FRANKFURT SCHOOL REVISITED: THE IRRATIONAL RATIONALITY

I

f the Toronto School’s “global village” is the head of a coin, then the Frankfurt School’s “irrational rationality” is its tail. They are two sides of a coin; two different thoughts from different schools, originated decades ago in response to the same phenomenon - the rise of technology. While Toronto theorists look at it as ‘an extension of man’, their Frankfurt counterparts think of it as ‘an appendage of machine’, believing that the scientific revolution that occurred in the Age of Enlightenment – an origin of the growth of the modern society – is something irrational that enslaves man. What a critical theory!  

In 1944 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the prominent critical theorists of the Frankfurt School co-wrote the Dialectic of Enlightenment, introducing an epoch of progress through the rise of science, technological advances, and the cultivation of individual freedom.[1] This paper will rationalize the irrational rationality of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and explore how and why cultural transformations distorted the individual’s capacity to reason, as well as why that concept remains more or less true in the twenty-first century.

 

The Rationale of the Irrationality of Rationality

In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno stated that the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason had produced contradictory developments: the irrationality of rationality. “Rational systems inevitably spawn irrationalities that limit, eventually compromise, and perhaps even undermine their rationality.[2]” Technological advances, or ‘Reason’, failed to offer “a path to human liberation”, and had also been transformed into ‘an irresistible force for new forms of domination’. In other words, the term ‘irrationality of rationality’ is like a two-sided coin. Take smartphones for example; on one side, smartphones eliminate the space and time barriers and allow us to connect to the Internet and use whatever other communication applications made available on the device. On the other, the critical theorists side, we depend on our smartphones so much that we cannot even remember our friends’ numbers anymore as we let the phones do the job for us.   

In a broader sense, the unequal diffusion of technology causes the Digital Divide. Countries with poor technology become dominated, technologically and economically. A study of an effect of globalization and the lack of ICT in Nigeria[3] interestingly notes that,

“…There are breakthroughs in biotechnology and new materials as well as development in ICT which firms and other nations must be aware of and proactively anticipate the trends, consequences and implications as well as device appropriate response...The emergence of serious economic crisis in most African countries in the 1980s and Western response of using international financial institutions…has led to tighter imperialist control of the continent”; and hence, the term “digital slavery.”[4]

Critical Theory and the Culture Industry

The critical theory and the culture industry are connected because the culture industry furthered the collapse of reason. The term culture industry was used for the first time in the book The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno, replacing the term ‘mass culture’. In the essay Culture Industry Reconsidered[5], Adorno refered to ‘industry’ as the ‘standardization of the thing itself’ and he himself asked the readers not to take the word too literally. Within the culture industry – the standardized product – lies the pseudo-individualization, which is the new and improved that mask eternal sameness[6]. We see a lot of television soaps in which good guy always wins and eventually gets the girl, no matter what. We also see a lot of soaps which are the adaptations of great novels being remake again and again for generations. Everything-but the actors-is still the same – the eternal sameness.

All of these are examples of standardized commodities that are created for “mass deception,” in order to abort and silence criticism. Standardization silences doubt and without doubt, there is no need to question, thus, no need for reasoning. It makes perfect sense. This is how the culture industry ‘furthered the collapse of reason’. Imagine you are getting a recommendation for a product from a ‘friend’ in your social network site. Without reasoning or thinking it through, you have believed it already. That is because what your social network friends say is a kind of standardization – a standard for credibility and trustworthiness of information. Figures from CrowdTap in their free White Paper: The Power of Peer Influence show that 92% of consumers trust recommendations from their Peer over all other forms of advertising and recommendations[7].

The critical theorists, in addition, criticize that the culture industry endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises. It fabricates what Marx called “all that is solid melt into air.” A lot of marketing strategies today do not sell the product. They sell the ‘values’ of the products. Scott and Edles (2007), in their book, give an example of a Japanese automaker, selling the values of freedom to potential consumers in Harlem, New York, an area predominated by African-American whose freedom has been denied for decades. The example reminds me of what I learned from a marketing course I took last summer called the “value-delivery process”, which is: choosing the value, providing the value, and communicating the value[8]. It’s all about how to ‘sell’ the ‘values’. The point is what critical theorists criticized then is now happening and is currently the popular marketing strategy of the twenty-first century. 

