The Banana Peel Project

It was bound to happen. Somebody, somewhere, was going to accuse me of being a technological determinist. Maybe it’s because of the way I say–over and over again–how this or that technology “influences” this or “shapes” that. Maybe it’s because of my passionate defense of the aesthetic styles of others who have–rightly or not–been accused of technological determinism.

The violent reaction of many people with regard to such artists as McLuhan typically has nothing to do with what McLuhan was really getting at. More often, it has to do with their basic human need to cling to their bodies, to grab onto something that seems familiar, to deny that technology is what it means to human.

Read in a certain light, even a determinist can be a humanist.

In 1967, McLuhan echoed nearly verbatim Norbert Wiener’s vision of a total informational environment: “All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical…The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.”

Wiener wrote, “The transportation of messages serves to forward an extension of man’s senses and his capabilities of action from one end of the world to another.” The extent of the direct influence of cybernetics on McLuhan’s thinking has not been entirely ignored, and is demonstrated in analyses by both Fred Turner and McLuhan’s student Donald Theall. When Theall first exposed McLuhan to cybernetics in 1950, he turned his “new interest in cybernetics into a series of queries about poetry, art, technology, and communication.”

McLuhan’s concept of the “artist” was very similar to Wiener’s concept of the cybernetic scientist whose knowledge of information patterns could permit him to link interdisciplinary fields. McLuhan wrote, “The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovations.”

Wiener’s cybernetics holds that information itself is what gives people control over their environment. The concept of feedback, self-monitoring by an organism, demonstrates the inherent ability of information in a cybernetic framework to allow control. Wiener wrote,

For any machine subject to a varied external environment to act effectively, it is necessary that information concerning the results of its own action be furnished to it as part of the information on which it must continue to act.

For Wiener, information was all that one needed to understand and control the environment. But for McLuhan, information naturally acquired meaning by being assembled into meaningful patterns in the form of poetry, art, irony, and humor. People project meaning onto information, but information itself does not have inherent value. McLuhan called the process by which information acquires meaning “myth.” Myth was a way to understand the information environment on a human level.

Myth is a mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects. Electric circuitry confers a mythic dimension on our ordinary individual and group actions. Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.

For McLuhan, myth connected the cold and unemotional world of cybernetics with passion, identity, and direct experience.

The young today live mythically and in depth. Many of our institutions suppress all the natural direct experience of youth, who respond with untaught delight to the poetry and beauty of the new technological environment, the environment of popular culture.

The implication of McLuhan’s concept of myth was that, because myth was the conferral of human understanding on technology, human consciousness was actually prior to processes of information.

In other words, go ahead–call me a technological determinist. To ignore the power of technology to augment, extend, and enable all of the thoughts, desires, passions, and practices of humanity is to ignore that which makes us human.