Understanding Media Response

As I’m reading through McLuhan (and some of the passages last week in Benjamin) my macro-take is that, often, there’s a sneaky lot of totalization and over-determination going on: specifically techno-determination. In chapter one, the first paragraph sets the stage for this as McLuhan sets out his project’s premise pretty plainly: “the personal and social consequences of any medium … result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology” (7). I don’t think this is a particularly ground-shattering take on McLuhan, but it’s one of the stronger residual impressions I am left with after sitting with this text.

Let’s get a bit closer to one of his examples, bracketing in this discussion the hot/cold media distinctions that, no matter how hard I try, end up baffled by. Let’s take “Games” (234).

McLuhan frames games as “popular art, collective, social reactions [McLuhan’s emphasis] to the main drive or action of any culture” (235). In many examples, Mcluhan sees technology as an extension of corporeal bodies. Rather, in this particular, McLuhan sees games as “extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of the animal organism” (235). So games here seem to operate at a more macro scale in McLuhan’s analysis. In a tangential way, David gets at some of this in his post on coding in a new key. David mentions that his previous experience coding was structured by finance and manufacturing. Code as a technology, as David gestures to, has had a profound impact in social domains, explicitly referencing economic domains. Code, in other words, has helped shape, or afford, a constellation of social conditions.

In this chapter McLuhan seems, in places, to see Games less as causal in nature and more as reflections of social conditions. The baseball/football distinction illustrates that well, I think (239). Baseball’s use of specialized positions and skills reflects the mechanization of the “now passing mechanical age” (239). Baseball as a game is residual “The social practices of one generation tend to get codified into the ‘game’ of the next” (239). Football is gaining popularity, McLuan posits, because its rules and structures ar3e more suited to the electric (information) age where workers are less attached to specifically skilled or repetitive jobs on assembly lines or in factories. Rather, workers in the emergent age need to be ready to take on any number of projects, tasks, or duties. Sure, a quarterback throws the ball as a specialist in football, but the QB can also (and often does) run the ball, sometimes catches it on a weird trick play, or needs to make a tackle after he throws an interception, or blocks for a running back when a play breaks down and the flow reverses back to his position on the field.

Games, too, in this chapter, are, in a sense, cathartic: “expressions of group awareness that permit a respite from customary patters” (243). And games are also “translator[s] of experience” (244) that allow participants and societies to “shift familiar experience into new forms, giving the bleak and blear side of things sudden luminosity” (242). Games, in the final words of McLuhan’s analysis, are mass media, “situations contrived to permit simultaneous participation of many people in some significant pattern of their corporate lives” (245).

For discussion, I’d like to circle back to some concerns I mentioned above. In what ways is McLuhan describing games as a media, and can he get away with it? In other words, are games media that merely reflect social conditions or beliefs? Do games (like the poker discussion on page 240) contribute to, reinforce, or have some sort of causal impact on social conditions or beliefs? Do games provide respite and catharsis for social conditions or beliefs? Can he get away with saying games are all of the above? Finally, in a less charitable reading that borrows a concept from Eve Sedgwick, is McLuhan’s analysis of games (and more broadly any media) a bit paranoid, or perhaps reductionist?