Review: What Marshall McLuhan can teach us in the age of digital media
Nick Ripatrazone’s new book on Marshall McLuhan, Digital Communion, arrived in my mailbox the day I presented a play about Marshall McLuhan at a conference on the Catholic imagination in Dallas, Tex. If such coincidences exist, it is fitting.
As part of my Church Communications Ecology degree at McGrath Institute for Church Life, I wrote the play. Around 30 communication professionals participated in the program to learn, create and read about projects that would help church to communicate its message digitally. “Communications professionals” was a broadly defined term. The cohort included college professors and high school teachers as well as writers, editors, journalists, bloggers, digital media entrepreneurs, seminarians, and two artists, including myself.
Two months ago, we met over Zoom to talk about a variety of books. As well as reading theology by Bonaventure and Romano Guardini as ecological thinkers, Rachel Carson was our guide. We pondered Andy Warhol’s imagination and learned the communication theory behind Fred Rogers’s television neighborhood. We watched Bo Burnham’s “Inside,” discussed the phenomenon of Wordle on our class message boards and consumed media theorists Walter Ong, S.J., and Marshall McLuhan.
McLuhan had already seen the internet as an option in 1960s when everyone was still enamored with broadcast TV.
Nick Ripatrazone author of Digital Communion,One of the Zoom classes was visited. In our class, he spoke about his new book and shared its thesis: “McLuhan’s Catholicism is not a footnote but rather a foundation of his media theories.” For a thinker like McLuhan, who is not as widely celebrated as other 20th-century American Catholic thinkers, this simple thesis is a surprisingly radical new paradigm.
McLuhan, who was born in Alberta, Canada, on 11/11/1911, converted to Catholicism during his time at Cambridge, where he was writing his dissertation. He became a professor at St. Michael’s College in Toronto, and his first books, The Mechanical Bride (1951) The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)His public intellectual success in television age skyrocketed.
Ripatrazone’s Digital Communion opens with a pericope describing the first televised papal Mass in the United States—in Yankee Stadium on Oct. 4, 1965—a story that introduces the dramatic tensions between technology and faith. This story may also be a reminder that, just as with the invention of the printing press in the early 1900s, the Catholic Church was not ready for the dramatic shifts that television would bring.
After this opening anecdote, the book cuts to McLuhan’s appointment to the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. Ripatrazone points out in several chapters that McLuhan may have been ahead of his time. McLuhan was already predicting the advent of the internet in 1960s when most people were falling for broadcast TV. Now that we are streaming television shows in the palm of our hand around the clock, we are ready for McLuhan’s prophecies of the digital age.
Ripatrazone’s style in this spiritual biography and light theological exegesis of McLuhan’s thought echoes McLuhan’s own mosaic style. The author fills the pages with McLuhan’s own words, which is easy to do since McLuhan is an infectious coiner of aphorisms. McLuhan’s idiosyncratic formulations are always striking and original, making it difficult to resist quoting him verbatim.
Ripatrazone dives into McLuhan’s singularly personal life, phraseology and his core beliefs, excavating the Catholic thread running through each. He tells the story of McLuhan’s conversion at Cambridge. McLuhan’s love of Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce led him to Catholicism and inspired his media theory. Ripatrazone also delves into McLuhan’s skepticism of Gutenberg and his printing press, the shrinking and uniting effects of print and digital media and the concept of the global village.
Digital natives might not realize that printing is an even more automated intervention than it actually is. Virtual environments are our default environment, and communication beyond screens is more natural for us than it seems. But, McLuhan notes, Gutenberg’s printing press was the first media invention to make the world small.
Even though we are digital natives, printing is still a very mechanical tool. But, McLuhan notes, Gutenberg’s printing press was the first media invention to make the world small.
Gutenberg’s print alphabet, McLuhan believed, contributed to the Reformation. Repeated type is faster than printing a manual and produces more knowledge. This allows for an industrialization of information and individual access. This divides the universe into smaller, more accessible areas. McLuhan regards print as both an individualizing and fragmentary medium. McLuhan believes that the digital world brings us back to communion.
This brings us to today’s global village concept. Ironically, the internet’s hyper-connectivity makes it difficult to find common ground. We are too wildly plugged into “a little bit of everything all of the time,” as Bo Burnham describes the internet. Patricia Lockwood dubs the World Wide Web: “The portal you enter only when you needed to be everywhere.” And if you are everywhere, you are, of course, nowhere.
