas. But many of our ideas are feed-back subliminally from media. Jeep calling unto jeep.9 

McLuhan speaking to the NAEB ‘research committee’ in September 1959:

it is (…) confusing at first for some to learn that the mosaic of a [visual] page of telegraph press is ‘auditory’ in basic structure. That, however, is only to say that any pattern in which the components co-exist without direct lineal hook-up or connection, creating a field of simultaneous relations, is auditory, even though some of its aspects can be seen.

Global Village, posthumous, 48:

In our desire to illumine the differences between visual and acoustic space, we have undoubtedly given a false impression: and that is that the normal brain, in its everyday functioning, cannot reconcile the apparently contradictory perceptions of both sides of the mind.

Visual and acoustic space occur only in a variable relation or ratio between them. This variable ratio or “resonating interval” is the medium structuring them in this or that modulation that is their message in any (and every) particular case.

media (…) are encountered in [all] doublets” (McLuhan and Watson, From Cliché to Archetype, 108)

  1. Except where otherwise identified, all citations in this post are taken from the McLuhan folders in the Unlocking the Airwaves project. ↩
  2. McLuhan has ‘entity’ here, not ‘ground’. But an ‘entity’ is an example or effect of a manifesting power. Such a power may be termed an archetype, a cause, an element, a ground, etc, but not properly an ‘entity’. ↩
  3. ‘McLuhan’s Laws of the Media’, Technology and Culture, 16:1 (Jan., 1975), pp. 74-78. ↩
  4. McLuhan added: “I do not revoke the latter formula.” ↩
  5. This essay appeared in a series of different publications and was included as an appendix to McLuhan’s  1960 Report on Project in Understanding New Media. ↩
  6. The phrase “the sending and receiving of information” is from McLuhan’s letter to Harry Skornia, January 1, 1959; “basic structure” and “pattern in which the components co-exist” are from McLuhan speaking to the NAEB ‘research committee’ in September 1959. All these contexts are cited expansively above. “The various lines and levels of force operative in any field of relations” is from McLuhan’s letter to Skornia on June 25, 1959. Compare from a decade later, “operative principles and lines of force” in the Playboy Interview. ↩
  7. When the human “reasoning equipment is what we are seeking to elicit and strengthen”, this can be accomplished in no other way, of course, than by deploying our “reasoning equipment”. A difficult circularity is thereby introduced into the task, since it appears that the object at stake — namely, “reasoning equipment” that is to be elicited and strengthened — must already be active in the subject in any appropriate approach to that objective. Beyond this knotted problem of a ‘future perfect’ time, where a future finding must already be active in the initial way to it, a further problem is constellated. Through this same circularity of the exercise of our “reasoning equipment” on our “reasoning equipment”, all our experience would appear to be locked “inside a human box” (as McLuhan put the point). See Planet polluto, garbage apocalypse for the reference and further discussion. ↩
  8. The association of “our total sensibilities” with our “reasoning equipment” is not a “doctrinaire approach” because, according to McLuhan, it can be demonstrated. But it is all important in this context to note that “our total sensibilities” cannot be understood literally — any more than the discovery of the chemical elements could have been based on a literal understanding of physical materials. ↩
  9. ‘Jeep calling unto jeep’ may be a dictation error for ‘beep calling unto beep’: McLuhan’s unpublished review of Northrop Frye’s 1957 Anatomy of Criticism has the related “blip calling unto blip”. Ten years later, Giorgio de Santillana’s ‘Epilogue’ to Hamlet’s Mill (1969) by him and Hertha von Dechend has: “Cosmological Time, the ‘dance of stars’ as Plato called it, was not (…) an empty container, as it has now become, the container of so-called history; that is, of frightful and meaningless surprises (…) It (Cosmological Time) was felt to be potent enough to control events inflexibly, as it molded them to its sequences in a cosmic manifold in which past and future called to each other, deep calling to deep. The awesome Measure repeated and echoed the structure in many ways, gave Time the scansion, the inexorable decisions through which an instant ‘fell due’.” If the rather strange overlap here between McLuhan and Santillana is not coincidental, one possible route between them could have been Sigfried Giedion who taught at MIT in 1950 and would have met Santillana then (if they didn’t know each other already from, eg, Giedion’s earlier stints at Harvard). Giedion and McLuhan were frequently in touch in the 1950s, both in person and in correspondence. If Giedion had heard Santillana’s formulation, and been struck by it, he could well have mentioned it to McLuhan before the latter’s use of it at the end of the decade. In chapter xiii of Hamlet’s Mill, Santillana and von Dechend use the phrase “deeper than the deep”. ↩