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Marshall Mcluhan's General System Thinking and Media Ecology Robert K Vol 1 No 2 (Autumn 2020) Online: jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/nexj Visit our WebBlog: newexplorations.net Marshall McLuhan's General System Thinking and Media Ecology Robert K. Logan—Department of Physics, University of Toronto—[email protected] It is argued that the most important contribution McLuhan made to the study of media was his general systems theory approach consisting of his figure/ground analysis and his general systems or field approach. Introduction Marshall McLuhan made many contributions to our understanding of media and the impact of technology. I believe that his most important contribution from which flowed his many insights was his general systems theory approach. Although he never used the term systems thinking or general systems thinking but rather described his methodology as a field approach which included his figure/ground analysis. I will argue in this paper that in fact McLuhan’s understanding of media and their impacts was in fact a general systems theory approach that is the basis of what today we call media ecology. How was it that an English professor schooled in the discipline of literary criticism and rhetoric came to incorporate a general systems theory approach to his study of media? I will attempt to explain this paradox in terms of McLuhan’s interest in science and engineering. McLuhan as a teen ager built himself a radio from scratch using readily available electronic components. When he enrolled in the University of Manitoba in his home town of Winnipeg he signed up for engineering. But in his second year, lucky for us, he switched fields and became an English major and the rest is history as the saying goes. Although his focus shifted to literature and culture he never lost his interest in science and engineering. His writings are full of references to scientists, engineers and systems thinkers. The list includes scientists such as Albert Einstein from whom we got the idea of information travelling at the speed of light, Werner Heisenberg (from whom he borrowed the concept of the resonant interval), Niels Bohr, Linus Pauling, Louis de Broglie and Hans Selye and systems, thinkers such as Norbert Wiener, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Claude Shannon, Buckminster Fuller, Kenneth Boulding and Gregory Bateson. He was familiar with the writings of these thinkers and put their books on his reading lists for the courses he taught. Donald Theall (2001, 30, 188) in his book The Virtual McLuhan documents McLuhan’s familiarity with the cybernetics and general systems literature. McLuhan could almost instantaneously intuit the relevance of Norbert Wiener’s and C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver’s ideas about cybernetics and systems theory in the light of modernist art, literature, poetics, aesthetic theory and cultural production…He quickly rejected [Wiener’s] mathematical theory of 187 Robert K. Logan communication, but the impact of the world examined in Wiener’s the Human Use of Human Beings had a profound effect on McLuhan (ibid. 30). The ground for recognizing the importance of communication and technology had been prepared by McLuhan's rapid recognition of the significance that Shannon and Weaver's work and Wiener's cybernetics would have on the intellectual world and the necessity of criticizing that approach from the perspective of traditional grammatico-rhetorical theories of communication (ibid. 188). What is a Systems Approach? Let us describe how McLuhan’s approach to studying media, communications and the impact of technology is a 'systems' approach by first describing the general systems approach. A system in the context of general systems thinking is a set of interacting components whose impact on each other and the system as a whole is non-linear. As a result, the system as a whole has properties that none of its components possess. There are three levels of causal interactions among the system as a whole and the components of which it is made. They are: (1) the vertical causal interactions of the top-down interaction of the system as a whole with its components; and (2) the vertical bottom-up causal interactions of the components of the system with the system as a whole, and finally (3) the lateral causal interactions of the components of the system with each other. These three sets of causal interactions cannot be disentangled and analysed independently because each of three sets of causal interactions affects the other two. Systems thinking and general systems theory considers the non-linearity of these three distinct sets of causal interactions. Bottom up and the top-down vertical interactions between the system as a whole and its components are non-linear and are affected by the lateral interactions among the components and vice-versa the lateral interactions are non-linear and they affect and are affected by the vertical ones. The three sets of interactions cannot be disentangled and hence a general systems or ecological approach must be taken to describe a complex system such a set of media and its users. As a result of all of these non-linear interactions, a system, such as a living organism for example, has properties that none of its components possess. The properties of the system as a whole emerge from the complexity of the three levels of causality just described. General systems theory, therefore is sometimes referred to as emergence theory or complexity theory. Chaos theory, cybernetics and ecology are also closely related to the general systems approach. It is therefore not an accident that the general systems approach began in the field of biology where the interactions among living organisms and the environments they occupy are extremely complex and totally non-linear. This is also the case with the interaction of the organs of an organism and the organism itself. The first to suggest the complexity of these interactions in a 188 Marshall McLuhan's General System Thinking and Media Ecology comprehensive way was biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1928, 1949, 1968) who coined the term Allgemeine Systemtheorie in his 1949 book, which was translated as General Systems Theory which appears in the title of his 1968 book, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications. McLuhan’s Analysis of Media and the Impact on Their Users is a General Systems Approach McLuhan’s analysis is a general systems approach is also an ecological approach given that an ecosystem and a general system are essentially equivalent. The media ecosystem that McLuhan considers parallels Bertalanffy’s (1968) general system theory because both involve the non-linear interactions of the components of the system and the system itself. The components of McLuhan’s general system include all of the media that users make use of, the users themselves and the impact of the media on their users. Each element of a general system or a media ecosystem impacts all the other components of the system and the system as a whole and vice- versa each element of the system is impacted by all the other elements of the system and the system as a whole. A general system and a media ecosystem both involve emergent dynamics in which the general system or the media ecosystem has properties that none of its components have. The first hint of McLuhan embracing a systems approach in his study of media and their effects occurs in a 1955 paper in which McLuhan (1955) wrote: “It is therefore, a simple maxim of communication study that any change in the means of communication will produce a chain of revolutionary consequences at every level of culture and politics. And because of the complexity of the components in this process, predictions and controls are not possible.” McLuhan’s description of communication studies is almost a perfect match for a complex general system which has properties that none of its components possess and it is impossible to predict the properties of the general system even if one knows about all the properties of its components in advance. The characteristics of a general system or an ecosystem is that of emergent dynamics by which the components of the general system or the ecosystem interact with each other in a non-linear fashion in which there is both downward, upward and lateral causation between the system and its components. This parallels McLuhan’s methodology which he described in the opening line of his book The Gutenberg Galaxy where he wrote, “The Gutenberg Galaxy develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems. Such a mosaic image of numerous data and quotations in evidence offers the only practical means of revealing causal operations in history (McLuhan 1962, 7).” Once again in Understanding Media, McLuhan (1964, 248) introduces the field notion which he relates to the electric field as described by physicists and uses it to describe electrically configured information and the post-Gutenberg world, which he viewed as “a total field of interacting events in which all men (sic) participate.” McLuhan’s field approach led to his ecological/environmental way of describing the interaction of all the forms of media with each other and their users. There 189 Robert K. Logan are just too many elements and interactions to describe them one component at a time in a linear sequential way with the world’s population approaching 8 billion people and an even greater number of electronic and digital devices, emails, blogs, Web sites, tweets, videos, podcasts, etc. etc. McLuhan adopted a “total-field-theory approach,” which I believe was influenced by his understanding of modern 20th century science as the following passage suggests, “All types of linear approaches to situations past, present, or future are useless. Already in the sciences there is recognition of the need for a unified field theory, which enable scientists to use one continuous set of terms by way of relating the various scientific universes (McLuhan 1953, 126).” McLuhan’s unified field approach retrieves Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in which space and time are united in a four-dimensional space-time continuum.
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