Although I’m said to write articles very quickly, that quickness has conditions: that is to say, only after I’ve dawdled and dawdled and dawdled until the very last moment can I possibly squeeze out a paper at lightning speed…… This time I’ve finally squeezed it out again at the last possible moment; as for how effective it is…… well…… I don’t care anymore…… entering dead-pig-doesn’t-fear-boiling-water mode……
Media•Sensation•Space-Time ——A Preliminary Inquiry into McLuhan’s Media Ontology
Abstract: The basic position or method of McLuhan’s media theory can appropriately be called “media ontology.” In McLuhan’s view, media are not neutral channels for the transmission of information between subjects, or between subject and object; rather, it is media that constitute nature and human nature. Media, or technology, are extensions of the human being; people can see their own reflection in media technology, and to reflect on media is also to reflect on human nature. Theories concerning the cultural differences produced by oral and written technologies, as well as the correspondence between oral-written technology and auditory-visual space, are the most central and typical applications of McLuhan’s media theory. The development from oral technology to written technology, and the concomitant shift from auditory space to visual space, forged the distinctive conceptions of space and time held by Westerners, and determined the characteristics of Western modern thought, such as abstraction, linearity, objectivity, disenchantment, isolation, analysis, stasis, and so on.
Keywords: McLuhan media ontology oral culture and written culture auditory-tactile space
Introduction
In the field of communication studies, or rather media studies, McLuhan is a singular and mysterious figure. His reputation has risen and fallen dramatically, and opinions of him have been sharply divided; his method is entirely his own, neither belonging to the mainstream empiricist school nor fitting into the critical tradition since the Frankfurt School. Some scholars have called it an “artistic” mode or a “mosaic” form.[1] But clearly, merely offering praise such as “wildly imaginative” or “utterly unconventional,” or insults such as “loose and chaotic” or “mystifying for mystification’s sake,” can satisfy no one. In fact, McLuhan himself was not at all unaware of his own research method. Although McLuhan never attempted to build his theoretical edifice with a clearly tiered logical structure (which is precisely what McLuhan’s method opposes), this does not mean that McLuhan lacked a distinctive and consistent mode of thinking and basic attitude, or, in other words, some kind of research “paradigm.” And that paradigm will provide us with far-reaching inspiration, enabling us to understand media more profoundly and understand ourselves. The task of this essay is to offer a preliminary sorting-out and indication of this basic method or attitude in McLuhan; I shall call the paradigm of McLuhan’s media theory “media ontology.”
I use the term “ontology” here in the sense of the contemporary Continental philosophical tradition of “phenomenology-existentialism.” Associating McLuhan with phenomenology is not my own invention; in fact, quite a few Chinese and foreign scholars have long noticed the connection between McLuhan and phenomenology[2]. However, scholars such as Fan Long and Mei Jionglin mainly draw on Husserl’s concepts such as “eidetic intuition” to interpret McLuhan, whereas I think that, compared with Husserl, McLuhan’s line of thought is actually closer to later existentialist phenomenologists such as Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Rather than saying that McLuhan’s method is “eidetic intuition,” it would be more apt to call it “ontology.”
In fact, McLuhan himself embraced this positioning. He explicitly mentioned: “My method is properly called ‘structuralist.’ …… In the realm of media, I alone have ventured to use structuralist or ‘existentialist’ methods. This is an elegant method.”[3]
Although it is difficult to demonstrate that McLuhan’s thought was directly influenced by phenomenology-existentialism, what can at least be affirmed is that McLuhan was well acquainted with the latest developments in Continental philosophy and held them in considerable regard.
McLuhan himself clearly read broadly and continuously in the works of Continental philosophers. For example, in McLuhan’s later lectures he quoted at length from Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”[4], and McLuhan’s student and colleague Walter Ong also cited Merleau-Ponty’s works[5]. In addition, as early as McLuhan’s famous work The Gutenberg Galaxy, one section was titled “Heidegger Coming on the Electric Wave Like a Cool Cat Riding the Mechanical Wave, Just as Descartes Did”[6]—he believed that, just as Descartes’s philosophy reflected the mode of thought of the mechanical world, Heidegger’s philosophy was the outstanding representative of this brand-new electric world. Just as readers in the mechanical age would naturally be enthusiastic about Descartes’s philosophy, so Heidegger’s philosophy would naturally be welcomed by people in the electric age. Of course, McLuhan went on to remark that Heidegger himself did not realize the environment of electronic media technology in which his own thought was rooted, whereas McLuhan himself was making more self-conscious use of the mode of thought of this new world.
That is to say, in McLuhan’s view, his thought, like Heidegger’s, was an embodiment of the world of electronic media; McLuhan declared that he “has always been attentive to Kant, Hegel, and recent phenomenology; clearly, Kant and Hegel merely leaped from Hume’s visual determinism into auditory subjectivism. All of their followers still believe that the auditory world is the world of spirit, unlike the external visual world; in fact, the opposite is true: the auditory world, like the visual world, is a material world. …… The structuralism of the European phenomenologists is an auditory-tactile world; I am very familiar with it, because I am using that world.”[7]
In short, according to McLuhan’s own self-positioning, his mode of thought is “phenomenological-structuralist-existentialist,” born along with the electronic media environment and based on the “auditory-tactile world.” So next we must ask: what kind of existentialism is McLuhan’s? What is the meaning of the media environment? And what does the world of sensation mean? Moreover, what is the relationship among these things called “thought,” “media,” “sensation,” and “world”?
This essay will offer a preliminary sorting-out of the above points in McLuhan’s mode of thought; let us begin with “ontology.”
Ontology
What is called “existentialism,” according to Sartre’s classic formulation, has as its basic slogan “existence precedes essence”; that is to say, “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterward. If man, as the existentialist sees him, is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.”[8]
In other words, human beings have no essence, or rather the essence of human beings is “nothing,” is “possibility,” and not any determination. However, this does not mean that human beings can determine and shape themselves without any limits. There are two crucial points here: first, “being-in-the-world”; second, “making.” What is “the world”? How is one to “make” it?—this inevitably brings in something called “technology,” or in other words, “media.” What is called “media ontology” is not ontology applied in the domain of media, but precisely an interpretation of ontology itself.
