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."