More than forty years ago, Marshall McLuhan, among others, famously started theorizing
and analysing what will be referred to here as the ecology of broadcasting (McLuhan 1964; McLuhan & McLuhan 1988). His analyses hovered above questions such as: What will television mean to the world we once knew? In what ways has radio reshaped our ways of understanding the world and our place within it? His answers to these questions were mainly based on close, formal interpretations of the mediums’ technological
possibilities. If they technically allow for instant communication on a global scale (TV), this is also what they will bring about (as in, for instance, his infamous “global village” metaphor). If they – in technical terms – allow for a restructuring of societal organization (radio, TV), this also becomes their most probable social outcome.2
Ever since it was presented, McLuhan’s thought-provoking theorizing has inspired numerous studies (cf.
Postman 1985; Meyrowitz 1985; Thompson 1995), and it has also become an important
part of the intellectual heritage of media analyses. His ideas have nevertheless also provoked equally numerous – or perhaps even more numerous – critical readings and debates. One of the most frequent lines of criticism has had to do with his style of writing, as it was never academic in the original sense of the
word. He used flowery language in his efforts to interpret the ways in which broadcasting media would transform human beings, cultures and societies. But even beyond his aphorisms, “probes”, and speculative formulations, critical readers of his medium theory have also found additional and more substantially problematic dimensions. Without going into all the details of this criticism, it is important to point out that
these numerous critiques have been especially keen on noticing the many ways in which Marshall McLuhan seems to have been blinded by his own close readings of the technological possibilities of new media. His efforts to predict the new media’s potential social, cultural, and political consequences based on interpretations of their formal qualities caused McLuhan to be technologically deterministically insensitive to
the ways in which media always develop embedded within a nexus of social, political and economic relations.
This tradition is less helpful, however, when it comes to thinking about the social organization of the media industries, about the ways in which the media are interwoven with the unequal distribution of power and resources, and about how individuals make sense of media products and incorporate them into their lives
(Thompson 1995). These are fairly well-known deficits in McLuhan’s theories, as well as in the theories of
many other medium theorists, and for the argumentation I am about to develop here, it is only necessary to comment briefly on parts of this criticism – especially those parts concerning the tradition’s lack of applicability when it comes to analyzing the media industry, and its tendency to overlook the ways in which individuals understand and make use of media products.
Contrary to what many critiques claim about these analyses of the ecology of broadcasting, medium theorists in general – and Marshall McLuhan in particular – did actually analyse the media users and/or audiences, but in their own rather peculiar ways, rarely through the use of empirical data, and always without sociological conceptualizations of the users. Rather than digging into empirical research, or qualifications of the sociological
characteristics of the users, McLuhan preferred to analyse users from a theoretical and more speculative point of departure. Hence, his writings actually contained a large number of theoretically well-informed suggestions about the possible consequences of the application of new media. These ideas were also rather elaborated, but empirical analyses of users and audiences were deliberately left out.
If the audiences, or the users, were theoretically present but empirically absent in McLuhan’s writings, the producers and/or media organizations were more genuinely absent in his efforts to grasp the new ecology brought about by broadcasting media. Simply put, media producers as well as the organizations producing media content were hardly a category of interest to McLuhan, nor was the overall social organization of the
media industry. This missing element is also one of those aspects of McLuhan’s writings that were most severely criticized in Raymond Williams’ (1974) classical, critical reading of McLuhan: If the effect of the medium is the same, whoever controls or uses it, and whatever apparent content he [sic!] may try to insert, then we can forget ordinary political and cultural argument and let the technology run itself. It is hardly surprising that
this conclusion has been welcomed by the “media-men” of the existing institutions. It gives the gloss of avant-garde theory to the crudest versions of their existing interests and practices, and assigns all their critics to pre-electronic irrelevance (1974/1990:128).