The Medium is the Message

“After three thousand years of specialist explosion and of increasing specialism and alienation in the technological extensions of our bodies, our world has become compressional by dramatic reversal. As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion…” (McLuhan, 1964, p.7)

Back in 2009, just a few years before the emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham known as ISIS (or ISIL) on the open web, Boris Groys wrote an elaborate essay on religion in the age of digital reproduction. The purpose of the essay was to navigate through contemporary phenomena of extremist thought and analyze their dissemination within today’s information market. In other words, Groys wished to prove, somehow, the complacent relation between the tools through which religious attitudes emerge in mainstream culture on one hand, and the tools through which information systems like the Internet functions, on the other hand.

In the past year, I have tried to follow the lead of Boris Groys, researching the different methods in both media theory and political history, in an attempt to find some sense in today’s complex grid of violence.

As ISIS started to publish their videos online after the break of the Syrian revolution in 2011, it seemed impossible to miss the strategies implemented in their performance: the endless references to Western pop aesthetics and the use of social media networks and user-generated platforms to emphasize their role in contemporary politics, globally. However, most of the analyses conducted so far, on the relation between networked media and a phenomenon like ISIS, have only focused on how those media are being used to transmit and spread extremist ideology.

What I wish to discuss and explore in this essay is how a phenomenon like ISIS has been able to show us, with blood, literally and figuratively, how the Internet is shaping our lives. With my emphasis on ISIS, whose online presence plays an integral role in their performance as a state, my research takes the shape of an investigation on contemporary media themselves, their message, and their impact on the psychic and social complex.

The Medium is the Message

Although written between the early 50’s and late 60’s, Marshall McLuhan’s publications seem rather relevant today as we struggle to find proper criteria to measure and study new mediums, especially when they are incorporated within popular culture. It is perhaps only fifty years later that we can look back and put the bits and pieces of history together.

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan argued in his book “Understanding Media, the Extensions of Man” that the medium is in itself the message – that is, the significance of any medium is defined by how it alters societal and political relations and by how it creates “new patterns of human association” that would otherwise be inconceivable. One might argue, there, that the meaning and the message is not the medium itself, but how we use this medium and these new technologies.

Thinking about the radio or the telephone for instance, their invention and their impact on the societal grid is independent from what we communicate through these technologies. In this sense, the content transmitted through the medium is only significant on a limited scale, in its description of individual correlations, whereas the medium itself has a larger impact on societies on a meta level.

Another striking example proposed by McLuhan is that of the electric light. “The electric light is pure information” (McLuhan, 1964). It does not matter whether we use the electric light in a cinematic projector or to spell out a verbal ad, what matter is how the introduction of the electric light to human societies has allowed the continuous formation of new spaces that would have been otherwise cursed with darkness – this includes the invention of cinema among a large array of other new worlds.

For according to McLuhan, if the mechanical ages had extended our bodies in space, then the electrical age has expanded our nervous system, abolishing space and time as we approach the final phases of extension of Man, after more than a century of electrical technology. This extension of the human body and central nervous system has somehow created, regardless to what those technologies are used for, a new scale and depth of social and political functions: If the mechanical age resulted in a specialized and partial character that is evermore exploding towards literate men and women who are detached from the concerns of the whole of mankind, then the electrical age has brought us into a participatory involvement with the whole of mankind.

The Open Society

Having spoken, briefly, about McLuhan’s concern with the position of media in our lives and where their significance lies, and despite the fact that his views were constructed in the very early days of electronic network systems, some of his writings seem even more relevant today.

When talking about ISIS and their online presence, it has always been a concern among scholars and analysts, and rightly so, to investigate the strategies of recruitment and the way the Islamic State creates its propaganda through the Internet. However, my concern here lies within a syntaxical reversal. I do not wish to study how ISIS transmits its ideology through media, but rather the nature of today’s media that allow a group like ISIS to emerge, and gain power and recognition; in other words, how today’s technology shapes human societies and how it creates a new scale and depth of societal and political meanings in such a way that this form of violence and exploitation can possibly and potentially exist.

In this sense, I find relief in McLuhan’s understanding of media, where it doesn’t matter how the light bulb is used, but what matters is what kind of possible spaces and forms of awareness the light bulbs introduces, allowing people to use it in diverse ways.