Smythe was a Canadian-born scholar who worked as an economist in a number of government agencies in the United States in the early 2oth century. He was vocal about his socio-political stances, which often left him at odds with authorities, including difficulties getting published when he turned to teaching at the University of Illinois during the 1950s. See his Wikipedia page for more, or see this encyclopedia entry.

The International Association for Media and Communication Research gives an award named in honor of Smythe for quality scholarship dedicated to exploring the relationship between media and political economy.

Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada (1981) is Smythe’s most widely known and excerpted work. He has a number of journal articles credited to him. An essay collection is also dedicated to him, and is, ironically enough, extremely expensive.

“On the Audience Commodity and Its Work”

Our excerpt, taken from Smythe’s 1981 book, seeks to recast critical Marxist theories about mass media, grounding them in a more “objective and realistic” theoretical framework (p. 231). In his estimation, previous efforts were, at best, incomplete because they did not consider “real life processes” (p. 231) that determined the relationship between media, advertisers, and audiences. He develops the concept of “audience power,” which he defines as an audience’s ability to “buy goods and spend their income accordingly” (p. 243) so as to perpetuate capitalism and therefore reify state-held power (p. 233). To accomplish this, Smythe argues that free- or leisure-time is really only an illusion that hides actual work and the commodification of virtually the entire life of any given individual who lives in a capitalistic society. By focusing conscious attention on the spectacle contained within media, “the real situation is mystified out of existence” (p. 241). Instead of viewing advertising as a necessity for creating and broadcasting media, Smythe views “non-advertising” content as a trojan horse really designed to sneak advertising into the homes, lives, and thought processes of audiences — what he terms a “free lunch” (p. 242-3). The effect, as he puts it, is to “reaffirm the status quo and retard change” (p. 243).

Questions and Connections

Several questions stick out to me:

• Is his approach any more realistically grounded than those he dismisses?
• How does his theory compare to other cultural materialist theories of media?
• How does the participatory internet alter or affirm his notion that industrialization destroys creativity (p. 233)?

Smythe is a determinist, but not in the same way as McLuhan. Whereas McLuhan sees all (or at least most) human agency as irrelevant in the face of technological form, Smythe sees technological form as an extension of market capitalist ideology, and as the site of a “social process” through which the relationship between people and commodities is formed. Instead of being the actor with the most agency, technology becomes the conduit through which agency is controlled. He’s similar to Williams in this point, yet the audience is just as unable to affect this process as they are in McLuhan’s scheme. The use of the “free lunch” is distracting enough to hide the areas in need of critical examination.

Thus, I find him oddly reminiscent of Gramsci, in spite of his insistence that he’s more “objectively” and “realistically” grounded than Gramsci and others. Really, he seems primarily intent on providing empirical evidence of media as a hegemonic process. Yet, he does seem just as guilty in over-generalizing his theories, particularly with respect to print journalism pre-WWI.

Thoughts?

McLuhan was a Canadian scholar who trained primarily in literature, but became widely known as a media theorist and scholar. He began his career at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and then went on to spend more than 30 years at the University of Toronto. The university’s Program in Culture and Technology is named after McLuhan.

Selected Bibliography

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)

The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (1967)

McLuhan’s famous statement that “the medium is the message” is the summation of his belief that human society evolves in ways that can be directly traced to the rise, use, and impact of technological innovation. Echoing, though not necessarily subscribing to, post-structural theory, McLuhan argues “the latest approach to media considers not only the ‘content’ but the medium and the cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates” (p. 204). However, he diagnoses culture and society as largely “numb in our new electric world” (p. 207). In his assessment, mechanization has given way to electric speed as the primary operating force within technology. This transition is especially distressing to McLuhan, and he cites it as the cause of society’s numbness: “Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of industrial marketers, the nonliterate with the semiliterate and the postliterate” (p. 207).

In order to fully assess such technology’s impact on society and culture, McLuhan argues that the scholar must remain detached from the medium and its “lines of force” because “any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary” (p. 206). His language always seems to phrase media as a force that operates within culture the way, say, gravity operates within nature. He suggests structurally traceable cause/effect relationships from media to audiences, relationships that have profound effects on the ways audiences (mis)understand meaning. In essence, electric technology overpowers meaning, substituting a kind of spectacle arising from the technology rather than the message’s origin.