Human existence is always “in the world”: what does this mean? Wu Guosheng says: “‘Being-in-the-world’ is not what we usually imagine, where the world is like a basket and we are like vegetables thrown into that basket-world. That is not the case. To put it simply, rather than writing the ‘world’ in ‘being-in-the-world’ as 世, we might as well write it as 视, as in ‘vision.’ This world is a field, a ‘visual field,’ a horizon. For a person to exist in the world means that the person exists in a way that unfolds a world. So how is ‘this world’ unfolded, and through what is it unfolded? Heidegger did not discuss this question in detail; he only said that so long as a person exists, he or she unfolds a world. In my view, technology is the way the world unfolds, the concretization of world-disclosure.”[9]
What McLuhan discusses as “media” is what is here called “technology,” the “way the world unfolds.” In McLuhan’s view, media technology not only influences human thought; rather, it is media that constitutes “the world” or “nature” itself—“the effect of a new medium on the life of the senses…… is not to change our thoughts but to change the structure of our world.”[10]
Wu Guosheng writes “world” as “visual field,” pointing out that the world is like an extended field of vision. Yet in McLuhan’s view, such a statement refers only to the unfolding of a “visual world.” For McLuhan, this “visual field” is the product of Western alphabetic-print culture; the world of oral culture and the electronic age, however, is not unfolded through vision, or rather the status of vision is by no means dominant. In the “auditory world,” there is no existence of a distant “edge” like a “horizon”; people do not imagine the unfolding of the “world” through such a picture of gazing into the distance, and the auditory-tactile world is always tightly wrapped around the human being. The question of the sensory world (space) will be discussed further below.
Existentialism and McLuhan’s media ontology are both anti-essentialist. In his view, the world that this person unfolds is not some “subjective world” opposed to the “objective world”—media “are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature.”[11] It is not that there is an objective world and also a subjective world, and that media, as an intermediary between them, transmit things from the objective world into human perception. Ontologists never speak of that transcendent ontological world, because what people can “talk about” is already a structure determined by the media technology of “speech.” It is meaningless to talk about some world beyond all media. What human beings can understand, grasp, and discuss are all “media,” or “human extensions.” The significance of media is not that they transmit to people the determinate properties of things with such-and-such characteristics, but rather that it is media that make things possess such-and-such characteristics in the first place. McLuhan said: “The medium (also called the extension of man) is a factor in ‘making things happen’ rather than in ‘making things known.’”[12]
On the other hand, if people in the world are to “define themselves,” then what do we use to define human nature? And where are we to understand human nature? Technical ontology gives the answer: “technology and man mutually determine each other”—“what kind of person you are depends on what kind of technology you use; how you understand human beings is how you understand technology; how you view technology is how you will view human beings.”[13] This is precisely McLuhan’s view—“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”[14]
McLuhan uses the words “media” and “technology” interchangeably, and defines them as “extensions of man.” The so-called “extensions of man” simply means that technology is always some function or functions of the human body extended, enlarged, or intensified—for example, eyeglasses are an extension of the eye, the wheel is an extension of the foot, clothing is an extension of the skin, and cities and society are also extensions of the body’s mechanisms of defense and balance, and so on. In McLuhan’s view, “all human artifacts, including language, law, ideas, hypotheses, tools, clothing, computers, and so on, are extensions of the human body.”[15]
To go further, human extensions do not merely extend human capacities; they are also an externalized “expression” of human nature. McLuhan said: “Human technology is the most human thing about man. All forms of hardware are language-like and are humanly expressive. When human organs are extended into the environment they are a form of utterance or expression.”[16] “All of man’s extensions are external expressions or exteriorizations of our being and have the character of language. Whether the extension is a shoe, a cane, a zipper, or a bulldozer, all forms of extension have the structure of language, and are exteriorizations or external expressions of human being. Like all language forms, they have their own syntax and grammar.”[17]
Thus technology, as an extension of man, becomes a kind of externalized or objectified human nature; to understand technology is to understand human beings themselves—human beings can, and only can, intuit themselves through externalized technology (what traditional philosophy calls introspection within consciousness is, in the final analysis, nothing more than an inquiry into artificial media technologies such as language and concepts). This is also very much like Marx’s view—Marx said: “……the object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but actively, in reality, and thus he contemplates himself in a world he has created.”[18] “The history of industry and the objectified existence of industry are an open book of human essential powers, the sensible presentation of human psychology.”[19]
And people often do not realize that the qualities we see in those objects are in fact a “re-presentation” of human nature, a reflection of ourselves. On this point, McLuhan invokes the story of Narcissus, the Greek myth in which Narcissus becomes infatuated with his own reflection in the water and falls into an obsession from which he cannot extricate himself. McLuhan points out that Narcissus is not, as people usually say, a “narcissist,” but rather someone lacking self-love. He did not realize that the reflection in the water was a reflection of himself: “If he had known that the reflection was his own extension or repeat, he would have felt quite differently about it.”[20] He would then re-understand the meaning of the reflection, and his understanding of himself would also be renewed. McLuhan uses this myth to symbolize the relationship between modern people and technology: people become fascinated by objects and cannot extricate themselves, yet they are so numb and dull that they fail to recognize their own reflection, and thus forget or repudiate themselves.
As for the predicaments caused by the obsession or frenzy of modern techno-supremacism, McLuhan does not offer any solution, but he believes that once people can perceive their own reflection in technology, they will acquire a wholly new attitude. To understand human beings through reflection on media technology—this is precisely McLuhan’s most basic theoretical demand.
Media as Environment
“Media is the message” is McLuhan’s most widely circulated aphorism, and also one of the core propositions of his media theory. However, this phrase is easy to misunderstand; McLuhan himself later came to dislike this formulation, and playfully turned it into “the medium is the massage”—“the medium is really the massage (massage) rather than the message (message), because it has the effect of imposing its character on everything it touches…… it is a kind of giant massage, brutal massage, that slaps everyone around.”[21]
Saying “the medium is the massage” is of course a playful expression. McLuhan preferred to say that media create environments—“The ‘medium is the message’ means that a totally new environment is created.”[22] “To say that technology, or extensions, create new environments is a better way of saying media are messages.”[23]
Of course, the saying “the medium is the massage” is not mere frivolity; what McLuhan wants to emphasize is that the environment created by media is a process that exerts powerful influence on human beings: “A medium creates an environment. Environment is a process, not a wrapper or a casing. The medium is an act that does things to the nervous system and to our lives of feeling, and completely changes our lives of feeling.”[24]
Whether one says that media are message, massage, or environment, the most basic starting point is opposition to a certain vulgar view: the notion that “the media of information transmission are neutral”[25]. This view treats media as conduits for transmitting information, and the only concern of media theory built upon it is how to clear these conduits so that information can be transmitted more efficiently. McLuhan said: “A transport theory of communication is concerned with eliminating noise, clearing the railways of interference, keeping transportation flowing. … I have little interest in that kind of theory. My theory is, or my focus is, what effects these media have on their users.”[26]
If media themselves are message, then what exactly is the content people convey through media? Of course, the “content” of media is also message, but at the same time it is still “media” — “the content of the new environment is always the old environment”[27]. As McLuhan said: “The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the content of print is writing, and the content of the telegraph is print. If you ask, ‘What is the content of speech?’ it is necessary to say: actual thought-processes ….”[28]
“The new environment is always ‘invisible’”[29], but it expresses the old environment: “in other words, the old environment becomes visible only when it has been replaced by the new environment.”[30] McLuhan thought that “electric light” was “the clearest example” of this proposition. People often doubt whether wheels, print, or airplanes can change our habits of perception. Even so, once they come into contact with electric lighting, their doubts vanish without a trace. In this field, the medium is the message. When the electric light comes on, a perceptual world appears. When the electric light goes off, that perceptual world vanishes entirely.[31]
The light in the background itself is invisible; what people see are the things illuminated by the light. These things may have been background objects in the original perceptual world (perhaps a world of sound and touch), yet in the new perceptual world (perhaps a visual world) they become clear objective objects or eye-catching works of art. “When writing was invented, Plato transformed the previous oral dialogue into an artificial art form. When print was born, the Middle Ages became an artificial art form….”[32] Thus, in McLuhan’s view, artists provide something like a “rearview mirror” perspective: they keenly catch the currents of the age and express environmental renovation. McLuhan pointed out that what is seen in the “rearview mirror” is precisely “the foreseeable future. Not what has already passed, but what is approaching you.”[33] Artistic works are therefore both nostalgia for the past and a grasp of the future.
