Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan, born in 1911, coined the phrase “The medium is the message.” There is general agreement that McLuhan’s statement is very significant but I have never understood exactly what it meant. Now, I think I know. Harold Adams Innis, who was a mentor to McLuhan and also a partner, in The Bias of Communication stated: “any channel of communication will eventually affect that which issues from it, and the result will be confusion leading to the disintegration of societies.”
This is evident in the difference in news reports. TV reports on what is available in pictures and newspapers also use pictures but give a more complete story. Listeners to a speech on TV and to the same speech on radio give quite different evaluations and interpretations of the same speech. On TV, appearance is more significant than content; on radio everything depends on words and content.
People who are immersed in TV gradually lose the ability to distinguish reality from fiction. Years ago when the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth was presented on TV some asked, “Who played the part of the Queen?” They didn’t recognize reality! When actors representing TV personalities were displayed on TV and viewers were asked if the personalities were real or fictional, 65 per cent thought Malcolm Muggeridge was a real person.
William Blake (1757 – 1827) foresaw this when in Songs of Experience he wrote:
This life’s dim windows of the soul
Distort the Heavens from Pole to Pole
And lead you to believe a lie
When you see with, not thro’ the eye.
The camera can inform but it can also deceive. All this has tremendous implications for the church. How can we communicate the historic gospel to people who find it difficult to distinguish between what is truth and what is fiction? Accommodating communication to people accustomed to electronic communication may not be the answer. Seeing “with, not thro’ the eye” may lead to misunderstanding the Message. I don’t think anyone has found a way to overcome this challenge.
A common youth culture is developing all over the world. This culture is more different from that of the older generation than at any time in history. Some years ago, the BBC sent a crew to a number of countries to discover what people were watching on TV. They found suitable pictures in the desert, in the jungle, the tops of mountains, in plains and swamps. What they discovered was they were all looking at the same programs, at that time, “I Love Lucy,” “Wagon Train” and “Peyton Place.” One time in Kenya, when I turned on the TV in my hotel room I saw “Little House on the Prairie.” Today, every imaginable facility for making ourselves heard and seen are everywhere. But have we anything to say? It may not make any difference for it is the media this is creating in young people a demand for change and creating the “Arab Spring” and other revolutions.
The greatest of all changes are the changes technology has made to the human brain. The left side of the brain is where we think logically, evaluate information, know what is right and wrong and live more or less rationally. We read, discuss, debate, make decisions, think abstractly. The right side of the brain is devoted to feelings and emotions. It gathers information by impressions and images. We use the left side of the brain when we read, listen to lectures and think. We use the right side of the brain when we are entertained by movies, singing and all that has to do with impressions. This has been praised as being “refreshingly uninformative.”
It is no secret that people are no longer getting information from reading and lectures but from “sound bites,” talk shows, movies and all that is communicated with technology. Talk shows are largely a pooling of ignorance and opinions. The supreme virtue is no longer truth but tolerance. When we believe nothing is true, tolerance is easy. What is really happening is that our civilization has moved from being left brained to right brained and we have lost the capacity for abstract thinking and sustained thought.
This has tremendous implications for the church, which has lived in a right – brained society that was concerned with theology, creeds, truth and a rational faith. The “book,” the Bible, which was read to discern what is true, is no longer read. Many modern churches do not have a pulpit with a Bible, but a stage and the service has become a performance. Now, the most popular preacher in the U.S.A. is Joel Osteen who never attended a seminary or studied theology but who is a motivational speaker. His church was a sports arena and he has 40,000 in his congregation. In many evangelical churches “worship” now means one thing—music. A band has replaced the organ. The result is a whole generation of “Christians” who have very little knowledge of the Christian faith. In such a situation, spirituality is popular and Christianity, which is rooted in the church which Christ said is the Body of Christ, is not needed. So we have the situation where only 20 per cent feel the need to be involved with “organized religion” and where the majority of the population claims to be Christian.
One could sum up the challenge the church faces today: finding a way to communicate the historic faith to a right – brained society when its history, in recent centuries, has been rooted in left – brain thinking.