“I have been experimenting,” Marshall McLuhan informs the readers of Technology and Culture in early 1975, “with developing a new series of ‘Laws of the Media.'” He presents them for discussion and critique by those readers, in the hopes that those who study technology, including historians, philosophers, economists, engineers, and sociologists “might enjoy and profit from attempting to disprove my ‘laws'” (p. 74).
This invitation is offered in a Popperian spirit, in the expectation that efforts to disprove the laws of media will establish it as a scientific theory. The theory was generated via structuralist methods, and may require for its support in specific cases an argument developed via historical analysis, but it applies broadly. “I am talking about ‘media’ in terms of a larger entity of information and perception which forms our thoughts, structures our experience, and determines our views of the world about us,” he says (p. 74-5), adding that “It is this kind of information flow–media–which is responsible for my postulation of a series of insights regarding the impact of certain technological developments. I call them ‘laws’ because they represent, as do scientific ‘laws’, an ordering of thought and experience which has not yet been disproved; I call them ‘laws of the media’ because the channels and impact of today’s electronic communication systems provide the informational foundation upon which we order, or structure, these experiential perceptions” (p. 75).
Each medium, McLuhan declares, amplifies some capability or sense, obsolesces a prior medium, retrieves an older medium, and when taken to an extreme, reverses into a flipped or opposing function. He lists a number of examples, some of which are not wholly clear (cable TV reverses into home broadcasting?) or not entirely convincing (clothing augments “private energy–clothing as weaponry”?) but others of which making interesting claims (the Xerox or photocopier speeds up the printing process, obsolesces the mass-produced book, retrieves the oral tradition, and reverses into “everybody is a publisher”–a description that anticipates Soviet-era samizdat).
The essence of McLuhan’s laws of media is contained in this article; the underlying logic is developed a little more in the posthumous volume assembled by his son Eric, but all in all the core of the idea and its presentation is the same in both places–the nod to Popper, the structuralist positioning, and the impressionistic lists of technologies that range from electronic media to scientific discoveries to everyday objects, all taken to be both expressive media for human communication and pragmatic tools of human action.
A year later, one of the readers whom McLuhan had invited to criticize his model had his reply published in Technology and Culture . William Henry Venable, a Pittsburgh-based engineer and lawyer, associates McLuhan’s description of his laws as defining some figure against its ground with C.S. Peirce’s logic of representation, in which a sign stands for its object “not in all respects, but in reference to . . . the ground” of what is represented. Thus, the laws serve to define particular objects in relation to sets of predicates related to augmentation, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal.
[In passing, Venable mentions a report presented by one Rupert Murdoch of Australia to the 25th Congress of the International Chamber of Congress in Madrid, entitled “Responsibility for Informing the Public.”]
“McLuhan’s four selected symbols,” Venable says, referring to the predicates of his laws, “seem to postulate that past and present technologists were shooting at the same target, that the present shots come closer to the mark (amplifies) or that present improved bows come closer to the mark (obsolesces) and returned to some old bow designs (retrieves), and that there are presently known or past-known shots in the opposite direction (reversal is).” This smacks to Venable of the error identified by Derek de Solla Price, “in which all that happens is seen by the historian as leading with a single arrow to the present” (p. 258). This can obscure rather than illuminate the historical dynamics at work. He offers corrections to a number of McLuhan’s exemplars.
The one thing that Venable doesn’t do is contest the four-fold typology of media functions that McLuhan proposes. The most he does is to suggest that he regards them as a symbolic ordering–law-like in a legal sense, perhaps, rather than a phenomenal one.
References
Marshall McLuhan, “Communication: McLuhan’s Laws of the Media.” Technology and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1 (January 1975), pp. 74-78