Originally posted July 8, 2020. Updated October 28, 2023.
The electric light is pure information.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
The Trojan Horse
On October 25, 2019, Philip Morais with Windsor Law and School of Creative Arts hosted Media & Space: The Regulation of Digital Platforms, New Media & Technologies Symposium. It was an interdisciplinary event launched in the multimedia studio of the Alan Wildeman Centre for Creative Arts, whose high ceilings spanned from a control booth in the back to a front wall projection screen, holding speakers and attendees from Canada predominantly, with representation from America and Europe. The conference gathered 14 scholars to discuss how spatial aspects of media, which Marshall McLuhan thought through,1 might be a point of departure or arrival for a regulatory framework on digital platforms, borders and borderless states, as well as what role can Canada play in the global village2 of today. How do you read, in other words, a national legal system against a transnational media ecosystem in order to find balance in the flux of the online sublime?
Who was Marshall McLuhan? He was a Canadian professor of English and public intellectual whose impact earned him immediate comparisons to Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov (Wolfe, 1968); a career he tenured close to exclusively at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. His main contribution to intellectual history in the mid-twentieth century was arguably not as a communication theorist3 but metaphysician4 and critic-as-artist5 whose translations of techniques of literary criticism to techno-cultural subject matter were revolutionary, crystallized in “the medium is the message” aphorism (McLuhan, 1967). That phrase became a part of popular culture in the 1960s, a decade he was associated with and defined as a figure often on television. Notwithstanding, he was shaped in private life by the 1930s as a student at Cambridge University that later became an academic, Catholic and husband to Corrine Keller Lewis, whom he had six children with and remained married to until he died on December 31, 1980. Laws of Media: The New Science was published posthumous in 1988. His insights and anticipations subsequently flipped from opaque to obvious in the 1990s when an advent of the World Wide Web retrieved interest in him.
The first panel was chaired by me: “McLuhan in Space, Local and Global” and consisted of three keynote speakers whose expertise in archival research lent historical weight to the morning. “Marshall McLuhan is an organizing principle more than anything else because, after all, he is one of the pioneers of this thing we now call media study,” grandson Andrew McLuhan offered, Director of The McLuhan Institute, whose first major research project was cataloging Marshall McLuhan’s working library named to UNESCO’s Memory of the World register. Andrew went on to immediately add in his address: “There is no difference between environmental science and media study.” Dr. Michael Darroch, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Culture in the School of Creative Arts quoted James Dean playing Jim Stark in the film Rebel Without A Causeto tease out user experience on social media: “We’re all involved!” With Dr. Janine Marchessault, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University, Darroch wrote an introduction and foreword to the recent reprint of the initial eight volumes (1953-1957) of Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, edited by the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter with McLuhan. His presentation contextualized time McLuhan had spent on the Windsor-Detroit border as a professor of English at Assumption College from 1944 through to 1946 as a “transformative moment.” As McLuhan suggests in “Canada: A Borderline Case” a “border is not a connection but an interval of resonance” (McLuhan, 1977, p. 226), a dialogue, a dynamic of figure and ground shifting constantly nationally; digital platforms do likewise to the body of the user by being an environment bordered by software executing calculations, an extension of the nervous system according to McLuhan who classified all electricity-based technology to be performing such functions (McLuhan, 1964, p. 3). Dr. Elaine Kahn touched on this resonance theme by way of the body politic of the comparatively more recent past. The author of Been Hoping We Might Meet Again elaborated upon correspondence between Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and McLuhan from 1968 to 1980. In reply to my question if the latter was the inspiration behind including “other media of communication” among fundamental freedoms in section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Kahn opined: “Well, I can’t imagine how he couldn’t have been.”
