Marshall McLuhan, media guru of the late 1960s and 1970s, predicted
the cellphone in 1965! McLuhan explained the significance of digital media
prior to the invention of the personal computer and cellphone technology. Our
evidence? An article from May 5, 1965 in The
New Yorker magazine. The Talk of the
Town column at the front of that issue features a piece entitled “The McLuhan Metaphor .” The
article’s publication coincided with the New York World’s Fair. You remember
the World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, with the famous Unisphere, the globe used
in the movie Men in Black…? The globe
is still there, not far from LaGuardia Airport and adjacent to the U.S. Open tennis stadium. The globe is
a perfect metaphor for the insights of Marshall McLuhan, the man who coined the
phrase “global village” to define the world we now live in. But the real action
that May was happening in Brooklyn, the next borough over, where McLuhan
delivered a talk at a Presbyterian church.
The New Yorker
author describes McLuhan’s lecture at Spencer Memorial Church in Brooklyn and
quotes several startling prophecies included in his remarks: “(He) predicted a
happy day when everyone will have his own portable computer to cope with the
dreary business of digesting information.”
“Dr. McLuhan next suggested the possibility of a new
technology that would extend consciousness itself into the environment. ‘A kind
of computerized ESP,’ he called it, envisioning ‘consciousness as the corporate
content of the environment—and eventually maybe even a small portable computer,
about the size of a hearing aid, that would process our private experience
through the corporate experience, the way dreams do now.’”
McLuhan’s accurate prediction of the personal computer and
smaller portable devices merits no further explanation but the second
insight--consciousness as the new environment-- cuts to the very essence of the
present digital era. Imagine the
hearing aid device, anticipated by McLuhan, as
an iPhone or other mobile device. Every individual typing into a Facebook or
Twitter application shares private experiences with the wider world, and
McLuhan uses the term “corporate group” to indicate the wider world. The posts
are exactly as McLuhan described, personal, random thoughts offered in a
dreamlike manner. McLuhan perceived the new electronic environment as consciousness— and no better description
exists of the modern social network.
The author mentions the plan of industrial giant
Westinghouse to place a Time Capsule for future generations at the site of
the World’s Fair. The author suggests
Marshall McLuhan might be better utilized as a better Time Capsule than a
display of mere physical objects, “cultural and technological mementos of
twentieth-century man.” The anonymous writer, in a brilliant feat of
understatement, suggests that McLuhan will
teach us more about his era, than any of the lavish futuristic exhibits
sponsored by Ford and General Motors. I visited those exhibits and remember the
emphasis on automobiles buzzing around the superhighways of the future. Of course, the ctual superhighway of the
future became the Internet.
The 1965 The New Yorker writer notes McLuhan entered the scene as an author,
“by three startling books on Western civilization-- The Mechanical Bride, The
Gutenberg Galaxy, and most recently Understanding
Media, in which he joyfully explores the tribal virtues of popular culture,
casts a cynical eye on the ‘classification traditions’ that came in with print
and sees near-mythic possibilities in our computer age.”
A
year later, at the Texas-Stanford Seminar on “The Meaning of Commercial
Television” in April 1966, McLuhan explained further. His audacious comments
must have surprised the audience of media professionals and scholars:
1) The western world organizes itself visually by
connective, uniform and continuous space.
2) Every new medium changes our whole spatial
orientation.
3) We are in the business of reprogramming the sensory
life of North America, changing the entire outlook and experience of the
population.
(Donner
90-93)
McLuhan’s predictions for deepened audience engagement
following the shift from print media to electronic media cannot be overstated
as essential to understanding the electronic environment. The inability of
individuals to separate from the social network even has an acronym (FOMO)
referring to a “fear of missing out.” McLuhan’s notion of new technology
working as extensions of the human body had achieved new levels of traction in
the electronic era, for if clothing extended the skin, and the wheel extended
the legs’ ability to achieve movement, “the computer achieved not merely an
extension of our eyes, like print, but an extension of our whole nervous
system.” (New Yorker 1965)