Below, McLuhan assesses a 1976 presidential debate between Carter and Ford in light of his theories on media. He argues that neither candidate has any clear understanding of how to operate in a televised medium.

One intricate theory McLuhan references several times in this clip elaborates on the difference between “hot” and “cool” media. The idea is famously explored in Understanding Media. Essentially, “hot” media are those who focus the audience’s attention primarily upon a physical sense that overrides the audience’s conscious participation. “Cool” media demand more participation by diffusing their experiences across a broader range of senses. Thus, the audience has to work hard in order to generate much sense from media. Below are some McLuhan-related links.

CBC Radio/TV archive of McLuhan

Wikipedia entry on McLuhan

U of Toronto Program

RAYMOND WILLIAMS (1921-1988)

Williams was a British scholar of literature who joined the British Communist Party while at Cambridge. He later served in the British armed forces during WWII, including fighting in Europe after the Normandy invasion. He maintained his Leftist political stances throughout his life, clearly influenced by Gramsci. He is often considered a major figure in the 20th century development of cultural materialism as a systematic analytic (see IU link below).

Selected Bibliography

Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974)

Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1975)

Williams connects society and technology in a more multi-faceted relationship than does McLuhan. He criticizes the viewpoint held by McLuhan as one that seals technology’s development in a vacuum, in effect “abstract[ing] technology from society” (pp. 5-6). Instead, he wants to situate technology as a force developing within socially and materially determined “purposes and practices” (p. 7). Thus, television in particular represents the confluence of multiple technical innovations from different sectors that are synthesized in order to meet the demands of cultural/social development. Specifically, economic development and social development have to meet in order for such a technology to arise, gain a foothold, and become a social force. Through “a long history of capital accumulation and working technical improvements,” communications technologies are created as a direct response to material needs operating within cultural matrices (p. 12).

Thus, communications technologies like television owe something of their existence to the material constraints of the cultures in which they arise – economic considerations, especially. Williams states, “A need which corresponds to  with the priorities of the real decision-making groups will, obviously, more quickly attract the investment of resources and the official permission, approval or encouragement on which a working technology, as distinct from available technical devices, depends” (p. 12). Drawing clearly from Gramsci, he constructs a material history of television as not just one of technical design, but also of necessary social design at work within centralized power structures in Western culture of the 20^th century. In other words, TV or radio might be analyzed as entertainments arising from the demands of consumers. Yet, they also arise as products “officially” sanctioned and supported because they can effectively operate within the status quo power structures entrenched within those cultures. And their use evolves along these lines. In current terms, we would see Williams’ theory as an ecological one drawing from a Marxist foundation.

Wikipedia entry

Raymond Williams Society

Keywords excerpts

Indiana University page defining “cultural materialism”

John Higgins’ critical examination of Williams and his theories

CONCLUSIONS

McLuhan’s theories on media echo the literary concerns contemporary to him. Scholarship turned toward the nature of language as a tool for carrying meaning. McLuhan offers a very similar take on television. He could be seen as a postmodernist except for two major divergences from postmodern thought. First, McLuhan seems to assume a strong sense of causality in the relationship between technology and society, echoing to a degree Saussurian structural linguistics rather than later post-structural theory. Second, that line of causality seems to flow from technology to humankind, and not necessarily the other way. In other words, power and influence is embedded within technology, leaving humankind seemingly at the whims of the technologies they use. People are not agents at work within media complexes, but are rather the subject of media.

Meaning is devalued in this formula in favor of structurally unraveling the consumer’s/audience’s relationship with media, and to step outside the media complex in order to analyze it from a disinterested vantage point. And that relationship can be described almost entirely in terms of a medium’s structure, rather than the audience’s experiences. Such  an epistemological vantage point is necessary to achieve true media literacy.

Williams critique of such a viewpoint becomes salient in the modern media market, especially given the relationships scholars like Henry Jenkins have theorized in response to the rise of participatory cultures. McLuhan only pursues media and technology as socially constructive forces, and not as constructed forces. His primary (only?) concern is understanding technology as a causal force, and not necessarily as a contingent cultural development. The result is that elements of McLuhan’s philosophy still resonate in much media scholarship, but not as a comprehensive analytical framework. As scholarship is now firmly entrenched in describing as many facets of cultural objects as possible in material terms, wider ecologies have taken shape.