Why McLuhan?: Thoughts on “Re-understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan”

by Michelle Ciccone and Dan Krutka

On the night of Thursday, August 25th, 2022 a small group of us joined together via Zoom to discuss Sarah Sharma and Rianka Singh’s edited collection of chapters in Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan.  Michelle led the book club and we decided to offer some thoughts on the book. Neither of us are experts of McLuhan or media ecology and so we consider this post the start, not end, of a conversation where we hope to continue wrestling with McLuhan, media ecology, and their role in multiracial democracy.

Sharma, S & Singh, R (Eds) (2022). Re-understanding media: Feminist extensions of Marshall McLuhan. Duke Press.

Purchase from publisher. 272 pages

. ISBN: ‎ 978-1-4780-1787-5.

Review by Michelle Ciccone & Dan Krutka

Dan’s thoughts

I have always had a paradoxical relationship with the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. On the one hand, I am attracted to McLuhan’s big ideas such as “the medium is the message” and media as “extensions” and “amputations” of human senses. They help me rethink human relationships with technologies in constructive ways. They push against simplistic technology as tool metaphors that miss the unintended effects of technological change. They bring attention to how technologies shift the social conceptions along with the pace, pattern, and scale of human perception. And, as Sarah Sharma said in the “Introduction,” McLuhan’s media theory offers a “critical framework for thinking about technology and power” (p. 5).

On the other hand, I find McLuhan’s writing uninspiring, filled with exaggerated claims, antiquated cultural references, and an arrogance of certainty. I much prefer reading others’ explanations of his ideas. Even my favorite quote about his work came from John Culkin, “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us,” not McLuhan himself (see our quote activity). More importantly, McLuhan’s writing is troubling. His grand and universalizing theories stink of paternalism, racism, and sexism.

I was therefore excited to read a critical, feminist “retrieval” of McLuhan’s ideas. Part One of the book both delivered and fell short of my expectations thus far (I do have chapters left to read). The introduction (Sarah Sharma), chapter one on Black materialist media theory (Armond R. Towns), and chapter four on Indigenous textiles of the Shipibo-Conibo of the Peruvian Amazon (Ganaele Langlois) all extended McLuhan’s ideas in critical ways for me. 

In chapter one, Sharma wrote that “feminist and critical race scholars have long been doing the work of examining how the medium is the message—by locating specifically how, where, and to what extent (a) different technologies alter the tempo, scale, and rhythms of life in different ways for different populations while also paying attention to (b) how patriarchy, racism, and different forms of power are extended through technology and (c) how technologies extend people’s ability to resist patriarchy and racism” (p. 7). This redefinition allowed my thinking about McLuhan’s ideas to shift from the influence of technology on humans to a more transactional interaction between societies, culture, and power.

In chapter one, Towns extended McLuhan’s theorization of transportation to include “the production of racial blackness in the Americas” via the slave ship in addition to the mediation of Black resistance and agency (p. 28; see Henry “Box” Brown example). In chapter four, Langlois focuses on the non-Western, Indigenous identity and ways of life of the Shipibo-Conibo as mediated through the spiritual visions of the kené design of textiles and ceramics. The Amazonian cosmologies mediated through textile challenge McLuhan’s vision of a superior Gutenberg man and his typographic “civilization” that values the “precision of meaning and fixing things in linear, rational sequences” above “tribalized” societies (p. 72). For me, these chapters disrupt McLuhan’s grand narratives and make clear the biases, bigotries, and privilege  in his writing that we need to recognize.

My one critique of the book is that I think it sometimes lost its thread. While I found the chapters I read interesting, I did not find the chapter on sidewalks or wires as living up to the critical vision espoused in the Introduction. I was left wanting a bit more tying things together and returning to the thesis. 

A good question posed during our discussion was, “why McLuhan?” Why return to a man with problematic ideas? I think this is a fair question. For me, I just cannot shake McLuhan’s ideas and, to be honest, I don’t want to. They’re powerful and productive. But I appreciate how this book better allowed me to “take his analysis without taking his attitudes” (p. 4).

