Soldiers Using Ipods Echo McLuhan's View of the Radio

In the chapter of "Understanding Media" entitled "Radio: The Tribal Drum," Marshall McLuhan explains not only that radio can effectively influence its listeners (as is the case with any medium), but also how it is able to do this. On page 302, McLuhan says,

"Radio is provided with its cloak of invisibility, like any other medium. It comes to us ostensibly with person-to-person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magical power to touch remote and forgotten chords. All technological extensions of ourselves must be numb and subliminal, else we could not endure the leverage exerted upon us by such extension" (McLuhan, page 302).

What McLuhan is arguing here is that radio innately contains certain leveraging powers towards its listeners, and what makes this possible is that this interaction occurs entirely in the subconscious. He says that if people were directly aware of the influence that radio was having upon them, they would be less likely to accommodate (and therefor change with), what they were hearing.

Today, one of the biggest competitors to mainstream radio is the now widespread use of iPods for listening to music. In my own personal life, where I used to listen to the radio as I fell asleep or drove in the car, I now have my iPod to entertain me. As a result, I was very intrigued to find that I was reminded of McLuhan's comments when I stumbled across an interesting article online about iPods and soldiers. In this article, How the iPod became a tool of war, reporter Ian Sample of the British newspaper The Guardian explains the growing role of music as a tool to motivate and pump up soldiers at war in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Much like McLuhan's concept of radio, it is illustrated that the subconscious assimilation of music with violent lyrics, like those of songs by Eminem and Metallica, are able to actually motivate the soldiers to be more prepared to fight. For example, in this audio interview with Sergeant First Class CJ Grisham, the soldier explains how the blaring of the song Go to Sleep by Eminem and DMX would "artificially make [the soldiers] agressive" before a conflict, and as a result became a normal pre-battle ritual. The effect is so notable, says Sample, that, "What's interesting about the work is not so much which bands soldiers are drawn to, but the extraordinary terms they use to describe the power the music has over them. Some talk about tracks turning them into monsters, making them inhuman so they can do inhuman acts."

So just as McLuhan perceived of the radio, its successor the iPod has essentially the same power to act as a strong, subconscious motivator. In fact, its strength to rally troops in war is so evident that many soldiers, as Ian Sample puts it, "only half joking, say iPods should be standard issue for soldiers. The psychological effect the music has, and highly stressful situations, make for a powerful mix."

MUD's: The New Newspaper

In chapter two of his book "Imagined Communities," Benedict Anderson describes the role that media, specifically newspapers, have had in unifying large groups of people, since around the 16th century. He argues that although reading a newspaper may seem like a truly independent affair, which he explains by saying "it is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull" (Anderson, page 35), habitually reading the paper ultimately serves to establish the reader's place in a larger community. Anderson goes on to say that this occurs because,

"each communicant is well aware (while reading a newspaper) that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has no the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked imagined community can be envisioned?" (page 35).

In almost a direct response to that question posed by Anderson years before, Sherry Turkle, introduces the current scenario that exists with users of Multi-User Domains, also known as MUD's. In chapter 10 of her book "Life On The Screen," Turkle describes this technology, which enables people to create a separate online identity in a virtual domain, on that can coexist with their "real" identities in the physical world. Turkle evokes the work of social psychologist Kenneth Gergen, and explains the unifying effect that these online worlds can have. Just as was made possible by the creation of newspapers centuries ago, with the adoption of MUD's "Individual notions of self vanish 'into a stage of relatedness. One ceases to believe in a self independent of the relations in which he or she is embedded," (Turkle, page 257).

So although their creation is separated by about 500 years, newspapers and Multi-User Domains achieve the same thing - they create independent experiences and identities that actually serve to unify a larger group amongst all who use them.

Meyrowitz in Europe: Hot or Cold?

During the introduction to Joshua Meyrowitz's book "No Sense of Place", the author describes the scenario that faced him upon returning from a trip backpacking across Europe. His international journey had inevitably left him with dozens of interesting stories, but he faced a situation with which I'm sure you all are familiar with - he found himself subconsciously telling different stories to different people. Meyrowitz explains, "I did not give everyone I spoke to exactly the same account of my trip. My parents heard about the safe and clean hotels in which I stayed... (while) in contrast, my friends heard an account filled with danger, adventure, and a little romance" (Meyrowitz, pg. 1). He goes on that he is neither lying to his audiences, nor even stretching the truth of his trip to Europe: he is merely selecting which truths to convey to which people.

But why does Meyrowitz - or any of us for that matter - ever behave in such a way? He goes on to explain that certain activities and audiences require different behavior (on page 2 he compares sitting in church, where it is polite to be silent and passive, to eating dinner at a friends house, where it is not). This is pretty straightforward and logical, but something that often slips through our strains of consciousness nonetheless.