Conclusion 

Of all the rationality of my irrationality, I would like to propose this paper as a critical thinking of today’s world of information communication technology. It is a fact that technological development happens all the time, constantly and fast. Since you cannot run or hide from it, the question is how do you embrace and be liberated – not dominated – by it? Technology, like many other things, has two sides: one rational (good) and the other irrational (bad). It would be irrational to give mobile phones to the people in a very less developed area and say you have successfully and rationally solved the Digital Divide issue and freed all from digital slavery. Technology could be a tool to a development but not the development per se.

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[1]Appelrouth, Scott, and D.Edles, Laura.  2007.  Sociological Theory in the Contemporary Era. California State   University, Northridge.  Pine Forge Press; California.

[2] Ritzer, George.  2013.  The McDonldization of Society. Sage Publication; California.

[3] L. A. Ogunsola.  2005. “Information and Communication Technologies and the Effects of Globalization: Twenty-First Century "Digital Slavery" for Developing Countries--Myth or Reality?”.  The Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship.  v.6, no.1-2 (Summer 2005). Retrieved on February 15, 2013 from <http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v06n01/ogunsola_l01.htm>

[4] The paper in footnote 3 explains the characteristics of slavery as “the slave was deprived of personal liberty and the right to move about geographically as he desired. There were likely to be limits on his capacity to make choices with regards to his occupation. At this juncture, one can rightly ask how the above characteristics of slavery fit in to this concept of 'digital slavery'”

[5] Adorno wrote this essay, the Culture Industry Reconsidered as he looks back at his earlier writings on the culture industry. The essay is one of many compiled into a book.  Adorno, Theodor.  1991.  The Culture Industry: Selected essays on mass culture.  Routledge; New York.  pp. 100.

[6] Appelrouth, Scott, and D.Edles, Laura.  2007.  Sociological Theory in the Contemporary Era. California State University, Northridge.  Pine Forge Press; California.

[7]A post by Gary Bembridge posted in CustomerThink.com on June 18, 2012 cited CrowdTap information on peer recommendations in his aticle “Why Peer Recommendations are Absolutely Critical for Marketing Success Today” Retrieved on February 17, 2013 from http://www.customerthink.com/blog/why_peer_recommendations_are_absolutely_critical_for_marketing_success_today. CrowdTap is a website where consumers and brands collaborate; people get rewards (Amazon gift odes and charity donations) for giving input on brands or products. The website has been in a beta mode since 2010.

[8] Wittaya C.Sopon.  2012. Positioning Excellence: The Right Solution, the Right Positioning. Lecture. Marketing Certificate Program-MCP Excellence Series. Thammasart University.

Toronto School Revisited: Is the Medium Really Is The Message

Toronto School Revisited: Is The Medium Really The Message? 

“It doesn’t matter much what you say on the telephone. The telephone as a service is a huge environment and that is a medium. And the environment affects everybody. What you say on the telephone affects very few, and the same as in radio and other medium.”

That was Marshall McLuhan in 1977 explaining “The Medium Is the Message” to an audience on the Monday Conference on ABC TV.[1] Marshall McLuhan was one of the forerunners of the Toronto School of communication theory, who considered the medium itself is the message, in a broader sense than just print or electronics like television – an environment. So even the light bulb can be a medium[2] because it has a huge effect on people. The term faced so many criticisms at that time, but they couldn’t have known that thirty years later the electronic media would allow no space and time barriers, and that it will have so much impact on the human society. This essay will probe into concept of ‘the medium is the message’, not to prove it right or wrong but rather to try to make sense out of it in the twenty-first century context.

The Medium is the Message

Such an outrageous thought, one might say. Can a book still be a “book” without the words? How could a television send “a message” without a program? The answer, by McLuhan himself, is:

“What you print is nothing compared to the effect of the printed words. The printed word sets up a paradigm, a structure of awareness which affects everybody in very, very drastic ways and it doesn’t matter what you print as long as you go on in that form of activity.”

