Carey, James W. “McLuhan and Mumford: The roots of Modern Media Analysis.” Journal of Communication, 1981, 162-178.

The relationship between McLuhan and Mumford at one level is quite straightforward and open to easy inspection. McLuhan has cited Mumford in virtually all his work, certainly in all his important publications. While the argument has generally been rather one-sided, in his later publications Mumford has devoted considerable and often savage space to McLuhan. (162-163)

However, the argumentative relationship between these two important figures in contemporary scholarship is both more subtle and ambiguous than the pattern of citation suggests. The purpose of explicating this relationship is not merely for the joy to be found in puzzling through texts or influencing reputations. There is bigger game. McLuhan and Mumford have been debating the consequences of electrical technology, in particular, electrical communications for contemporary culture and society. Not only can they teach one something of those consequences but they also illustrate, in a variety of ways, some of the conceptual and ideological pitfalls involved in trying to think sensibly about electrical communication. (163)

In 1965, with the publication of Understanding Media, the work of Marshall McLuhan burst beyond the narrow limits of the scholarly community and acquired a general audience. (164)

Intellectually the advance was contained in two remarkable insights which McLuhan pressed with the outrageous daring necessary to arrest the attention of modern audiences. (166)

First, he argued that forms of communication such as writing, speech, printing, and broadcasting should not be viewed as neutral vessels carrying given and independently determined meaning. Rather, he proposed that these forms be considered technologies of the intellect, active participants in the process by which the mind is formed and in turn forms ideas. To put the matter differently, he argued that all technical forms were extensions of mind and embodiments of meaning. Technologies of communication were principally things to think with, molders of mind, shapers of thought: the medium was the message. In pressing this argument he opened a new avenue of historical scholarship and rephrased a large set of questions that had vexed scholars. (166)

The second advance McLuhan pioneered and which set certain constraints upon his critics grew directly out of his literary studies. Students of the arts are likely to examine communication with quite a different bias than that advanced by social scientists. The question of the appeal of art is essentially a question of new means available for producing and reproducing art would demand and create an entirely new aesthetic. He sensed that cultural forms operated not at the level of cognition or information or even effect. The media of communication affect society principally by changing the dominant structures of taste and feeling, by altering the desired forms of experience. The new and proliferating means of recording experience meant that the monopoly enjoyed by print was to be exploded and that no means of experiencing the world would dominate as printing had among educated classes for centuries. (166)

The new means of reproducing reality also meant that the historic barriers between the arts and between the arts and other departments of life – art and science, work and leisure – would be driven down. Electronic communication would jumble experience, creatively juxtapose ideas, forms, and experiences previously disseminated in different and isolated ways. In turn this would create new patterns of knowledge and awareness, a new hunger for experience, in much the same way that printing – by assembling the sacred and the profane, the new and the traditional, the exotic and the mundane, the practical and the fanciful, in the same printer’s workshop – led to a decisive alteration in modern taste. (166-167)

This erosion of barriers between the arts meant as well the erosion of barriers between the audience. The division of culture into high and low, folk and popular, mass and elite, highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow – barriers and distinctions that were themselves the product of printing – would have to be discarded under the impact of new forms of communication which simply did not recognize these distinctions. The high arts were now as often pirating mass and folk culture, and mass culture in turn was leaching the traditional arts. Thus, the ability to make things more widely available in graphic form, to reproduce at will sacred texts and treasured painting, to make reality itself in the drama of film and television, to record and freeze the most mundane of persons, scenes, and slices of reality that were historically conveyed in different and isolated ways, signaled the existence of a new hunger for experience, a new means to realize it, and both of these demanded a new theory of aesthetics. (167)