Yet ordinary people are not as sensitive as artists. “New technologies numb us”[34], and people’s ways of thinking often remain stuck in an earlier age, interpreting the meaning of new technologies through old patterns: for example, “the printed book was long regarded as a cheap and vulgar form of manuscript,”[35] the automobile was seen as a horse carriage without a horse, “broadcasting looked like telegraphy without wires,” “automation is a terrifying extreme of mechanization”[36], and so on. These are all great misunderstandings, like “using an X-ray machine as a space heater”[37].
The theme of McLuhan’s media studies is precisely to reveal what effects media or technologies bring to human beings. Here McLuhan proposed the concept of “sense ratios”: “As extensions of our senses, media inevitably form new ratios. Not only do the various senses form new ratios, but in their interaction they too must form new ratios.”[38] Since what technology extends is human sense or faculty, the introduction of each new technology will change the mutual relations among the human senses. Technologies that extend vision may weaken the status of hearing and touch; some technologies tend to intensify intercommunication among certain senses, while others tend to split them apart.
Based on such a method, McLuhan conducted analyses of various media technologies in terms of “sense,” the most representative of which is his discussion of the three eras of “speech,” “writing,” and “electronic media.” McLuhan believed that oral language extends and strengthens hearing; thus people in oral cultures perceive a certain acoustic space, which in turn shapes the various characteristics of oral-cultural people in thinking, cognition, and lifestyle. Correspondingly, writing, especially alphabetic writing and print, shapes a visual world. By the age of electronic media, hearing-and-touch once again becomes dominant. Below, I will take the critique of oral culture and literate culture as an example to illustrate McLuhan’s research.
Speech and Writing
As quoted above, McLuhan pointed out: “All forms of extension have language structure, are externalizations or exteriorizations of the human being. As with all forms of language, they have their own syntax and grammar.”[39] Then human beings’ most basic and important extension is undoubtedly language itself. It is by means of language that human beings can grasp the structure of the world. McLuhan quotes Humboldt: “Man lives in the world in the main as language presents it to him. Indeed, since his senses and acting depend on perception, we can say even more simply that he lives exclusively as language presents it to him. Man has developed language from himself, and by the same process he has tangled himself in it. Every language draws a circle around the people to whom it belongs, a circle that can be escaped only by stepping out of it into another one.”[40] Language in the broad sense includes all technologies for grasping the world, while language in the narrow sense of course refers to language in the forms of speech and writing.
Language makes knowledge of the world possible. To form knowledge of the world, one must first be able to separate oneself from the world to some extent, and only then can one stand face to face with it. The animal is completely fused with its world, and thus cannot produce objectifying knowledge. McLuhan cites Bergson: “Without language, man’s intelligence would be entirely absorbed in the objects of his attention. Language to intelligence is what the wheel is to the foot and to the body. The wheel makes it possible for the limbs to move more lightly and rapidly among things, while involvement decreases more and more.”[41]
From speech to writing and then to print, the history of language seems to be precisely the history of the human being’s increasing estrangement from the world. The significance of writing is by no means merely that it enables the original language to be recorded so as to be disseminated more widely; rather, it fundamentally changes the nature of “language.” If we had never experienced an oral culture without writing, those of us who can read and write would find it hard to understand what the unwritten oral language is like as a kind of language. On this point, McLuhan’s student and close friend Walter Ong gave an interesting analogy: for a literate person who has never encountered an original oral culture to understand “unwritten language” is like explaining what a horse is to someone who knows cars but has never seen a horse, by using the concept of a “car without wheels” — “struggling to strip from the ‘wheel-less automobile’ every notion pertaining to ‘automobile,’ in order to inject into the ‘wheel-less automobile’ a meaning entirely equivalent to ‘horse.’”[42] Of course, the final impression that person forms of a “wheel-less automobile” must be something utterly distorted. For us, the concept of “unwritten language” will also bring similar difficulties.
Even so, we can still glimpse the many differences between oral culture and literate culture. One way is to examine past and existing unwritten cultures; another is to investigate the characteristics of speech and writing technologies themselves. In the end we will discover that the differences between unwritten and written cultures correspond precisely to the differences between speech technology and writing technology.
McLuhan cited a report by Professor Wilson of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, concerning the showing of films to Africans[43]. He pointed out that we, who are more oriented toward literate culture, are accustomed to “seeing the world in three-dimensional or perspective terms,” and thus “can read photographs or films without training,” but those Africans of unwritten cultures cannot understand films without training.