McLuhan. Monday Conference on ABC TV - June 27, 1977.

McLuhan spoke of the medium as a paradigm, a structure of awareness, an ‘environment’ that creates a strong impact on a large scale of audience. McLuhan’s medium, therefore, refers (but not limited) to a book, newspaper, radio, television, telephone, film, Web Site, or email (Griffin, 2009[3]). And it is the ‘experience’ of the medium itself that delivers the message, not the content. Thai soap opera consumption should epitomize how people ‘experience’ soap opera from different medium with different effects. People read the plot from a newspaper (they really need to know the story even before it goes on air). Reading provides the experience of imagining the story from the letters, while the experience from actually watching it on screen is totally different. In addition, it does not matter how the story proceeds or ends, those who love to read or watch, still perform that activity, one soap after another. That is the power of the medium as a message.

It was in the 1960s when McLuhan coined the term the medium is the message. The ‘electronic media’ of the time was television and radio (and early computer). But the electronic medium of the twenty-first century is very different. Prints do not appear only on paper. Television becomes wider. The invention of the World Wide Web created the “global village” of the networked society. Media converged into one single medium, the Internet. The bigger television screen physically expands the experience of television watching. The ‘internet experience’ allows a person to engage in both activities – watching television and surfing the net – at the same time. A clip of a notorious scene from TV can be watched on the Internet. Within the Internet is a social media. The same video clip is shared to other people. And it is not just sharing the content. It is sharing the experience, with feelings, since social media lets you write your thoughts on everything. Therefore, the experience other people gain from watching that video clip on a social media website is different than when they experience it from TV. 

The Internet, hence, creates a new paradigm. It’s not about watching; it’s about sharing the thoughts and feelings. The Internet is a new “huge environment” that affects everybody (who has access) tremendously.

In our time, we are concerned not with meaning of media but effect[4].  

All media has an effect on man and society, regardless of its content.[5] McLuhan insisted that the media affects people because of the environment and the experience that it creates. In the fourth epoch of human history[6], the books, according to McLuhan, were the source of all individuality and that the new media will turn us all in to collective automata robots[7]. An epitome of this statement would be the story of 75-year-old Lucille Lofty, who was interviewed by blogger Carole Hicks. Lofty told Hicks that her family’s lifestyle radically changed after purchasing their first TV set in 1952[8]. The television took over the place of conversation, reading and many other interests that they shared as a family. Lofty’s father “turned on the TV as soon as he got up in the morning, kept it on all day and made sure he could see it from where he ate at the kitchen table”.

The impact of the medium today has become even more powerful than Lofty’s story with the emergence of the Internet. The 2000s electronic era brought about the new hi-tech gadgets that allow internet access anywhere, anytime. The gadgets enable access to the World Wide Web, and the social media (also a new medium), where all other medium (prints, television, film, recording music, etc.) converge. That doubles the impact. The social media alone is such a vast environment, rendering the experience with phenomenal effect. That is because the social media is content plus comments; and comments are very subjective. The effect of the social media, therefore, is like a whiplash; it starts with one person watching something on TV and shares it on the social network with one move of a finger. By sharing, a person also attaches his/her own comments. The clip (along with subjective comments) then spreads to millions more people like wildfire, accumulating emotions and arguments along the way; like a whip that starts with a small jerk of a hand but the power increases as it travels towards the tip.

McLuhan couldn’t have known of the World Wide Web in the early 1960s when he introduced his thought on the medium being the message, not to mention the social media. But he knew that the new media would eventually bring us to the Global Village[9] or today’s networked society. It also occurs to me that the media convergence is, in one way, the global village of the media itself; all media are interconnected and accessible via one medium – the Internet. “The electric media will create a world of dropouts from the old fragmented society,…and cause people to drop in to the new integrated global-village community”, said McLuhan in an interview with Playboy magazine back in 1969. The World Wide Web and the network society that we are now living in just makes the statement a goose-bumping true prophecy. The new medium, such as smartphones and tablets, truly eliminates the boundaries of space and time. We read books from all over the world online. We watch movies, music videos or television shows from many countries from anywhere and anytime we like. 

