ISSN: 1329-878X

Revisiting McLuhan No 94 February 2000 Order form Abstracts

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Abstracts

REVISTING McLUHAN

Revisting McLuhan - Hart Cohen
Three critical frameworks can be developed retrospectively to contextualise the papers that follow. These frameworks are best defined as modes of knowledge production through which McLuhan's ideas were produced and which continue to have relevance. They are, first, the communication and media critique; second, the left cultural critique; and third, the modernist/postmodernist critique - a socio-techno-aesthetic. Understanding McLuhan the person was germane to the idea puzzles he produced because, as a media celebrity, he practised modes of behaviour inconsistent with the production of critical rationalist discourse expected from within the academy. Even with strong scepticism of McLuhan's determinist views, his work sustains interest in the social consequences of media technology and may therefore be read retrospectively as an important corrective to contemporary studies of new communications technologies.

Who/what isMarshall McLuhan - Donald F. Theall
McLuhan's work intervenes in the critical area where new problems of embodiment are related to modernist and avant-garde interest in the harmonisation of the senses and the role of the artist as an engineer. McLuhan uses Joyce, the English-speaking modernists and the symbolists to intuit and explore this orientation in which electric technologies modify communication - production, reproduction and dissemination. McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' anticipates the present convergence of medium and message in the microcomputer. McLuhan placed on the agenda a whole new vocabulary, and consequently a new conceptual structure for the investigation of art, literature, culture and communication. His agenda penetrated academic, artistic, popular and official culture while currently a McLuhanesque vocabulary has permeated not only culture and communication studies but also media and bureaucracy. McLuhan was not a theorist, but interested in probes, percepts and affects grounded in a commitment to the traditions of classical learning adapting ancient modes of exegesis to the newly emerging world of post-electric technologies.

The mediation is the message: The legacy of McLuhan for the digital era? - P. David Marshall
McLuhan has enjoyed a resurgence in credibility through his rise with the Wired generation. This article identifies that McLuhan's major value is not so much contained in his aphorisms, but directly related to the way he was mediated and disseminated into the cultural consciousness. Thematically, McLuhan's mediation can be grouped around three valuable elements that are worth celebrating: his endeavour to operate at the level of the universal; his activity as a public intellectual; and his less obvious but currently important investment in the populace and popular culture. These components of the McLuhan persona/mediation have had a particular resonance with the changing divides of production/reception, the will to universalisation and the transformed 'public sphere' that the Internet has foregrounded.

'McLuhanist' societal projections and social theory: Some reflections - Paul Jones
This article seeks to develop systematically several themes alluded to in my recent account of Raymond Williams' sociological critique of Marshall McLuhan. It considers some initiatives within social theory which might meet Williams'criteria for an adequate social theory of 'the media'. The chief target is the illegitimate projection of 'new social orders' from limited and often asocial analyses of 'new'social phenomena, including those related to 'the media'. A parallel is drawn between the technological determinism from which Daniel Bell projects his post-industrial/information society thesis and the formalism of McLuhan's conception of 'the media'. Mark Poster's mode of information thesis is found to provide an adequate critique of Bell only to reproduce the projection of McLuhan. More satisfactory alternatives are located in the recent work of John Thompson and Craig Calhoun, both of whom develop further Joshua Meyrowitz's attempted bridging of the theoretical gap between 'medium theorists' and sociology.

'Everyone's deep politics began to show': Bursting the acoustic space of Herbert M. McLuhan - Geoffrey Sykes
This paper offers a strong critique of the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, commencing with his key notion of 'acoustic space'. Inasmuch as his ideas have been taken up in popular and professional discourse, and can also be seen as representative of main, current positions in media and communication theory, critique of McLuhan's historical work and career has contemporary relevance, as well as significance in any history of media ideas. This paper systematically discounts the content of McLuhan's thought in its grammatical, cultural, political and psychological significance. Confirmation of the literary, political, classical and theological grounds of his media inquiry only serves to problematise and finally discount its overall appeal, especially compared with more recent phenomenological and semiotic approaches.

Rethinking 'the medium is the message': Agency and technology in McLuhan's writings - Ellen Balka
McLuhan's oft-cited maxim 'the medium is the message' is examined and it is argued that, although McLuhan can be read as a technological determinist, it is also possible to interpret 'the medium is the message' from within the context of a social constructivist understanding of technology, which sees society and technology as mutually shaping phenomena. Inherent to such a reading of McLuhan is an understanding of technology as the output of social processes, in which humans have agency. These themes are addressed through a review of scholarship that suggests that McLuhan is a technological determinist, an examination of McLuhan's work and those who challenge the dominant understanding of McLuhan as technological determinist. Previous research about the use of computer networks by women is used to illustrates how McLuhan can be read as a social constructivist. It is argued that communication scholarship might benefit from reliance on a broader understanding of technology and society that draws more heavily on insights gained form the social studies of technology.