Michelle’s thoughts

I’m still thinking about this “why McLuhan?” question as well. As a current graduate student, I am still reading much of McLuhan’s work for the first time, so I’m in a perhaps peculiar situation where I will have done more grappling with McLuhan’s ideas outside of McLuhan’s texts before I read his own work. A purist will probably have a problem with that, but I think I actually will be a better reader of McLuhan now that I have read Re-Understanding Media. 

But then that question creeps in. Why McLuhan? Why do I care to be a better reader of McLuhan, if to read McLuhan is to wade through his falsely universalizing claims and theories? I think what’s so powerful about Re-Understanding Media for me, in addition to the fascinating insights and analysis found throughout, is how the book demonstrates that we can see a thinker’s work as “up for grabs” (Sharma, Chapter 10, p. 180), and that we can and should "refuse the calls to imitation" (Chun, Afterward, p. 229), even of the work that may speak to us the most. As a student-scholar, this is something that I think about a lot: as I read more widely and have those experiences of stumbling upon work that makes me write “!!!!!!” in the margins, to balance the thrill of having been electrified with inspiration without then developing a misplaced allegiance to the individual thinker is an exercise in restraint and humility. The process of building ideas on top of the ideas of others is this funny feeling of developing a deep familiarity with the output of someone else’s mind all the while being careful to not get lost in there. Reading Re-Understanding Media has come at a good time for me in my studies, as it self-consciously models what this can look and feel like.

I didn’t expect to walk away from this book with renewed optimism for the possibilities of new media technologies, but I do. Part III highlights the work of artists in pushing media theory in new, exciting, and liberatory directions. Chapter 11’s interview with Morehshin Allahyari is especially compelling, reframing the 3D printer as a “poetic machine” (p. 193) not just useful for reproduction and replication but as a machine to print/create “disobedient systems” (p. 194), playing with construction, destruction, and reconstruction. (Read the interview—there’s so much there!) Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Afterward reminds us that McLuhan identified a special role for artists in helping us grapple with and freeing us from the sensorial rearrangements brought about by new media environments. I am reminded that the work that we do in developing models for more critical technology education can and should be interdisciplinary, multidimensional, and sprawling, tapping into not just rational analysis but also embodied and creative ways of re-understanding the technologies in our life.

Educational technologies and the technologies of schooling do not come up in this collection, and so my final question is what would that look like here? What would a re-understanding of edtech look like? What new and unexpected insights might we land on if we applied McLuhan’s tools of analysis to educational technologies? As jumping off points in the future, I think I will be returning to a couple of chapters in Part II, namely Chapter 6 (“Wifesaver: Tupperware and the Unfortunate Spoils of Containment” by Brooke Erin Duffy and Jeremy Packer) and Chapter 7 (“‘Will Miss File Misfile?’ The Filing Cabinet, Automatic Memory, and Gender” by Craig Robertson). Chapter 6 argues that Tupperware is best understood not as technology of extension (as in extending the shelf-life of the leftovers placed within) but rather as a technology of containment. McLuhan may have positioned extension technologies as active (and masculine) and containment technologies as passive (and feminine), but Duffy and Packer turn that dichotomy on its head by tracing how the Tupperware container actually serves an active role in enabling new sociotechnical systems and by transforming its contents. 

In Chapter 7, Robertson traces how the filing cabinet was coded as a machine most appropriate for use by women, as women handled the “mindless” work of information organization so that their male coworkers could be freed up to do the more important knowledge work of offices. Not only does Robertson’s chapter tell a fascinating story of how certain technologies get coded as for particular kinds of people, but it also builds on Sarah Sharma’s insight that “the reorganization of labor is part of the message of every medium” (p. 121). 

I take to heart Sharma’s reminder in the Introduction that it’s not productive or necessary to try to guess at “what would McLuhan say about edtech?” But I am inspired to build on McLuhan’s framing of media to help me better understand particular educational technologies. In what ways do certain kinds of edtech both extend and contain? What gets transformed as it passes through each edtech medium (and the sociotechnical systems they become embedded within), and what are the contours of that transformation? What is the message of an edtech medium? There’s so much more to think about.