THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ — McDialogues™
Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science.
by Nelson S. Thall, former President and Director, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada.
What Is the Relationship Between Technology Ecology and the Grammars of Electric Culture?
A Student of Technology and Mass Media asks:
Mr. Thall, I notice you have refined the subtitle of The Daily McLuhan Dialogues™. It once read An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science. It now reads Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science. Have you changed your field of study, or are these two ways of naming one pursuit? And what is the relationship between technology ecology and the grammars of electric culture?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
The field has not changed. What has sharpened is the angle of approach. The two phrases are not rivals, and they are not mere synonyms. They are two lenses trained on a single object, and each shows what the other cannot.
Begin with technology ecology. It studies the environments that media and machines bring into being. Every technology creates an invisible environment around us, and that environment, not the device itself, is the true message. A new medium does not simply add content to a culture. It rearranges the entire field of perception, behaviour, identity and politics. We live inside these environments as a fish lives inside water, so completely surrounded that we cannot see the water at all. Technology ecology is the discipline of learning to see the water.
Now turn to the grammars of electric culture. A grammar is the hidden order beneath a language, the rules we obey without naming, and notice only when they are broken. Every environment carries such an order. The electric age has its own syntax, its own permissions and prohibitions. It favours certain kinds of attention and starves others. It rewards certain behaviours and quietly forbids the rest. To study the grammar is to read the rules the environment enforces while it pretends to be neutral.
So the relationship is this. Technology ecology describes the habitat. The grammars of electric culture describe the laws operating within it. One asks, what world has this technology built around us? The other asks, what is that world compelling us to do? They are the where and the how of a single enquiry, and neither is complete without the other.
This also accounts for the second half of the subtitle, and for why it changed. Propaganda is not a lie told loudly. Propaganda is the deliberate turning of a medium’s grammar against the people who live inside it, the exploitation of rules they cannot see, in an environment they did not choose. Once a person can read the grammar, propaganda loses its invisibility, and to read the grammar is already to begin resisting it. That is why Counter-Propaganda need no longer stand in the masthead as a separate promise. The counter-measure is the understanding. To name the grammar is to disarm the propagandist.
The electric age, radio, television, satellite, computer, smartphone, and now artificial intelligence, is therefore no toolbox. It is a language with a grammar, a habitat with laws, and a theatre in which propaganda is staged. Technology ecology teaches us where we are standing. The grammars of electric culture teach us the rules of the ground beneath our feet. Both exist for a single purpose, to make visible the invisible forces that shape human life in the electric age, so that we may live in that age as its students, and not as its subjects.
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All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM) was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
I can be reached at nelson@themediumisthemessage.com