The Magisterium and Marshall McLuhan

I first met Marshall McLuhan’s son, Eric, in Rome in 2016. Eric was speaking at the invitation of the Vatican about his father’s intellectual legacy and how it might shed some light on the social media revolution unfolding at the time. We shared a nice dinner at Trattoria Polese, a few hundred meters from Saint Peter’s Square, but Eric seemed exasperated. He explained that his father Marshall, the well-known Catholic scholar of media and culture, had been invited by the Vatican 50 years earlier to weigh in on the new media of his era, television. But as far as Eric knew, Marshall’s interventions were ignored, “probably left in a drawer somewhere,” he said. Eric feared that his recent intervention at the Vatican also fell on deaf ears. 

 

While he is never directly cited, there is ample evidence in papal teaching over the last 40 years that Marshall McLuhan’s ideas actually did see the light of day in Rome. In fact, it would be rather fitting given McLuhan’s insistence that the effects of media technology work at the subconscious level that his own interventions at the Vatican were experienced in the same way.  

 

Many are familiar with Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, “the medium is the message” — a clever way of saying that any medium, whether printing press or smartphone, transforms the culture more profoundly than the individual messages they convey. His insights launched a new branch of media studies, called “media ecology”,” —  a framework that views media technologies as more than just tools. Instead, they can be seen as environmental shifts that transform human perception and experience. 

 

In Redemptoris Missio (1990), Pope Saint John Paul II writes, “the first Areopagus of the modern age is the world of communications, which is unifying humanity and turning it into what is known as a “global village.” The term “global village” figures prominently in McLuhan’s oeuvre. His 1962 book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, chronicles the transformation of culture from the printing press to the electric age. Instant electronic communication, be it telegraph or social media, creates a “simultaneous “field” in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a “global village.”[1]

 

The discerning reader will notice that The Gutenberg Galaxy actually reads more like a history of the Catholic Church as told through the changing media landscape of 15th century Europe.  For McLuhan, the Protestant Reformation cannot be separated historically from the social conditions created by print technology. Sola scriptura, for instance, presumes widespread Bible availability and mass literacy. With the advent of electric media however, the habits of thought and expression that dominated under print conditions gave way to electric speed and new ways of engaging with the world. 

 

How is it then that an advanced technology like electric media returns humanity to a more primitive social experience like a village? For 500 years, print created a reading public that learned new conditions of attendance. The mental posture of reserved detachment required for silent reading fosters an individual “point of view.” This is an effect of print that occurs regardless of the content being consumed. 

 

Under electric conditions however, reserved detachment gives way to emotional involvement and participation (that began with radio and TV and climaxed with social media). As in a village, there is no detachment, only direct engagement. Identity is not strictly individual (as it is under print conditions) but communal and tribal. Some interpreters of McLuhan have suggested that he was too optimistic about technology when he suggests that electric media recreates a “village.” However, those interpretations assume that villages are serene places of human cooperation and fellowship. 

 

On the contrary, McLuhan argued that villages are inherently agonistic, places where tribal rivalries and violence are commonplace. There is little space for separation or contemplation like there is in a print culture. Instead, reactions are instantaneous. It’s hard to look at today’s social media culture and say that instant reactions, “hot takes,” and a new form of tribalism are not on full display. Such tribalism can even be seen in the Church itself where “traditionalists” square off against “progressives” in heated online feuds. Ironically, the medium that was supposed to unite the world by connecting people and cultures has also led to more divisiveness. 

 

It should be noted that McLuhan’s interest in media was rarely moralistic. In fact, he once called attempts to analyze media forms on moral terms as the “numb stance of the technological idiot.” His point was that the failure of media technologies to solve social problems was not a matter of proper use but one of proper understanding. His seminal book Understanding Media artfully conveys this alternative view by surreptitiously adopting a Scriptural hermeneutic. Just as Biblical scholars can read Scriptural forms in a fourfold way (literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical), McLuhan believed an observer of technological forms could do the same, thus avoiding the kind of moral reductionism that gets in the way of deeper understanding. 

 

Television is bad for kids. Why? Because it advertises sex and sugar cereals? This line of reasoning replaces a true understanding of television’s social and psychological effects with precious moralizing. The content of the medium is a red herring. It is the form itself that requires further exegesis.  