The second panel was “Law Without Walls” and consisted of three legal scholars, chaired by Associate Professor Dr. Pascale Chapdelaine of the Faculty of Law. Dr. Jeffrey Meyers, Lecturer, Thomson Rivers University, Faculty of Law, presented “Without Walls: A Possible History of the Present”; Dr. Tetyana (Tanya) Krupiy, Postdoctoral Fellow, Tilburg University, presented “Social Injustices in the Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: The Use of Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making Processes as an Act of Social Engineering”; and Matthew Marinett, S.J.D. candidate, University of Toronto, Faculty of Law, presented “Comity’s Double Edge: Reciprocity and Cooperation in Global Internet Takedown Orders”. The common intuition shared by these papers was of future culture being constituted via present technology and how innovators are unacknowledged legislators of the world. The apprehension was complementary to the keynote address at lunch that was delivered by David Goodis, Assistant Commissioner, Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, which oversees freedom of information provincially, municipally, and in health. Reflecting on the challenges posed by the regulation of digital media as liminal spaces that undermine clear distinctions between public and private, his focus was on the consequences of smart cities for personal data sovereignty in enabling ubiquitous state and corporate surveillance, advocating for law reform through modernization of privacy law with respect to both state and private actors: “We’re pushing for that.”6
The third panel was “Understanding Media Ecology Spaces” and consisted of communication scholars working in the intellectual tradition of media ecology, chaired by Assistant Professor Dr. Vincent Manzerolle of the Department of Communication, Media and Film. Dr. Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, Department Chair, University of Winnipeg, presented “ESP: What if McLuhan was . . . . ? –The Human Computer Interface and Language Transformations”; Andrey Miroshnichenko, Ph.D. candidate, York University, presented “The Question of Zuckerberg’s Guilt: Instrumental vs. Environmental Views of Media”; Adam Pugen, Ph.D. candidate, University of Toronto, Faculty of Information, presented “From the Electric Tribe to the Digital Polis: Exploding the ‘Doctrine of Logos’ Online”; and Dr. Robert Logan, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, presented “McLuhan’s General Theory of Media (GTOM) and the Role of Reversals: Figure/Ground; Concept/Percept; Cause/Effect and Visual/Acoustic Space”. The question of the intersection between media and space zoned off half of these papers into media ethics with sustained attention to the effects and interrelations between culture and technology. Without (traditional) professional conduct or content consumption for subject matter, responsibility and managing public affect in the algorithmic platform were predicated on in place of them. That occupied at least one normative holding of media ethics: practical application of moral consideration.
The last panel in the late afternoon was “Postmodern Picnic in Space” and consisted of communication scholars working in the postmodernist and/or critical theorist vein, chaired by Dr. Michael Darroch. Dr. Vincent Manzerolle, presented “Cloudy Streams: Grounding the Environment in Digital Media Infrastructure”; Dr. Nathan Rambukkana, Assistant Professor, Communication Studies, Wilfred Laurier University, presented “Towards Platform Archaeology”; and Gemma Richardson, Professor, Humber College, presented “Blurring Boundaries: Viewing Context Collapse and Surveillance Capitalism on Social Media through the Work of McLuhan”. These papers contributed dialectics and economics to the conversation along with plays on environmental and historical materialism.
By sunset that Friday guests began to depart to the conference dinner at Mazaar. The other biting feeling was how was I going to make Media & Space translate to a takeaway?
The Space Odyssey
McKay, Alex. (1999). Treaty Canoe [Papier-mâchéon cedar 12’ x 24” x 32”]. Retrieved from https://treatycanoe.ca.
The symposium was followed by a reception when Treaty Canoe by local artist Alex McKay was carried out of the multimedia studio by speakers to the art gallery in the adjacent building, home to the School of Creative Arts in the renovated Windsor Armouries. The canoe hung on wires with hooks in the middle of the space, rocking lightly like a hammock in a breeze, producing an illusion of levitation from afar. The artist co-presented with photographer Tory James, who voiced an Indigenous view.
