For the Arab Spring, the Medium is the Message

Marshall McLuhan's theories of media and consciousness speak to the uprisings in the Middle East.

Among the peoples of the world strange new vortices of power will appear unexpectedly.

– Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

To honour what would have been Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday last Thursday, I offer these reflections on McLuhan’s thinking as applied to the so-called Arab Spring.

The struggle continues across the Maghreb and the Middle East – in Libya, in Egypt, in Yemen, in Bahrain, in Algeria, and in Syria. Keep track here.

We have yet, however, to see anything close to a comprehensive analysis of what’s going on. We’re used to the classical sort of uprising, with leaders, programmes of demands, and years of conspiratorial planning ¬– the Leninist model, in other words. What we are observing is something relatively new.

Old reactions are there in abundance, of course: army and police repression, palace counter-reformations, and the usual “bread-for-the-masses” stuff (higher wages, free land – whatever bribe might work). But it’s as though the protesters are living in a different world. Spontaneous uprisings are not new in history, of course, even on this scale. Yet the people in the streets are not being led, have not formed factions, and do not appear ideological in the narrow sense of the word.

Moreover, these uprisings have spread with surprising speed from country to country, each of which has its own specific history, governance, and local lifeways. And, for spontaneous upwellings, they have shown unprecedented staying power: The Arab Spring is now the Arab Summer.

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Find out why social media is a double-edged sword here.

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I would like to suggest that social media seen everywhere – texting, Facebook, Twitter – are not simply tools in the hands of revolutionaries, but are at the very core of the revolution itself. They offer, of course, the efficiency of lightning-fast communications, but they have also created a new way for people to be in the world, and with each other.

The medium is the message.

Marshall McLuhan’s star rose and fell some time ago, but it’s now apparently on the rise again, and just in time. His theories of media and consciousness perhaps permit us to grasp more fully what is going on in that part of the world. In particular, a review of those theories serves to counter the ever-glib Malcolm Gladwell’s abrupt dismissal of the role of social media in those uprisings.

In a recent interview, Gladwell argued that social media are merely good communication tools, but that revolutions have happened without those forms of instantaneous communication:

I’m a little bit skeptical of some of the more grandiose claims on behalf of social media ... The real work is elsewhere, right? [emphasis added]

So my question is not can you – can you reach someone in two seconds? Fine. [But] have you done the 20 years of preparation necessary to build a coherent movement?

But this is all independent of the tipping point (another Gladwellism – plain language for what McLuhan himself calls a “break boundary”). You can try to force the tipping point to happen more quickly, and do what you can to control what happens next, but you simply can’t generate it yourself, and it often happens without your aid.

Through the lens of what comes after, what comes before is virtually incomprehensible. During the period in which these two co-exist, they are related only through anxiety and open antagonism.

A better explanation of the massive upheavals we have been observing, then, is to be found in the clash of two ways of, for want of a better term, “being in the world.” And McLuhan, in his idiosyncratic way, was on top of all this before it happened.