Not being able to understand a film does not merely mean failing to understand the film’s “content,” but failing to understand the medium of “film” itself. If a film shows a scene in the stock exchange on Wall Street, then it is easy to understand why those African tribespeople could not understand it. However, the film Wilson showed depicted “how ordinary families in a primitive African village got rid of a foul pool,” and “the images show picking up empty tins and moving them elsewhere, and so on”[44]. There was nothing in this “content” beyond the daily experience of Africans. Yet when the researchers asked the Africans “what did you see,” the answer was “a chicken” — the researchers did not even know there was a chicken in it! So they “searched for this chicken very carefully, scanning frame by frame. Sure enough, there was a chicken, flashing into view for one second, frightened and fleeing. In the lower right corner of the screen…. The rest was all slow motion.”[45] Only when the researchers asked further did they answer that they had seen a person. But from beginning to end, “they did not see a complete story”[46]. Wilson then said: “They did not see the whole frame — they were searching for details within that frame. Later, we consulted an artist and an eye specialist before learning that experienced viewers, that is, viewers accustomed to films, always focus their gaze slightly in front of the screen so as to take in the whole framework of the image. In this sense, we can also say that a picture is a convention, and you must first survey the whole picture. These Africans did not do so because they were not used to films.”[47]
McLuhan explained this as follows: “They have no viewpoint that sets them apart from the object; they are completely one with the object. They are strongly immersed in it. The eyes are also used, but not for perspective, rather almost for touch. Euclidean space in large measure depends on the separation of vision and touch, hearing and touch; they have no life experience of Euclidean space.”[48]
Put simply, people in unwritten cultures lack a certain ability to separate the senses from the body. They are intensely fused with the world they perceive, and are not good at playing the role of detached “spectators.” Wilson also reported that, when films began with the standard opening sequence — “a panoramic view of the city, shrinking into a street, then into a house, then the camera pushing through the window, and so on. When they watched these shots, they insisted on seeing the camera as if it were themselves continuously walking forward, doing those actions, until being pulled in through the window”[49]. By contrast, when we modern people watch such shots, it seems perfectly natural to separate our “vision” from our body. We can experience the movement of a visual space, yet our body is not stirred in the slightest. This habit of stepping back and observing coolly is precisely the basic mode of writing and reading. Speaking and listening in oral culture both require strong participation and are situational, whereas writing and reading cultivate an attitude of detachment and transcendence. McLuhan said: “When we speak, we tend to react to every situation, even to the act of speech itself, with tone and gesture. Writing, however, tends to be a detached and specialized act. We rarely have the opportunity to react to the act of writing, nor is there any need to react to it. Literate people or societies cultivate the ability to do anything from a relatively detached and transcendental standpoint. Illiterate people or societies, on the other hand, undergo emotional or affective involvement in everything.”[50]
Thus it is easy to understand why people raised in literate cultures can easily play a passive role when facing books or films: “But the African audience had no such training in quietly following a sequence of statements.”[51] So much so that those showing them films had to pay constant attention to how to guide them in interacting with the film: “The film presenter had to comment while showing the film…. If there were people singing in the film, the narrator also had to sing, and invite the audience to sing along….”[52]
Not only is the experience of reading and writing indifferent and detached, writing itself — especially abstract and neutral alphabetic-print writing — is even more indifferent and alienating, tending to cut off the various bonds between human beings, the world, and others. McLuhan gave a vivid example: “Suppose we do not display the Stars and Stripes, but instead put the words ‘American flag’ on a piece of cloth and exhibit it. Although the meaning conveyed by these two signs is the same, their effects are vastly different. Converting the rich visual pattern of the Stars and Stripes into words strips the Stars and Stripes of most of its image-like and experiential character, while the constraints of abstract letters remain unchanged. Perhaps this example helps explain the changes a tribal person undergoes when he learns to read. In his relationship to the community, almost all emotional and tribal family feeling is stripped away. He is freed from emotional bonds and can detach himself from the tribe, becoming a civilized individual; becoming a person organized by sight, ….”[53]
Words in oral culture are “magical”; richly meaningful visual patterns such as flags and pictographs are also magical. This magic can mobilize people’s senses in many dimensions and evoke rich emotional associations. But alphabetic letters are completely empty. They are not only devoid of magic; they are disenchanted — “the unique power of the alphabet is to separate sound, form, and meaning. Our letters are semantically neutral”[54]. McLuhan pointed out: “Only the phonetic alphabet splits human experience into two such clearly distinct parts, enabling the user to substitute the eye for the ear, liberating him from the tribal spell of resonant speech and kinship networks.”[55] The bottles and jars used by early alchemists were all labeled with graphic symbols such as the signs of the zodiac, whereas the reagent bottles of modern chemists must bear letters — best of all, printed letters. Speech and images invest things with enchantment, whereas printed labels strip the world of its aura — “before written culture stripped language of its multidimensional resonance, every word was a self-contained world of sound, an ‘instant god’ or a revelation of god.[56]”
Just as Africans without writing need a long period of adjustment before they can understand film, so Westerners, when gradually moving from an oral culture to a written one, also need a gradual process of adaptation. Thus the texts that were welcomed at first were still situated in context. Walter Ong points out: “Ancient authors gave readers striking cues so that readers could imagine the situation in which they found themselves. They wrote philosophical material in the form of dialogue, … Later, in the Middle Ages, philosophical and theological texts adopted the form of quaestio and responsio, so that readers could imagine an oral debate. … Nineteenth-century novelists consciously, affectedly, and repeatedly said ‘dear reader’ …”[57] And by our own time, we no longer ask that a text should create some sort of scene for the reader; rather, we prefer to demand that a text be conceptually rigorous, structurally clear, neatly layered, logically coherent, and so on—things that, in oral culture, are not only not necessary requirements, but are almost impossible to imagine.
Walter Ong points out: “All thought, including that in primary oral culture, is to a greater or lesser degree analysable: thought has to split its material into various elements. Nevertheless, without writing and reading it is impossible to examine phenomena in terms of abstraction, ordering, classification and explanation, and it is also impossible to examine truth in written statements in this way.”[58]
Thinking is the reappearance in memory of impressions; this is what is meant by “racking one’s brains,” but what, exactly, does one go to “rack” for? In Phaedrus, Plato mentions that writing “damages memory,” but in fact, it is better to say that writing changes the nature of “memory.” Walter Ong points out: “In a primary oral culture, ‘search’ is a meaningless term: it has no imaginable meaning. Without writing, words have no visible existence, and even if the objects they denote are right in front of one’s eyes, the words are invisible. Such words are only sounds; you can ‘summon’ oral words, that is, recall them, but there is nowhere to ‘look for’ oral words. They have no focus, no trace (trace is a visual metaphor), not even the slightest trail. Oral words are simply happenings, events.”[59] “Today the literate person needs to learn organized knowledge before he or she can ‘understand’ it. In other words, what they can remember is what has already been put together in words, what can be retrieved. Not only Euclidean geometry requires such a process of recollection, but so does the history of the American Revolution, and even the batting averages of baseball hitters or traffic regulations.”[60]
“It is difficult for a person to keep talking to himself for several hours at a stretch; in oral culture, long periods of thought are closely connected with exchange with others.”[61] But even so, people cannot record their own process of thought, and if they want to preserve and transmit the results of thought, so as to form relatively determinate knowledge, they must organize the content of thought into some form, so that it can be summoned up or traced at any time. And the way people in oral culture and those in written culture organize the materials of thought is vastly different. Literate people can arrange their line of thought into some kind of orderly, directory-like structure, whereas oral people not only cannot establish a fixed hierarchical structure, but fundamentally “do not have neutral tools such as lists.” Walter Ong, citing Havelock[62], reminds us: “The latter half of Book II of the Iliad lists the famous catalogue of ships in more than four hundred lines, using as its classificatory categories the names of leaders and regions from all over Greece, but all the names are fully set within the environment of human action: personal names and place-names appear in action”[63]
The first feature of oral-culture thought that Walter Ong points to is that it is “additive rather than subordinate,” by which he means that oral people do not have a hierarchical architecture like that of a lower level subordinated to a higher one, but more like the way children speak, simply linking sentences or propositions with “and then… and then…”. Walter Ong illustrates this phenomenon by pointing to the differences between two translations of Genesis 1:1–5[64]. In the Douay version of the Bible, which is closer to the Hebrew original, the same passage uses nine sentence-linking “ands” (corresponding to the Hebrew we and wa), whereas in The New American Bible, the translation uses only two “ands,” and both are submerged within complex sentences; the other connectives are replaced by “when,” “then,” “thus,” and “while.” Walter Ong notes that this “analytical, meticulous relation of subordination and coordination” is precisely a unique feature of written culture, especially alphabetic culture.
