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Marshall McLuhan has a horse problem. As in, with regards to technology and culture, I don’t get a firm impression of which he thinks is the horse and which he thinks is the cart. Not that it needs to be one or the other but with all the dichotomies (hot and cold media, the first world and “less advanced” cultures, etc.) it would seem like he should come down one way or the other.

Sometimes it seems like the technology informs the culture. In Chapter 2, we get “The hotting-up of the medium of writing to repeatable print intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the sixteenth century.” So, print shaped the cultural ideology in this sentence. However, in other places, he seems to think that the culture dictates what technologies are appropriate. In Chapter 4, we get this: “The Russian bugs rooms and spies by ear, finding this quite natural. He is outraged by our visual spying, however, finding this quite unnatural.” First, let me say something about this assertion: the Soviets and the Americans both used both. We planted bugs and the Soviets used visual spying. I don’t know where McLuhan is getting the idea that one side preferred one method over the other. That aside, the point in the passage is that the culture shapes the technologies that are used by particular cultures.

Personally, I find the idea that technology shapes the culture, what is thinkable and unthinkable, compelling. Another scholar, Lewis Mumford, writes about the clock becoming ubiquitous and, in becoming so, “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” More exacting etiquette around punctuality became a cultural norm once the clock came into being. The hourly wage and ideologies around productivity, tied to the clock, became norms. However, if we follow the idea of technology shaping culture too exclusively, we get into technologic determinism and then agency dissolves. That’s the main question I have for McCluhan: are you a determinist? If so, great, but it seems like there’s a lot going on in Understanding Media that rejects determinism.