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."

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.