Treaty Canoe embodied many of the formal concerns of the conference: a medium of Indigenous technology with treaties on a skin of papier-mâché, transcribed by hand and translucent in the light of the white room. Colonial content was contextualized in the chosen materials of cedar, ribbons, glue, ink and linen paper. It read an artefact as a legal text and legal text as a social artefact, touching to the heart of the interdisciplinary possibility law and communication studies could bring to bear in consolidating law applicable to the human body and beyond those borders to the concomitant technological extension thereof into an artificial environment, clues otherwise out of our ordinary modes of awareness. It was a postscript as well as a prelude to the conclusion of the evening: Andrew McLuhan donated to the University of Windsor Archives an eight-page typescript, “The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,” which was originally published in the Windsor Review in 1966.7
The title to the symposium was Media & Space. One thing this connotes is cyberspace. An electric light of pure information processed on integrated circuits. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of online users in the past decade (Gibson, 1984, p. 69): an Arab Spring unimaginable without Facebook, or election of an American president unimaginable without Twitter, or protection of Canadian privacy made more manageable with trust in the Digital Charter. From Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig claiming “Code is law” in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Lessig, 1999, p. 6) to the Supreme Court of Canada utilizing “the medium is the message” in the criminal case of R v Marakah, this dialogue between law and communications studies constitutes where we were and where we’re whirling still.8 These synergies, disruptions, and recurrences by ripples of association will be further explored with a special issue of a scholarly journal or book. Or quoting a lawyer quoting a lawyer: “Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should” (CBC, 1972).9
© Philip Morais,10 2020; J.D. candidate 2021, Faculty of Law, University of Windsor
Footnotes
1 See Carpenter and McLuhan (1960) at p. 67: “Auditory space … [is] a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing. It is not pictorial space, boxed in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment.” See generally Cavell (2002).
2 See McLuhan (1962) at p. 31: “The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.” See especially McLuhan (1998). But see Chrystall (2011).
3 See McLuhan (2008) at p. 19: “As he often said, Marshall McLuhan did not have A Theory of Communication.”Contra Darroch(2016) at p. 278: “The political economist Harold Innis and English scholar Marshall McLuhan are best known for advancing theories about the specificity of media and the function of communications technologies in effecting social change, an approach often criticized as overly deterministic.”
4 See McLuhan (1970, July 6): “I am not a “culture critic” because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities.”
5 See Theall (2001) “McLuhan as Modern Satirist” at pp. 187-201.
6 David Goodis found McLuhan and Fiore (1967) prescient and used these words as a slide in his presentation at p. 12: “Electronic information devices for universal, tyrannical, womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know.” But see R v Spencer, 2014 SCC 43 at para 41: “There is also a third conception of informational privacy that is particularly important in the context of Internet usage. This is the understanding of privacy as anonymity. In my view, the concept of privacy potentially protected by s. 8 must include this understanding of privacy.”
7 See McLuhan (1966b) at pp. 93-94: “Art as anti-environment is an indispensable means of perception, for environments, as such, are imperceptible.” See generally McLuhan (1966a). See also McLuhan (1987) at p. 319: “Canada as anti-environment to the U.S.A. is able to perceive many of the ground rules and operational effects of the American environment that are quite imperceptible to the U.S.A.”
8 The hendiadys of “law and communication studies” has precedent in the law and literature movement begun in the 1970s; see Dworkin (1985) at p. 146: “I propose that we can improve our understanding of law by comparing legal interpretation with interpretation in other fields of knowledge, particularly literature.”
9 The words of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau to the media after being reduced to minority government in the 1972 Canadian federal election. Trudeau was a lawyer quoting a poem by another lawyer, “Desiderata” by Max Ehrmann. See CBC (1972, November 1).