Syllogistic logic is undoubtedly also such an analytical structure. When we think about logical propositions such as “if p, then q,” symbols of this sort often have to arise in the mind and be arranged in some order; and this relation is hard for those who think in auditory impressions to imagine. When they think, the impressions they summon are not abstract symbols of any kind, but “events” and “situations.”
Walter Ong cites research by the Soviet psychologist Luria’s team[65]. Their study showed that illiterate respondents do not use abstract concepts such as “circle”—when researchers showed them circular patterns, they called them plates, barrels, watches, and so on. When researchers asked respondents to classify four cards showing a hammer, a saw, a log, and an axe, they could not understand the line of thought that “only the log is not a tool,” but instead insisted on situational thinking: “They’re all the same: a saw saws wood, an axe chops wood. If I had to throw away one of them, I’d throw away the axe; the axe isn’t as good as the saw for carpentry.” In addition, the experiments also suggested that illiterate subjects do not accept logical thinking, but instead treat logical problems as riddles; they also refuse to define things, and find it difficult to engage in self-analysis, and so on. In McLuhan’s or Walter Ong’s view, these features cannot simply be attributed to intellectual deficiency or lack of education; in fact, there is evidence that as long as one receives even the most basic training in written culture—for example, learning the simplest spelling, regardless of how much specific knowledge one acquires—one will behave entirely differently.
In addition, the transition from writing to printing also brought profound effects. McLuhan points out: “Everything has its place; everything is in good order. This is not only a characteristic of the typesetter’s case of type, but also a characteristic of the whole organization and arrangement of human knowledge and action. This has been so since the sixteenth century.”[66] McLuhan reminds us that “the consequences of mechanizing words are just as revolutionary as the consequences of mechanizing time. … Movable type is already the embryo of the modern assembly line.”[67] Printed books can be said to be the first mechanically “mass-produced” homogeneous commodity; “it opened the door to the pricing system.”[68] To this day, books are probably still the only commodity on which a uniform price is printed directly onto the product. Besides giving rise to the modern commercial system, this may also have promoted a certain theory of value based on abstraction and labeling—that is, the belief that any kind of knowledge or thing possesses some abstract, objective, fixed, and uniform “value.”
The foregoing comparison between oral culture and written culture is intended to show the following fact: although McLuhan’s media theory does not follow an empirical method, it is by no means mere idle speculation; rather, it can be closely integrated with empirical research in history, sociology, anthropology, and so on, mutually illuminating and corroborating one another. As for more specific aspects, and McLuhan’s numerous discussions of the age of electronic media, I will not go on to expand on them here. Finally, let us return to the earlier question: how, exactly, are the differences between oral culture and written culture “isomorphic” with the corresponding media technologies? In McLuhan’s view, speech is an extension of the auditory-tactile, whereas alphabetic writing is an expansion of the visual. The various differences between oral people and literate people are precisely the differences between “auditory space” and “visual space.”
Media and Time-Space
If technology is an extension of human faculties, then it is very obvious that speech extends hearing, whereas writing gives greater prominence to vision. Moreover, unlike pictographic and ideographic writing, alphabetic writing not only extends vision, but also makes vision tend toward independence and differentiation. In McLuhan’s words, alphabetic culture caused the “schizophrenia” of Western man. McLuhan says: “The magical world of the ear and the neutral world of the eye are split, and the nontribal man emerges in that split. … All literate people have been schizophrenic ever since the invention of the phonetic alphabet. … Ever since the phonetic alphabet abstracted meaning from sound, ever since sound was translated into visual code, man has been entangled in the experience that effected this transformation. Pictographic, ideographic, and hieroglyphic writing do not possess the power to de-tribalize man; apart from the phonetic alphabet, no other writing has ever freed man from the constrained world of interdependence and mutual involvement. The world of interdependence and mutual involvement is the world of the auditory network.”[69]
McLuhan reminds us: “It is only vision that separates us; the other senses involve us,”[70] though people can also close their eyes and listen only with their ears, closing the eyes does not strengthen concentration when listening to the speech of others. In verbal communication, the human senses are linked in operation: one is always listening while also staring at the speaker, and speech is accompanied by intentional or unintentional bodily movements. In verbal exchange, not only is the relation between person and person close, but the relation among the various senses is also coordinated. When using touch for manipulation, it is best for the eyes and ears to participate at the same time. During kissing, it is best to close the eyes—perhaps because vision brings with it a sense of alienation? The case of writing and reading with文字 is entirely different: there is not only no close interlinkage between persons, and between one sense and another, but rather they must be separated. When reading, it is best to shut off hearing; while writing, it is by no means suitable to wave one’s arms and legs. In the medium of writing, author and reader are also separated. When we speak, we always hope to be looked at, and are willing to let the audience intervene at any time, at least through interaction in the form of nodding, applauding, or smiling; but we are not used to being stared at while writing, and even if the person beside us is a future reader, we still do not want to be writing while being pointed at and criticized. Writing and reading require a person, or more precisely, a person’s vision, to withdraw from a world full of connections and rich variety and enter a closed, monotonous, independent, empty, silent space. From then on, notions such as “individual,” “private,” “objective,” and “abstract” are gradually nurtured.
As McLuhan says: “In tribal society, for very practical reasons, touch, taste, hearing, and smell are all highly developed, far more so than sight in the strict sense. Suddenly the phonetic alphabet drops like a bomb into tribal society and gives vision the highest rank in the sensory hierarchy. Literacy ejects man from tribal society and causes him to use his eyes in place of his ears, to substitute linear visual values and a segmented consciousness for holistic, profound, public interaction. The phonetic alphabet is a reinforcement and extension of visual function; it weakens the作用 of hearing, touch, taste, and smell,”[71]
It is precisely this visual centrism that laid the foundations for Western concepts of time and space. McLuhan points out that “The alphabet created the Greek sensibility for Euclidean space, and at the same time discovered perspective and the chronicle.”[72]
Oral culture of course also has “history,” but that kind of history exists in the form of epic poetry, telling the stories of heroic figures rather than the image of “history” itself. Epic is organized around specific personages, not according to the order of “years”; oral people do not have the concept of an objective and linear “history” that transcends specific individuals and everyday life.