Does the capability of the social media that allows anyone to publicize their minds mean that we all can be the message?

McLuhan wrote, “In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information...[10]” McLuhan emphasizes that the medium is the message; not only because the “content of any medium is another medium” but also because any “medium shapes and controls the scale and form of human action[11]”, and I’d rather add ‘reaction’ as well, since I think the medium can be very manipulative of its audience.

An article on FORBES online titled “Advertising People Are the New Advertising Medium[12]” posted on May 15, 2012, talked about advertising people being the “medium.” The writer, who is in the advertising business, explained from his standpoint that advertising people use the social media more than average people do, thus, they become a ‘bona fide medium’. His three reasons are: they (advertising people) have many non-advertising ‘friends’; they are motivated to share creative things; and they tend to be the “cool people” in social circles (hence, the cultural drivers). Thus, if the advertising people – on the social media landscape – are the medium themselves, then they are also the message, which I quite agree with. A message from “ad people” would have different affect than that same message coming from non-advertising people, no matter what the message is.

Other Media Effects theories, such as the Cultivation theory, the Magic-Bullet theory, and the Agenda-setting theory, may argue with McLuhan’s concept. They believe in the powerful effects of the content of the media and not the media itself.  McLuhan, however, never said that the content did not have an effect. He merely said that, “the effect of TV, the message of TV, is quite independent [of the programs - the content].[13]” 

Conclusion

Marshall McLuhan’s concept of “the medium is the message” may not seem interesting or even possible thirty years ago. The 2000s era is proving him right. With the World Wide Web we are now living in the Global Village and the world is interconnected. The electronic medium has become the message, regardless of the content, because they provide the vast experience that affects a large scale of people and the society. The inventions of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets and other digital communication devices undeniably extend our consciousness as they speaks louder than their content and become more powerful.    

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[1] Marshall McLuhan answered to a question on “The Medium Is the Message” in Monday Conference on ABC TV, on June  27, 1977. Retrieved January 21, 2013 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaH51F4HBw

[2] Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, p. 8, explained that “a light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness.” (Wikipedia. Retrieved on January 22, 2013 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message)         

[3] Em Griffin.  2009.  A First Look at Communication Theory. 7^th ed.  New York: McGraw-Hill.

[4] McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

[5] Playboy Magazine.  1969.  “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan”. © Playboy. Retrieved January 16, 2013 from http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/#.

[6] McLuhan divided all human history into 4 periods, or epochs: the tribal age, literate age, a print age, and an electronic age (Griffin .2009).

[7]McLuhan answered to an audience in an open interview in 1967. Retrieved January 16, 2013 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMEC_HqWlBY

[8] Lofty, Lucille. Interview. Carole Hicks. 17 March 2008.  Retrieved on January 23, 2013 from http://carolehicks.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/televisions-impact-on-society/

[9] The term Gobal Village was introduced in McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962)

[10] Leslie Johnson.  2011.  Marshall McLuhan: How a Pre-Internet Academic Changed the Way We Think About the Web.  Retrieved January 22, 2013 from http://www.behaviourchangeandtechnology.org/2011/06/marshall-mcluhan-how-a-pre-internet-academic-changed-the-way-we-think-about-the-web/  

[11]Quoted in McLuhan, Marshall – Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (2009).  Thoughtjam.  Retrieved January 23, 2013 from http://thoughtjam.wordpress.com/2009/01/02/mcluhan-marshall-understanding-media-the-extensions-of-man/

[12] Will Burns.  2012.  Advertising People Are The New Advertising Medium.  Forbes.  Retrieved January 22, 2013 from http://www.forbes.com/sites/willburns/2012/05/15/advertising-people-are-the-new-advertising-medium/

[13] Marshall McLuhan answered to a question from an audience after his lecture on “The Medium Is the Message” in Monday Conference on ABC TV June 27, 1977.  Retrieved January 21, 2013 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaH51F4HBw