Whatcha doin', Marshall McLuhan? - McKenzie Wark
After decades of relative neglect, McLuhan is back. While his ideas on media form are receiving a long-overdue assessment, it is also worth recalling McLuhan's challenge to the form of scholarship as media. McLuhan's 'probes' were designed to produce, in the long run, precisely the kind of stimulus they are now, finally, provoking. However, McLuhan's writing is not that easily assimilable to mainstream humanities and social sciences scholarship. The paradox of McLuhan is that his Catholic faith enabled him to put in question the sacred cows of humanism, such as the faith in the 'social' and in 'culture' that limits sociology and cultural studies in their attempts to grapple with media.

Discussion: Marshalling McLuhan - Paul Heyer
This paper provides a summary of and conclusion to the papers in this special theme section of 'Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy'.

General Articles

Perpetual crisis: The politics of saving the ABC - Geoffrey Craig
In recent years there has been a rally to 'save' the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). This paper explores the assumptions about the national broadcaster which often inform such rescue attempts. The ABC seems to have entered a state of 'perpetual crisis' following government funding cuts, political accusations of bias, issues of structural change and the Mansfield inquiry. Even more than usual, the identity, functions and future of the national broadcaster have become a public issue. While fully supporting a strong national public broadcaster as a space for public contestation, I argue that saving the ABC should not render it 'safe', returning it to some prior privileged state and established identity. Rather, drawing on an 'agonistic model of democratic politics', I argue that the ABC needs to be conceptualised as a site which produces 'dilemmatic space' and that the crises of the ABC are those which necessarily constitute the institution as a public broadcaster.

Shaping audiences online: Principles of audience development for cultural institutions - Patricia Gillard
Audience development is an applied form of audience analysis which reveals to an organisation the nature of its different audiences. With a clearer definition of how audiences interpret and use its programs and services, an organisation can develop those programs and communication strategies which are likely to engage audiences more effectively. This usually means an expansion of the audience base, and a clearer positioning of the organisation's work.

Cultural institutions are increasingly using Websites to communicate with external audiences and incorporating new media into exhibitions onsite. The mix of communications with both onsite and online audiences challenges earlier ways of thinking about who are the audiences for cultural institutions and how they should be measured. Fundamental conceptual questions need to be answered, and an audience development strategy adopted which builds visitation across virtual and material sites.

Home invasion: Television, identity and belonging in Sydney's western suburbs - Tanja Dreher
Television occupies a central place in most Australian homes, and 'TV talk' is an important process in negotiations of individual and group identities (Gillespie, 1995). TV is the focus of many private, family interactions. As a 'window on the world', television is also a primary source of information about public life. Thus TV is deeply implicated both in interactions within the home, and in our understandings of the wider 'home' of the nation. This paper draws on discussions with diverse community groups in and around Cabramatta to explore the crucial role of TV in negotiations of 'home' and 'belonging' in Australia's most culturally diverse local government area.

Postcolonial culture policy in Hong Kong - Y.T. Luk
This paper is concerned with the arts and culture policy in Hong Kong in the postcolonial context, after the 1997 reversion to Chinese sovereignty. It addresses itself to the main concerns of arts policy with a view not only to making cultural activities flourish, but also to shaping - if possible - a Hong Kong identity as a special administrative region of China, taking into account Hong Kong and its people as a cultural, political, economic and social location.

Bribes, gifts and graft in Indonesian journalism - Angela Romano
This study of the 'envelope culture' - in which sources offer money or other gifts to journalists - explores the complex web of social, economic and institutional conditions that perpetuate the cultures of gift-giving, bribery and graft in Indonesian journalism. The study finds that the envelope relationship may lead to exploitation of either sources or journalists and, at its extreme, has generated a nefarious criminal subculture. This paper also explores the policy responses of the Indonesian journalists' professional association and various newsrooms. Attempts to control the envelope culture often fail because anti-envelope policies are often too ambiguous, policies are rarely accompanied by pay increases sufficiently substantial to encourage behavioural change, senior journalistic role models fail to set appropriate examples and newsrooms lack systems for detecting and prosecuting offenders.

'Sale of the millennium': The 2000 Olympics and Australia's corporate identity - Enno Hermann
This article argues that discourses of 'the national' in Australia have increasingly come to be treated in commodified terms - that is, in the language of advertising. It looks at the advertising campaign that accompanies the upcoming Sydney Olympic Games, where Australia features as a tourist spectacle of an idealised global culture. Images of natural beauty, multicultural harmony and particularly Indigenous culture are highlighted in this unprecedented opportunity for Australia to sell itself to the world. Treating the Sydney Olympics in this way, as a global media event, allows for some reconsideration of the processes and the images employed in Australia's national imagining.