McLuhan cites Mumford’s related views on the significance of the clock for modern civilization, and comments: “Lewis Mumford thinks that, in terms of its influence on the mechanization of society, the clock should rank ahead of the printing press. But he fails to notice the influence of the phonetic alphabet; it was the phonetic alphabet that made the visual segmentation and unification of time possible. In fact, he did not realize that the phonetic alphabet is the source of Western mechanism, just as he did not know that mechanization is the process by which society shifted from an auditory-tactile orientation to a visual-value orientation.”[73] McLuhan believes that “it is not the clock, but the written culture reinforced by the clock, that created abstract time, leading people not to eat because they are hungry, but to eat at the ‘time to eat’”[74]
The crux of the “time to eat” lies in the fact that it is some abstract, symbolic, visual impression, such as “12:00,” rather than an auditory impression. The hour as a written symbol and the hour as a “clock chime” are entirely different things. If the “time to eat” simply means “the moment the bell rings,” then this is not abstraction, no matter whether the bell-ringer is a person or a mechanical device. But once the “time to eat” is a visualized moment, then time is abstracted away from concrete life and separated from it, while at the same time it acquires the image of objectivity and disenchantment. The mechanization of “time” does not come only from the mechanization of the “clock”; crucially, it also comes from the clock’s transition from the auditory to the visual. It is the shift from “clock chime” to “hour mark” that has shaped modern people’s sense of time.
Before the mechanical age, and in the rural world after the mechanical age, the so-called “clock” undoubtedly referred to an auditory clock. It was at once a musical instrument, a ritual instrument, and of course also a device for telling time. Like the mechanical clock, the ringing of bells could also establish a unified rhythm of life, but this unity precisely reflected the connectedness of village communal life; the sound of the bell was the core that sustained the group. The visual clock, by contrast, provided the opposite tendency, namely to alienate people from communal life and abstract “time” away from the earth and the countryside. This phenomenon has nothing to do with whether the clock is operated by a bell-ringer or by a mechanical transmission mechanism; it has to do with whether the hour is auditory or visual.
Regarding the decline of bell-ringing culture, the French historian Alain Corbin’s Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside provides an interesting account—“The bells of the nineteenth-century countryside became noise in another age. People listened to them and appreciated them with a set of emotions that has now disappeared. These bells indicated a different relation between human beings and the world, and between human beings and the sacred; they indicated another way in which human beings existed in time-space and felt time-space. Interpreting the surrounding soundscape also entered into the process of constructing personal and collective identity. Bells constituted a language, establishing a communication system that slowly disintegrated…”[75]
It is hard for us to imagine the auditory environment of the French countryside at that time—bells in a church were often arranged in sets of twelve or even eighteen, and “the whole peal, by stirring vibrations in the air, made one’s head reel and one could not think of anything else…”[76] Corbin describes how that sacred and meaningful sound of bells eventually became noise that disturbed “private life,” and how the dismantling of bells was deeply entangled with the political and social environment of the time, and how, when bell-ringing was prohibited, it aroused widespread indignation, and so on; I shall not quote any further here. We only need to note this: the history of the clock is deeply intertwined with transformations in people’s sensory culture and social relations, and the disenchantment of “private space” and time-space is likewise associated with the retreat of hearing.
McLuhan devoted the most discussion to the relationship between alphabetic writing and “Euclidean space.” He said: “Today, the role of phonetic-writing culture in creating the techniques of propositional exposition (formal logic) is widely known. But people still regard Euclidean space and three-dimensional visual perception as evidence of human universality; even anthropologists hold this view. There is no three-dimensional space in indigenous art. Such scholars think that is due to a lack of artistic skill.”[77] McLuhan, however, believed that this was because they lived in a world of audition, which determined that they would never pursue the perspectival effects of Euclidean geometry. “We can now see very clearly that the Greeks’ entry into image space and Euclidean space was by no means a natural outcome. In both ancient and modern times, the world-schema of natural, pre-literate people is the schema we see in children’s drawings and primitive art. Such art does not follow the eye’s dominant tendency. In cave paintings, multilevel, multiform auditory and tactile experience occupies the place of priority.”[78]
Space, in the broad sense, is the whole world as sensed; in the narrow sense, it can be said to be the background from which we perceive the size, distance, orientation, and other properties of things. Yet these spatial perceptions are by no means the exclusive preserve of vision: hearing and touch also provide perceptions of distance and direction, but the spaces presented through different senses are utterly different. McLuhan points out: “Every sense creates a unique space”[79]
What is called auditory space, or acoustic space, “means a space with no center and no edge. It is unlike visual space in the strict sense, which is an extension and intensification of sight. Auditory space is organic, indivisible, a space felt through the synchronous interaction of the various senses. By contrast, ‘rational’ or graphic space is uniform, sequential, continuous; it creates a closed world with no echoing resonance from the tribal world of reverberation. Our Western notions of time and space are derived from the environment created by alphabetic writing. The whole set of ideas of Western civilization is also derived from the invention of alphabetic writing. People in tribal worlds live a complex, kaleidoscopic life; because the ear and the eye are different, it cannot focus. It can only be synesthetic, not analytic or linear. Speech has to be uttered aloud; more precisely, it is the outward manifestation of all our senses working together. The auditory field is simultaneous, whereas the visual field is continuous.”[80]
When we imagine the unfolding of the “world (field of vision)” from a visual center, as Wu Guosheng has said, what we see is a “horizon”: our gaze quickly breaks away from our body and moves toward infinitely distant boundaries. In this world we are not at the center; indeed, one could say that apart from vision, already stripped off and isolated, our whole body does not belong to this “field of vision” at all. But if we imagine a world centered on hearing, the situation we think of is exactly the opposite. As Walter Ong, citing Merleau-Ponty, puts it, “sound comes to me simultaneously from all directions: I am at the center of this auditory world, which envelops me and makes me the core of perception and existence.”[81]
Here we cannot help recalling Heidegger’s talk of the “age of the world picture,” where he said: “The world picture does not develop out of a previous medieval world picture into a modern one; rather, the fact that the world becomes a picture at all marks the essence of modernity.”[82] To say that the world becomes a picture is also to say that the world is taken over by vision. For Heidegger, the picturing of the world means that humans step out of the world and objectify it. And this is precisely the characteristic of vision. Neither hearing nor touch makes one step out; neither separates one from the world.
Beyond causing human detachment, visual space is structurally very different from auditory space. Visual space is flat, continuous, segmentable, and capable of being frozen into frames; auditory space is uneven (spherical), discontinuous, whole, and dynamic.
When we imagine visual space, what comes to mind is either a horizon or the three orthogonal lines at a corner of a wall. But in the worlds of hearing and touch there is no such thing as a “straight line,” let alone geometric concepts such as “translation” or “congruence.” McLuhan cites Young Evans in pointing out that, without vision, relying only on hearing and touch, “with empty hands and no tools, it is impossible to discover whether three or four objects lie on the same line.” Euclidean geometry was the result of visual experience being greatly intensified, but Young Evans goes on to say: “The Greeks had tactile minds… whenever there was a choice between touch and sight, they would instinctively choose touch.”[83] Young Evans believed that the residue of touch was the reason Greek geometry did not advance further.