We cannot escape our environment—we live in a particular climate zone, in a particular state, in a particular city, in a particular neighborhood. And digital media is part of that environment—the global village crashing into our city street.
However, we have the option to choose how we engage with our environment. Which kind of neighbor are you? What kind of neighbor will we be? How can we interact with the devices that are our media in our own terms, not in the terms they set, which, as McLuhan says, turn us into “servo-mechanisms.”
Artists and others who see technology as evil (as I am) are often the ones to blame. McLuhan reminded me as Ripatrazone that digital liturgy and communion in digital age are not due to an iPhone, Zoom screen, or camera watching Mass Mass. It is entirely environmental. We are conditioned to be indifferent, distracted, and distracted by the digital world. We can still resist these environmental reactions and habits.
McLuhan believes that it may be the responsibility of artists to pay attention to their environment, the ground of being together, and its habits. “The present is always invisible because it’s environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly,” wrote McLuhan, “thus everyone but the artist, the man of integral awareness, is alive in an earlier day.” The artist, McLuhan suggests, is the member of society who clearly sees the present, not the past.
McLuhan believes that it may be the role of the artist to pay attention to what surrounds us, the ground we live on, and its habits.
The play I presented in Dallas, “Is the Internet in Color?” tells the story of a woman with Alzheimer’s disease who befriends a young journalist. One woman with Alzheimer’s disease finds that the present she holds is becoming increasingly difficult to grasp. She will soon find that her memories are all she has. Borne back into the past in a constant, literal way has an extremely violent meaning.
With theological and poetic interjections by Michael Murphy of the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola Chicago University and McLuhan-esque riffs by Brett Robinson, of the McGrath Institute for Church Life, we created a dialogue of sorts between the characters of the play and the ideas contained within the story of Nancy’s struggle with Alzheimer’s.
The woman, Nancy, meets a young man—a paradigmatic zoomer—whose journalistic job it is to record the memories of a collective body, a public. As the internet slowly kills local journalism, his industry is in peril. Do we have to live in the past as Nancy did? Are we forced to live in the past, like Nancy? Is it the past, or the present that keeps us stuck? “The present / is too much for the senses,” writes the poet Robert Frost, “too present to imagine.” Such a sentiment could also be said of the World Wide Web.
McLuhan explained that artists have the ability to raise awareness and pay more attention to an environment. “The artist’s role is not to stress himself or his own point of view, but to let things sing and talk, to release the forms within them,” said McLuhan in a 1959 talk to seminarians.
The artist—at least the playwright—creates art that demands the participation of the audience. A play, unlike a TV segment, is created in collaboration with the audience. This includes their emotions, reactions and questions. The play is truly a liturgical act that involves participation. Television has not captured this.
Even with the increasing connectivity offered by the digital age we feel increasingly isolated. Play is one rare liturgie that brings us together. Plays, just like McLuhan’s printed book, are an artifact of culture and can, and will, continue to exist. It contains something that is essential for our humanity.
What can we do to enslave God in a modern age and new environment where our perceptions of reality, language, and communication have been changed?
Nature has a knack for sneaking in to our carefully curated spaces. Even when our digital environments are designed to be free from friction, we still find friction. We grow impatient when the internet is frozen, when Facebook’s servers go down, when Instagram can’t load and when our iPhone screen gets cracked. Our global village becomes part of something larger than ourselves.
McLuhan acknowledged that God was in everything, even the digital light from the internet. However, McLuhan also recognized that the society that had fundamentally changed its media metaphors had shaken their faith in the mediated God. McLuhan understood that letters are not ink, but pixelation. Books aren’t calfskin anymore; they are PDFs. Christ, the Christ. LogosHow can we now imagine Christ as the Word?
McLuhan poses the following question to Catholics living in 21st-century Catholicism: “How do we glorify God in a modern age and in a changing environment? Our understanding of reality, language, communication, and communication has changed?” Even though the technological advancements of the past century may seem recent, the question remains as relevant as it was for the apostles.
Maybe we could learn from McLuhan who thought it was profound enough to observe changes rather than making moralizations. What we pay attention to is what makes observation possible. Your attention. Where should we place it each day? What will happen when our attention is not only focused on the digital world, but also the real? Complete Our world: radiant, beautiful and resilient to our scrolling fingers Perhaps then we will be able to begin to see clearly who We When we become absorbed in the digital world we have in our hands,