Throughout the rest of the introduction, Meyrowitz introduces other famous media theorists, among them Marschall McLuhan. He says "McLuhan describes media as extensions of the senses, and he claims that the introduction of a new medium to a culture, therefore, changes the 'sensory balance' of the people in that culture and alters their consciousness" (page 3. In other words, he is building upon his prior claim that we all alter our behavior for different audiences by saying that the media helps determine specifically how we judge our audience, and how our behavior changes accordingly. To further support this statement he explains how the perception of gender roles changed as a result of media events that occurred, on television and radio, during the 1960's.

But although Meyrowitz gives props to McLuhan in this reading, he regrets to note an important connection that exists between the idea of altering behavior based on audience, and with another of McLuhan's work. In "Media Hot and Cold", Marshall McLuhan breaks down the various forms of media technology that existed at the time into two distinct categories: Hot and Cold. Hot media technology he describes as being "high definition", and "extending on single sense" (McLuhan, page 22). Going further, he helps categorize a hot medium as one that is detached and rustic, and its examples include writing, photography, and radio. In contrast, a cold medium is one that is interwoven and modern, and includes the telephone, tv, and speech.

Why are these two distinctions important, or at least relevant to Meyrowitz? We can use the medium type to determine whether or not we will alter the information that we convey. In the initial example, Meyrowitz clearly demonstrates how through speech the audience interacts directly with the audience, and therefore acts accordingly. This is also the case when talking over the telephone - the audience is known, and both parties will cater their dialogue specifically towards whom they are talking. What do both of these mediums have in come? McLuhan categorizes them as Cold.

Conversely, with Hot mediums, it becomes impossible to directly cater to a specific audience. In writing or photography or film or radio, the author or the media has no idea who will view their work. As a result, it becomes inevitable that the burden of the interpretation of the work relies almost entirely upon the audience. They ultimately craft their own meaning and emotional responses using the tools given by the author.

This is just an interesting connection that I made when re-doing the readings, it is interesting that someone as well versed as Meyrowitz in McLuhan's work failed to touch upon "Media Hot and Cold". It enables us not only to categorize the various media technologies, but also to predict how we will convey ideas across a wide range of medium.

Mass Culture

As this very blog exemplifies, the ideas behind "mass culture" and "mass society" are drastically changing during the internet age. In his essay "On/Against Mass Culture Theories", Peter Gibbian describes the traditional views of the public. He says, "Mass society was defined and described by culture critics such as Ortega and Gasset as a society in which the heedless many use the creativity of the few: his 'mass man' does not invent, but merely uses other people's inventions" (Gibbian, pg 14). In other words, the work and ideas of the famous represented the viewpoints of the many.

In explaining this theory, Gibian paraphrases the writings of theorist Frederic Jameson, who explores important ideas of media through looking at the movie Jaws. Together they essentially explain that public reaction to the shark (and therefore sharks in general), that it is something to be feared, results directly from how the three main characters in the film react to it (page 22). In this example, Gibian would argue that the three characters represent the "few" described by Ortega and Gasset. Their opinions (demonstrated through dialogue, as well as through body language and actions) influence the audience of the film. These people then go on to play a role buying scary shark posters, inspiring shark attack reports on television, and generally spreading a negative sentiment and fear of sharks. Ultimately the widespread hysteria and creation of programming such as Shark Week on Discovery Channel, all stems from the opinions of three scared, albeit fictional, men on a boat.

I, on the other hand, would be likely to argue that this idea is not essentially the case anymore, as a result of the widespread adoption of the internet. Now, when a celebrity or created personality says something, it is almost instantly evaluated and contradicted by thousands of people on the web. Through blogs or websites, ordinary people can express their thoughts and opinions in a widely accesible place, and as a result, people are more often receiving news and opinions from what would have been considered the "heedless many" by Ortega and Gasset. So as a result of the internet, a web documenting the flow of opinion and information is much more tangled and interrelated now than it would have been twenty years ago.

Welcome!

Welcome to Sam Rounds' Media Journal.

This blog will serve to function as the required journal for my Media and Identity course, and as such will primarily highlight any responses, insights, and ideas stemming from our assigned readings and class discussions.

But in creating this blog, I was motivated to eschew the traditional journal format; in other words I sought to escape the realm of the physical and to publish my thoughts into a digital existence. By creating a journal online I have made something that can be seen by not just my professor, Dr. Anna Akbari, but by anyone in the world to whom my analysis may be relevant. My posts can be commented on by my instructors or my peers, can be edited and made more relevant over time, and can combine many forms of media (video, sound, photography, etc), to help support the ideas and works of history's great media theorists.

So in creating my journal as a blog website, I am essentially creating an analogy for modern media in the internet age. Technology today has allowed even the tech-illiterate (see: Me) a chance to share their ideas and opinions with the world. I look forward to taking advantage of this opportunity, while hopefully providing a thoughtful and interesting analysis on the role of media in shaping our various identities.

Thanks for visiting the site

-Sam