Electric Speed, the Scale of Human Affairs, and the Censor

Three Questions

  1. McLuhan states that "electric speed" heightens our "awareness of responsibility" by bringing together "all social and political functions" (5). Give an example that illustrates this concept.
  2. McLuhan claims that the "message" of technology is how it alters the "scale or pace or pattern" of human affairs (8). Describe how an innovation (e.g., the wheel, microorganisms, DNA, electricity) "accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions" (8).
  3. According to McLuhan, how does our censor protect "our central system of values"? Based on this description, how does the censor influence our critical thinking abilities?

Response

"How does our censor protect our values? Influence our critical thinking abilities?"

McLuhan claims that we censor new information because doing so protects both "our central system of values" and our actual, physical nervous system (24). I interpret this to mean that we instinctively doubt new information because it often challenges our preexisting understanding of reality, and the psychological stress of paradigm-shifting information often manifests itself in physical stress: fatigue, irritability, anxiety. So, we protect ourselves by resisting new information and therefore preventing it from disrupting our perception and interfering with our lives.

If I'm accurately interpreting this concept, then the censor stabilizes our identity because the new information threatens to "[alter] our relations to one another and to ourselves" (McLuhan 8). If so, then the censor's identity-stabilizing function represents an early stage of the Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski's theory of positive disintegration. This theory states that advanced moral development requires the disintegration of existing psychological structures to reform them (qtd. in Kienzler 327). But restructuring existing psychological structures threatens our identity by destabilizing how we perceive reality and thus how we perceive ourselves and others, so individuals first resist the change via doubt.

Ultimately, individuals who want to adapt to the changing world must evolve by not only recognizing their currently-held beliefs but also by acknowledging new information and allow iting to influence their existing psychological structures. Otherwise, their censor threatens to bring on what McLuhan calls "a lifelong state of psychic rigor mortis" (24).

References

Kienzler, Donna. "Ethics, Critical Thinking, and Professional Communication Pedagogy." Technical Communication Quarterly 10.3 (2001): 319-340. Web.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. Massachusettes: The MIT Press, 1994. Print.