In fact, the influence of “touch” likewise constrained Aristotle’s physics. For Aristotle, touch was still the most fundamental and important sense, so much so that “sensation means the touchable”[84]; the nature of sensible objects had to be tactile qualities (hot/cold, dry/wet). Aristotle believed that “human touch is precisely the most exact. Human beings fall far short of other animals in the other senses, but with regard to the faculty of touch he is more sensitive than any other species. This is why man is the most capable of thought among animals.”[85] The reason Aristotle’s physics clings to “pushing” through “direct contact” and rejects anything at a distance is probably because he still lived in a world of touch and had not yet fully entered the world of vision.
In the visual world, people can engage in cool analysis; the visual world is stern and stable, whereas the auditory world pushes people “toward a state of universal terror.”[86] Here, a comparison between the feelings produced by lightning and thunder may help. Lightning always comes before thunder, but when we see lightning we do not seem to be frightened all at once; and once we have seen the lightning, we can already anticipate that thunder is about to arrive. Thunder, then, should no longer be sudden. Yet when we actually hear the crash of thunder, we still can hardly avoid trembling all over. It is easy to imagine that for oral peoples with even keener hearing, their world was full of terror and magic. McLuhan quotes Alex Leighton: “‘For the blind, everything is sudden.’ Without vision, in ordinary data experience there is no sense of continuity, consistency, or connection.”[87]
Visual space can be segmented and thus “analyzed,” whereas the world of sound is always whole and ever-changing. In fact, the evolution of human dwelling forms also reflects the evolution from an auditory world to a visual world. McLuhan notes: “People lived in round dwellings until they ceased to be nomadic, until they moved toward specialized division of labor in the organization of work. Anthropologists often notice the process of change from round houses to square houses, but they do not know why. Media analysts can help anthropologists with this question.”[88] McLuhan explains: “A tent or hut is not a clearly bounded space or a visual space. Nor is a cave or earth lodge. … The square house speaks to us in the language of settled, divided labor; whereas the round hut or conical tent speaks to us in the language of the integrated, nomadic way of life of early collecting societies.”[89] Wu Guosheng also notes that “modern architecture is geometric lines, straight, angular; primitive architecture is not highly geometrized and is not angular. The perceptual system of primitive people was not constructed according to a geometric mode… its boundaries are not very clear. So if you look at a place and judge whether its geometric shape is regular, you can tell whether its civilization is modern.”[90] This non-geometrized primitive perceptual system, in McLuhan’s terms, is precisely the spatial structure of audition-touch.
Finally, visual space can be “frozen,” whereas auditory space is always in a state of motion and flux—“to stop sound and preserve it is fundamentally impossible. I can stop the projector and fix one frame on the screen. But if I intercept the movement of sound, I no longer have anything. … No other sense, apart from hearing, completely excludes in this way the motion by which a frame tries to grasp things, or excludes a stable state.” And clearly, “vision prefers the state of rest”[91].
Abstraction, linearity, objectivity, disenchantment, isolation, analysis, stillness, and so on—all these elements of modern thought can be said to result from visual space’s replacing auditory space. And the shift in status between vision and audition-touch is mutually determining with the evolution of media technologies.
This essay aims to introduce McLuhan’s basic theoretical position or method, namely media ontology, and to illustrate some of its core or representative claims. What I have offered above is therefore only the most preliminary exploration of McLuhan’s media thought, not a comprehensive survey. On the theme of media and the perception of time and space alone, McLuhan still has many interesting arguments that I have not been able to cite here. For example, McLuhan believed that television extends touch, that the electronic age would dissolve linear history and re-establish the status of “tactile space,” allowing people to be retribalized in unprecedented ways (the global village). To continue examining new media such as the internet along McLuhan’s lines would also be a fertile field.
References
[Can.] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., The Essential McLuhan, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000
[Can.] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000
[Can.] Marshall McLuhan, McLuhan Speaks, ed. Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, Renmin University of China Press, 2006
[Can.] Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye, eds., The Letters of Marshall McLuhan, trans. He Daokuan and Zhongdong, Renmin University of China Press, 2005
[U.S.] Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2008
Wu Guosheng, Lectures on Philosophy of Technology, Renmin University of China Press, 2009
[Fr.] Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside, trans. Wang Bin, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2003
[U.S.] Paul Levinson, Paul Levinson: The Essential Works, trans. He Daokuan, Renmin University of China Press, 2007
[U.S.] Michael Heim, From Interface to Cyberspace, trans. Jin Wulun and Liu Gang, Shanghai Science and Technology Education Press, 2000
Fan Long, The Intuition of Media: On the Phenomenological Method in McLuhan Studies, Jinan University Press, 2009
[Ger.] Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, trans. Sun Zhongxing, SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2005
[Ger.] Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, trans. Sun Zhongxing, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2004
[U.S.] Lin Wengang, ed., Media Ecology: Origins of Thought and Multidimensional Perspectives, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2007
McLuhan, Marshall, The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962)
Jon Markus Buli Holmberg, The Phenomenology of Technology (A Clinical Dissertation, Presented to the Faculty of California School of Professional Psychology, 2004)
[1] Yang Boshu: Internet and Society, Huazhong University of Science and Technology Press, 2002, p. 286. Cited in Fan Long, The Intuition of Media: On the Phenomenological Method in McLuhan Studies, Jinan University Press, 2009, p. 2.
[2] For example: Chen Zuoping, “The Phenomenological Method and the Logical Starting Point of Journalism Theory Research,” in Modern Communication, no. 2, 2006; Mei Qionglin, “Transparent Media: McLuhan’s Phenomenological Intuition of the Essence of Media,” in Journal of Humanities, no. 5, 2008; Fan Long, The Intuition of Media: On the Phenomenological Method in McLuhan Studies, Jinan University Press, 2009.
[3] See McLuhan’s letter of August 1, 1974 to Marshall Fishwick, in [Can.] Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye, eds., The Letters of Marshall McLuhan, trans. He Daokuan and Zhongdong, Renmin University of China Press, 2005, p. 582, p. 506.
[4] See [Can.] Marshall McLuhan, McLuhan Speaks, ed. [Can.] Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, Renmin University of China Press, 2006, pp. 196-197, p. 289-290.
[5] See [U.S.] Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2008, p. 54, p. 71.
[6] “Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave”, see McLuhan, Marshall, The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 248 and following.
[7] From McLuhan’s letter of January 29, 1974 to Father John W. Moore, in [Can.] Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye, eds., The Letters of Marshall McLuhan, trans. He Daokuan and Zhongdong, Renmin University of China Press, 2005, p. 562, p. 489.
[8] [U.S.] S.E. Stumpf and J. Fieser, Western Philosophy: An 8th Revised Edition, trans. Kuang Hong, Deng Xiaomang, et al., World Publishing Corporation, 2009, p. 421, p. 434
[9] Wu Guosheng, Lectures on Philosophy of Technology, Renmin University of China Press, 2009, p. 174.
[10] [Can.] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., The Essential McLuhan, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 312, p. 273.
