It's slightly frustrating to read Marshall McLuhan these days. The onetime media sage, who died in 1980, is virtually silent on the virtual world, and an academic cottage industry has arisen on speculations about what McLuhan would have thought of the Internet. More crucially, his assertions about television rest on observations about such cultural anachronisms as Perry Mason—TV viewers confuse the character with the actor, Raymond Burr — and Jack Paar—a cool host for a "cool" medium.
In his influential 1964 manifesto, Understanding Media, McLuhan defined media as extensions of our senses. "Hot" media are full of information and low on participation, whereas cool media invite, if not require, active involvement. Television is cool because of its low resolution: "The TV image is visually low in data ... a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning finger."
In other words, because your mind must constantly assemble the scanned, low-resolution image, you are, without knowing it, highly involved, even if you're absently absorbing American Idol. That's why Perry Mason seemed more real to fans than Raymond Burr, and why the easy, genial Jack Paar went down like a bedtime draft of chilled milk.
It was not McLuhan's point, but generations of social critics have found television's coolness insidious. Because it compels your unwitting involvement, so their argument runs, it dulls your mind with dreck and strands you, the prey of hucksters, in the mirage-dotted desert of Newton Minow's "vast wasteland." And so organizations such as TV-Turnoff Network browbeat parents to steer kids away from television, even setting aside a week each year—it ended Monday, if you missed it—for mass bow-out.
Now comes author Steven Johnson, writing recently in The New York Times Magazine, who argues that TV is not only getting better, it's actually good for you. Citing the scene in Woody Allen's Sleeper, in which scientists observing Allen's time-traveler matter-of-factly pity him for his misguided, whole-foods diet, Johnson posits a "Sleeper Curve," in which "the most debased forms of mass diversion—video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms—turn out to be nutritional after all."
And it turns out, too, that Johnson echoes McLuhan. "I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today," Johnson writes, "and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down." Censors, whose voices are rising, complain that sex and violence on TV are evil influences, especially on children. Johnson counters that multiple- threaded and deeply textured plots are exercising our minds, and those of children.
This is close to what McLuhan argued in 1964. His oft-misunderstood mantra, "The Medium is the Message," title of Understanding Media's first chapter, outlines the idea that media shape us, and that this is more important to understand than what they might say. "Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot," he writes with customary petulance. The Gutenberg milieu of "hot" type created a "literary man" who has overstayed his welcome, as McLuhan sees it. Literary man sustains a world mired in the visual properties of phonetics-based alphabets and thus riven by specialization—not just of the senses but of understanding.
"Pervaded by the mosaic TV image, the TV child encounters the world in a spirit antithetic to literacy," McLuhan argues. "This change of attitude has nothing to do with programming in any way, and would be the same if the programs consisted of the highest cultural content ... The TV child expects involvement and doesn't want a specialist job in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his society."
As with everything McLuhan wrote, the wisdom here is worth pondering. Forty years on, and despite his imperiousness, McLuhan brings to media analysis the unheeded warning that we're forever planning for the last war. But we are those TV children whose "deep commitment to society" he foretold, and where is that? Society has become only more specialized, our thinking about it more fragmentary.
You might argue from Johnson's point that highly layered and textured TV, with its potential for heightened cognitive involvement, will produce what McLuhan envisioned. But when, exactly? If the mental gymnastics of watching 24 or E.R. make us smarter, why is our political life so stupid? The increased fragmentation of home entertainment choices is one answer: Many brains regularly slump over Newlyweds and The O'Reilly Factor, too. Meanwhile, the decidedly "cool," participatory medium of the Internet appears to intensify, rather than synthesize, political polarities.
McLuhan pins the term "high definition" on top-down, single-sense "hot" media, like print or radio. Elsewhere he argues that improved resolution of the "cool," mosaic video image would no longer be TV. Of course, that's precisely where TV is headed—high definition, graphic clutter and Johnson's complex, textured entertainments. But research by two professors at Kansas State University and the Washington, D.C.-based Newslab recently found that viewers of news programs with busy graphics and crawls remember less than those who watch un-jumbled presentations. It's hard to see how heightened cognitive experience helps if nothing sticks.
To be sure, the censorious types pose more danger than exposed nipples or bloody gunplay. But it is another peril entirely to assume that mere mental exercise is sufficient. Content matters, after all.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.