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Digital McLuhan. A Guide to Information Millennium

by Paul Levinson
Routledge: London and New York, 1999
paperback 2001, ISBN_ 0-415-24991-0

Reviewed by Yvonne Spielmann,
Braunschweig School of Art,
Johannes-Selenka-Platz 1,
38118 Braunschweig,
Germany

spielmann@medien-peb.uni-siegen.de

The telling title of Levinson's book on Marshall McLuhan naturally raises the readers' expectations. One is interested to learn in what ways McLuhan's structural analysis of the impact that electronic media have on post-war societies, namely television in Northern America, also applies to the emergence of digital media and the development of networked communications. In particular McLuhan's stress on the interrelationship between historically different media in the phrase that "older media become the high profile content of newer media" has been widely carried on in more recent theoretical debates of screen and monitor media and of the combination of computer and screen. In addition McLuhan's advanced views on networks resulting from the merger of media and information technologies, that he expresses in the development of the "global village", plus the general understanding of the function of media as prosthesis and extension of human senses and capacities, together build a set of media theories that from the sixties on focus on newer media transforming (in McLuhan's terms "massaging") older media. Therein lies the timely twofold question of how we conceive machines and shape media environments that also 'shape' us on a global scale. In this regard the reader may like to gain a clear understanding from Levinson's book of what divides electric, electronic and digital media up into periods as the term "information millennium" suggests. They may also want to know what qualifies digital as a medium, eventually a universal medium or even as media. There is also a whole set of questions that comes up with the title of this book leading to the economic, political and social arena and naturally demanding for scrutiny of the modes of access, (governmental) rules and (commercial) regulations that structure networked information.

It is some disappointment that Levinson opens with rather vague assumptions of "digital culture" seen as a realization of McLuhan's concepts and in the same breath accuses the majority of scholars in the field of having misread and misinterpreted McLuhan's ideas that ground the famous metaphor of >"global village" and the aphorism "the medium is the message." Obviously, the author takes general criticism for granted and does not take the trouble to closer discuss successors and precursors of McLuhan that would also involve the context of the "Toronto School" of communication theory, cross-references and mutual considerations in the works of Harold Innis, Eric A. Havelock, and Walter J. Ong, (the last-named working on topics of orality and literacy that are central to McLuhan's book "The Gutenberg Galaxy" (1962)). As "Digital McLuhan" starts with the promise to explain and explore McLuhan the reader is initially disappointed because Levinson's prime interest is to use McLuhan for maintaining his own sketchy approaches toward the internet that does not need McLuhan at all when describing the role of on-line communication in America's President election campaigns, or in his discussion of information as property. Regarding these issues there is no understanding of alternative or opposing political forces, no consideration of the commercialization of information and clearly no knowledge of the use of networks in the hands of those who otherwise would not have access to mass media. Thus the book touches on the surface of important issues and appears speculative in contrast to the thoroughly developed on theoretical grounds used to discuss electronic media by McLuhan and followers. As one reads through the chapters named "The digital fulfillment", "A cyberspace sans alphabet", "Business in the on-line global village", or "The internet as mainstream", it is hard to avoid the impression that the author loosely connects and relates to the most common topics and phenomena of the current media discourse, but without given proper reason why he needs to force McLuhan into the narrow corset of having provided observations, metaphors and ideas about the implementation of new technologies that would match with computer and internet.

Where Levinsion claims merits for "rediscovering" McLuhan in his own right who, in Levinson's view, is misunderstood for having disregarded the content of media, whereas Levinsion himself misreads McLuhan for having provided a theory of digital media environment, because as he repeats again and again, the content of any new medium is another medium. However, the conclusion of the question of content for McLuhan's means transformation of shape and form and it is this transformational issue that is totally overlooked by Levinson's so that the purpose of the book rather seeks for verification of a 'one to one' reading of McLuhan in an unclearly defined 'digital age'. With regard to the particular case of computer and internet the reader may think of McLuhan's question of how previous or all previous media are "massaged" by and through new media that are essentially networked and therein differ from previous and less complex media. Unfortunately this kind of analysis is not Levinson's concern, unfortunately also because digitization provokes the understanding of computer as a medium that is either seen as plural media or seen as the universal medium par excellence. Throughout the book the reader is left wondering by the numerous shortcuts in the line of argumentation from McLuhan to 'digital' McLuhan, where a rather straight line is drawn from telegraph to digital media that nourishes the assumption that McLuhan should serve for a universal media theory. Certainly, McLuhan's understanding of media provides an understanding of digital media insofar as his structural analysis of convergence are accurate, but this does not mean that contemporary analysis necessarily pursues the same criteria of description. On the contrary, structural media analysis after McLuhan (most prominently in Neil Postman or Paul Virilio) is a field of analysis and a way of thinking that can contribute to the understanding of mediated societies and networks because the focus lies on transformation of media within media as well as on mediatization of quotidian environment.

Alas, Levinson's "Digital McLuhan" does not contribute to the larger frame of an ongoing debate, simply because he is taking up single issues. For example he looks for traces of the manifest verification of the metaphoric description of television as "acoustic space" in cyberspace because of common immersive qualities. But there are crucial differences between media information that on the one hand enters everyone's home through television in ways that are theoretically described as 'parasocial interactivity' and on the other hand is interactively accessed through cyberspace that virtually 'immerses' the viewer/user and engages her/him in 'impersonal relations' with the machine.

Regardless of such criteria that foster media specificity, Levinson's pursues in his own terms "the difficult task of predicting the future of communications", a task that unavoidably produces misreading of media development, because the author in a Darwinian manner (that he sees at work in all media development) states points where - from today's perspective - McLuhan was right or was in error. The narrow discussion of isolated tasks, of course, can hardly notice McLuhan in a historical view where the radical shift from literacy in the "Gutenberg Galaxy" not only preshapes contemporary discussions on computer or digital culture but also conceptually parallels Alan Turing's ideas for a universal machine, namely computer.

As those issues remain blank in a "Guide to the Information Millennium", we may question why Levinson so energetically connects to McLuhan and thereby forces aspects of the former such as "decentralization" into his own narrow view of new media. Surprisingly the book neither considers relevant social and economic debates on the topic (such as the brilliant analysis on centers without centers by Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen's differentiation between economics and finance in the domains of global informationalization) nor does it broaden the in McLuhan limited context of reference to American television, where the reader would be interested in the role of media information in post-socialist societies. Moreover, in discussing the monopoly of media the focus is on the ubiquitous story of the monopoly of Microsoft, but striking media events that witness the breakdown of monopoly and themselves write history such as the broadcast trial and execution of the Romanian dictator Ceausecu or the participation of media in the downfall of the Eastern German regime are not dealt with in the book.

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