[11] [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 310, p.272.
[12] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 82.
[13] Wu Guosheng, *Lectures on Philosophy of Technology*, Renmin University of China Press, 2009, p. 40.
[14] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 17.
[15] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *As McLuhan Says*, ed. [Canada] Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, Renmin University of China Press, 2006, p. 192, p.233.
[16] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *As McLuhan Says*, ed. [Canada] Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, Renmin University of China Press, 2006, p. 196, p.289.
[17] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *As McLuhan Says*, ed. [Canada] Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, Renmin University of China Press, 2006, pp. 195-196, p.289.
[18] Marx, *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844*, see *Marx and Engels Collected Works*, first edition, vol. 42, p. 97.
[19] Marx, *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844*, see *Marx and Engels Collected Works*, first edition, vol. 42, p. 127.
[20] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 74.
[21] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *As McLuhan Says*, ed. [Canada] Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, Renmin University of China Press, 2006, p. 53, p.76
[22] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 27.
[23] Found in McLuhan’s letters of September 17, 1964, to Buckminster Fuller and to John Culkin; see [Canada] Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye, eds., *The Letters of Marshall McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan and Zhongdong, Renmin University of China Press, 2005, p. 354, p.308. And p. 355, p.309.
[24] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *As McLuhan Says*, ed. [Canada] Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, Renmin University of China Press, 2006, p. 62, p.91.
[25] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *As McLuhan Says*, ed. [Canada] Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, Renmin University of China Press, 2006, p. 18, p.25.
[26] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *As McLuhan Says*, ed. [Canada] Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, Renmin University of China Press, 2006, p. 156, p.230.
[27] Found in McLuhan’s letters of September 17, 1964, to Buckminster Fuller and to John Culkin; see [Canada] Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye, eds., *The Letters of Marshall McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan and Zhongdong, Renmin University of China Press, 2005, p. 354, p.308. And p. 355, p.309.
[28] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 34.
[29] Found in McLuhan’s letters of September 17, 1964, to Buckminster Fuller and to John Culkin; see [Canada] Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye, eds., *The Letters of Marshall McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan and Zhongdong, Renmin University of China Press, 2005, p. 354, p.308. And p. 355, p.309.
[30] [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 278, p.238.
[31] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 169.
[32] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 27.
[33] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *As McLuhan Says*, ed. [Canada] Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, Renmin University of China Press, 2006, pp. 198-199, p.293
[34] [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 278, p.238.
[35] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *As McLuhan Says*, ed. [Canada] Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, Renmin University of China Press, 2006, p. 18, p.25.
[36] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *As McLuhan Says*, ed. [Canada] Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, Renmin University of China Press, 2006, p. 1, p.2.
[37] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *As McLuhan Says*, ed. [Canada] Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, Renmin University of China Press, 2006, p. 18, p.25.
[38] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 87.
[39] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *As McLuhan Says*, ed. [Canada] Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, Renmin University of China Press, 2006, pp. 195-196, p.289.
[40] [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 145, p.126.
[41] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 115.
[42] [USA] Walter Ong, *Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word*, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2008, p. 7, p.17.
[43] See [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 151, p.131 and following.
[44] See [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 152, p.131.
[45] See [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 152, p.131.
[46] See [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 153, p.132.
[47] See [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 153, p.132.
[48] [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 153, p.132.
[49] [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 154, p.133.
[50] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 115.
[51] [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 154, p.133.
[52] [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 154, p.133.
[53] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 119.
[54] [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 324, p.285.
[55] [Canada] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 121.
[56] [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 140, p.121.
[57] [USA] Walter Ong, *Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word*, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2008, p. 78, p.101.
[58] [USA] Walter Ong, *Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word*, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2008, p. 4, p.8.
[59] [USA] Walter Ong, *Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word*, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2008, p. 23, p21.
[60] [USA] Walter Ong, *Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word*, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2008, p. 25, p.33-34.
[61] [USA] Walter Ong, *Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word*, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2008, p. 25, p.33-34.
[62] Havelock’s *Introduction to Plato* displays the various features manifested in the Greek culture’s transition from oral to written forms, and McLuhan also cites this work frequently.
[63] [USA] Walter Ong, *Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word*, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2008, p. 32, p.43.
[64] See [USA] Walter Ong, *Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word*, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2008,.
[65] See [USA] Walter Ong, *Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word*, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2008, p. 39, p.51 and following.
[66] [Canada] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 325, p.286.
[67] [Canadian] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 349, p. 307.
[68] [Canadian] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 236.
[69] [Canadian] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, pp. 136–137, p. 117.
[70] [Canadian] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 282, p. 243.
[71] [Canadian] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 280, p. 240.
[72] [Canadian] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 141, p. 121.
[73] [Canadian] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 189.
[74] [Canadian] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 198.
[75] [French] Alain Corbin, *The Bell of the Earth: Soundscape and Sensory Culture in 19th-Century French Countryside*, trans. Wang Bin, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2003, Introduction, p. 6.
[76] See [French] Alain Corbin, *The Bell of the Earth: Soundscape and Sensory Culture in 19th-Century French Countryside*, trans. Wang Bin, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2003, p. 5.
[77] [Canadian] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 140, p. 121.
[78] [Canadian] Marshall McLuhan, *McLuhan Says* [Canadian] Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, eds., trans. He Daokuan, China Renmin University Press, 2006, p. 20, p. 27.
[79] [Canadian] Matie Molinaro, Colleen McLuhan, and William Toye, eds., *The Letters of Marshall McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan and Zhong Dong, China Renmin University Press, 2005, p. 418, p. 361.
[80] [Canadian] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 280, p. 240.
[81] [American] Walter Ong, *Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word*, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2008, pp. 54, p. 71.
[82] Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Sun Zuxing, ed., *Selected Works of Heidegger*, Shanghai Joint Publishing Company, 1996, p. 899
[83] [Canadian] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *The Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 156, p. 135.
[84] Aristotle, *On Generation and Corruption* 329b10~330a10, trans. Xu Kailai, in Miao Litian, ed., *The Complete Works of Aristotle*, China Renmin University Press
[85] Aristotle, *On the Soul* 421a20, in *On the Soul and Other Works*, trans. Wu Shoupeng, Commercial Press, 1999.
[86] [Canadian] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 200.
[87] [Canadian] Marshall McLuhan, *McLuhan Says* [Canadian] Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, eds., trans. He Daokuan, China Renmin University Press, 2006, p. 44, p. 64. Also see [Canadian] Matie Molinaro, Colleen McLuhan, and William Toye, eds., *The Letters of Marshall McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan and Zhong Dong, China Renmin University Press, 2005,
[88] [Canadian] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 164.
[89] [Canadian] Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 165.
[90] Wu Guosheng, *Lecture Notes on the Philosophy of Technology*, China Renmin University Press, 2009, p. 29.
[91] [American] Walter Ong, *Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word*, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2008, pp. 23–24, p. 22.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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