 

McLuhan’s adaptation of Scriptural interpretation takes the form of a tetrad, a fourfold structure that analyzes what a new technology enhances, retrieves, obsolesces and reverses. At a literal level digital culture seems to provide what it promises, constant connectivity. But at an allegorical level it retrieves certain habits of thought and experiences that resemble that of oral and tribal culture, the “global village.” At a tropological or moral level, certain faculties are diminished by digital devices. Things like deep attention, solitude and even individual memory begin to atrophy. Finally, digital culture reverses into its opposite when it reaches full saturation. Human connection and abundance of information reverse into loneliness and misinformation. 

 

A close examination of Church documents since Vatican II reveals a striking resemblance to McLuhan’s way of thinking. Inter Mirifica (1963) advises that all who use media “know the precise manner in which a given medium achieves its effect. For its influence can be so great that men…can scarcely become aware of it” (4). McLuhan believed that media are not tools but environments because they train our senses in ways that alter our perception of the world around us. In Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce writes, “the viability of vicinals if invisible is invincible.” McLuhan was fond of this wordplay for two reasons. First, it illustrates his view that the real effects of a media form is typically hidden by the media’s content that demands our immediate attention. Second, Joyce’s literary style draws the reader’s attention to how language and grammar function as medium by playing with the form itself. In her wisdom, the Church says something similar about media: its effects often go undetected when we are not made aware of them.

McLuhan liked to say that the cultural transformation wrought by the railroad had nothing to do with whether the trains were carrying coal or Corn Flakes. The railroad did more than convey goods, it reshaped our relationship to space and time. Railroad hubs grew into major cities and train schedules required the invention of time zones. Likewise, the cultural change wrought by digital technology has less to do with whether a smartphone is loaded with pornography or prayer apps and more to do with how the presence of the device itself has changed our habits of perception and patterns of cognition. 

 

The average smartphone user fails to recognize that it is not screentime or doomscrolling that is causing her psychological distress but a cognitive rewiring that removes us from the former condition of consuming our information in the detached and reserved manner of book reading. Today, our content is filtered and processed for maximum stimulation but this also disguises media’s most transformative effects. Underneath the memes and TikTok videos is a new grammar, or set of rules, that structures the new technology. It is communication rendered not by a mind and soul speaking to another mind and soul but by a mathematical process. 

 

Algorithms and LLMs (large language models) make up the formal structure of our digital experience. This is not a neutral process. Pope Benedict XVI put it this way in Caritatis Veritate:

 

Today the means of mass communication are so important… that it would be absurd to maintain that they are neutral… new technologies create new psychological attitudes… techniques and technology in general are never merely means but involve a worldview and influence human culture. (68-77)

 

Benedict echoes John Paul II, who said in his his Apostolic Letter “The Rapid Development” that “[w]e are dealing with a complex problem, because the culture itself, prescinding from its content, arises from the very existence of new ways to communicate with hitherto unknown techniques and vocabulary” (3). And both popes seem to give an homage to McLuhan himself who said:

 

All media work is over completely. They are so pervasive in their...consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.[2]

 

To decode what McLuhan means by “media work as environments,” it is helpful to look at Laudato si’ (2015), where Pope Francis lays out a vision of “environmental” awareness that includes more than things like protecting air and water quality but advocates for an “integral ecology” that sees everything as connected. He mentions media specifically when he says:

 

when media and the digital world become omnipresent, their influence can stop people from learning how to live wisely, to think deeply and to love generously...True wisdom, as the fruit of self-examination, dialogue and generous encounter between persons, is not acquired by a mere accumulation of data which eventually leads to overload and confusion, a sort of mental pollution. (47)

 

Note that Francis does not comment on the content of the media but on the ways in which we think and relate differently to one another under digital conditions. What’s at stake is our ability to be truly introspective when devices occupy so much of our interior life. What’s at stake is the potential for dialogue when social relations take place in digital environments where algorithms and antagonisms set the tone for discourse. What’s at stake is the generous encounter with others when eyes and faces fail to meet head on but are mediated and distracted by a screen. 

 

McLuhan rarely moralized these changes;, he simply provided a way of thinking about media that was more ontological than ethical. His gnomic style was perplexing for all the right reasons because it was like a depth charge waiting to go off in the mind of his reader that reveals the deep structures hiding behind all of the glittering content. He was a fan of Chesterton whose paradoxical style had a similar effect. McLuhan was a true Catholic thinker who believed that the ultimate expression of his famous phrase “the medium is the message,” could be found in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. It is fitting then that the Church would honor his message in the medium of the Magisterium.