10 I conceived of the concept and was titled Conference Organizer of the Symposium along with Dr. Pascale Chapdelaine, Dr. Michael Darroch, and Dr. Vincent Manzerolle. As a joint effort largely between LTEC Lab and myself, this enterprise predates September 21, 2018, and acceptance of an offer by Dr. Chapdelaine to partner on the effort. It was originally supposed to be held in the U.K. and hosted by AMG World in London, England. The event drew on my network and my expertise as someone who had worked in the conference industry: choosing keynote speakers, negotiating fees, as well as donation of the Marshall McLuhan typescript to the University. The cooperation of the Estate of Marshall McLuhan is appreciatively noted. Andrew McLuhan needs an especial acknowledgement: communications had with him on August 8, 2018 was why an event was initially conceived. This blog is definitive and should be cited as such by scholars.
References
CBC. (1972, November 1). The universe is unfolding as it should [Video]. CBC Archives. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1624569411768
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), 1982, c 11.
Cavell, R. (2002). McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Chrystall, A. (2011). After the Global Village. Canadian Journal of Media Studies, 9(1). https://cjms.fims.uwo.ca/issues/09-01/Chrystall.pdf
Darroch, M. (2016). The Toronto School: Cross-Border Encounters, Intellectual Entanglements. In P. Simonson and D. Park (Eds.), The International History of Communication Studies(pp. 276-301). Routledge.
Dworkin, R. (1985). A Matter of Principle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books.
Kahn, E. B. (2017). Interface: The Correspondence of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and H. Marshall McLuhan (1968-1980) [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Rutgers University.
Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, RSO 1990, c F.31, s 1.
Lessig, L. (1999). Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books.
McKay, Alex. (1999). Treaty Canoe[Papier-mâchéon cedar 12’ x 24” x 32”]. Retrieved from https://treatycanoe.ca.
McLuhan, E. (1998). The Source of the Term ‘Global Village’. In F. Guardiani and E. McLuhan (Eds.) McLuhan Studies 1(2). http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_2art2.htm
McLuhan, E. (2008). Marshall McLuhan’s Theory of Communication: The Yegg. In C. Anton (Ed.) Explorations in Media Ecology, 7(1) (pp.19-36). Hampton Press, Inc.
McLuhan, E. & McLuhan, M. (1988). Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Carpenter, E. & McLuhan, M. (1960). Acoustic space. In E. Carpenter and M. McLuhan (Eds.), Explorations in communication (pp. 65-70). Beacon Press.
McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York City: McGraw-Hill.
McLuhan, M. (1966a). The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment. In E. McNamara (Ed.), The University of Windsor Review, 2(1) (pp. 1-10). University of Windsor.
McLuhan, M. (1966b). The Emperor’s Old Clothes. In G. Kepes (Ed.), The Man-Made Object (pp. 90-95). George Brazillier Inc.
Marshall, M. & Fiore, Q. (1967). The Medium is the Massage. New York: Penguin Books.
McLuhan, M. (1970, July 6). Letter from Marshall McLuhan to Joe Keogh. Marshall McLuhan Collection (H.2065/1434–5). National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.
McLuhan, M. (1977). Canada: The Borderline Case. In D. Staines (Ed.), The Canadian Imagination (pp. 226-248). Harvard University Press.
McLuhan, M. (1987). Letters of Marshall McLuhan. In C. McLuhan et al. (Eds.), Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
McLuhan, M. & Trudeau, P. (2019). In E. Kahn (Ed.) Been Hoping We Might Meet Again: The Letters of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: Novalis.
Minister Bains announces Canada’s Digital Charter. (2019, May 21). Retrieved from https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic- development/news/2019/05/minister-bains-announces-canadas-digital-charter.html
Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, RSO 1990, c M.56. Personal Health Information Protection Act, 2004, SO 2004, c 3, Sched. A.R v Marakah, 2017 SCC 59. R v Spencer, 2014 SCC 43.
Theall, D. F. (2001). The Virtual McLuhan. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Featured Image: Panel 1 from left to right: Dr. Michael Darroch, Philip Morais, Andrew McLuhan, and Dr. Elaine Kahn. Panel 1 [digital image]. (2019). © Philip Morais, 2019.
