We noted at the outset of this section that media studies has by and large come to ignore or reject the views of Marshall McLuhan in favour of Raymond Williams’s analysis of similar
It is McLuhan’s view that these mediating factors are qualities of the media technologies themselves, rather than outcomes of the way they are used, which is criticised by Williams and many in media studies
terrain. In this section we draw out the major differences in their approaches to the question of technology’s relation to culture and society.
Human agency versus technological determination
Williams clearly has McLuhan’s concept of the ‘extensions of man’ in mind when he writes that ‘A technology, when it has been achieved, can be seen as a general human property, an extension of a general human capacity’ (1974: 129; our italics). McLuhan is seldom interested in why a technology is ‘achieved’, but this is a question that is important for Williams. For him ‘all technologies have been developed and improved to help with known human practices or with foreseen and desired practices’ (ibid.). So, for Williams, technologies involve precisely what McLuhan dismisses. First, they cannot be separated from questions of ‘practice’ (which are questions about how they are used and about their content). Second, they arise from human intention and agency. Such intentions arise within social groups to meet some desire or interest that they have, and these interests are historically and culturally specific.
McLuhan holds that new technologies radically change the physical and mental functions of a generalised ‘mankind’. Williams argues that new technologies take forward existing prac- tices that particular social groups already see as important or necessary. McLuhan’s ideas about why new technologies emerge are psychological and biological. Humans react to stress in their environment by ‘numbing’ the part of the body under stress. They then produce a medium or a technology (what is now frequently called a prosthesis) which extends and exter- nalises the ‘stressed out’ sense or bodily function. Williams’s argument for the development of new technologies is sociological. It arises from the development and reconfiguration of a cul- ture’s existing technological resources in order to pursue socially conceived ends.
McLuhan insists that the importance of a medium is not a particular use but the structural way that it changes the ‘pace and scale’ of human affairs. For Williams, it is the power that specific social groups have that is important in determining the ‘pace and scale’ of the intended technological development – indeed, whether or not any particular technology is developed (see Winston 1998). Williams’s emphasis called for an examination of (1) the rea- sons for which technologies are developed, (2) the complex of social, cultural, and economic factors which shape them, and (3) the ways that technologies are mobilised for certain ends (rather than the properties of the achieved technologies themselves). This is the direction which the mainstream of media studies came to take.
The plural possibilities and uses of a technology
Where, for the most part, McLuhan sees only one broad and structuring set of effects as flowing from a technology, Williams recognises plural outcomes or possibilities. Because he focuses on the issue of intention, he recognises that whatever the original intention to develop a technology might be, subsequently other social groups, with different interests or needs, adapt, modify or subvert the uses to which any particular technology is put. Where, for McLuhan, the social adoption of a media technology has determinate outcomes, for Williams this is not guaranteed. It is a matter of competition and struggle between social groups. For Williams, the route between need, invention, development, and final use or ‘effect’ is not straightforward. He also points out that technologies have uses and effects which were unforeseen by their conceivers and developers. (A point with which McLuhan would agree.) Overall, Williams’s critique of McLuhan adds up to the premiss that there is nothing in a par- ticular technology which guarantees or causes its mode of use, and hence its social effects. By viewing media the way he does, he arrives at the opposite conclusion to McLuhan: what a culture is like does not directly follow from the nature of its media.
Concepts of technology
We have noted how broadly, following a basic (nineteenth-century) anthropological concept of ‘man’ as a tool user, McLuhan defines a technology and how he subsumes media within this definition without further discussion. Williams does not. First, he distinguishes between various stages or elements in a fully achieved technology. The outcome of this process is sub- ject to already existing social forces, needs and power relations.
In line with the ‘social shaping of technology’ school of thought (Mackenzie and Wajcman 1999), Williams is not content to understand technologies only as artefacts. In fact the term ‘technology’ makes no reference to artefacts at all, being a compound of the two Greek roots techne, meaning art, craft or skill, and logos, meaning word or knowledge (Mackenzie and Wajcman 1999: 26). In short, technology in its original form means something like ‘knowledge about skilful practices’ and makes no reference at all to the products of such knowledge as tools and machines. So, for Williams, the knowledges and acquired skills necessary to use a tool or machine are an integral part of any full concept of what a technology is. McLuhan is largely silent on this, his attention being fully centred upon the ways in which technologies ‘cause’ different kinds of sensory experience and knowledge ordering procedures.