Living in an Acoustic World
An Introduction by Marshall McLuhan
We are living in an acoustic world. Marshall McLuhan delivered this message from the future in 1974, the year I was born. This lecture still provides a fitting description of the media ecology I inhabit at the age of 49, and the world I inhabit is still struggling to see what it can only hear.
I've resisted this message heroically, but the transition from the visual to acoustic world jolted me out of my denials and distortions. I felt the first jolt circa 2013. At the time, I didn’t have the vocabulary to translate the dawning realization into language. I turned to Understanding Media, but felt unprepared to metabolize the message of this seminal text.
More than a decade later now, the message resonates both as a self-evident truth and a lived reality: For natives of the continuous, connected, homogeneous and static visual world, the acoustic world of simultaneous information feels like an exile. Like water lilies planted in desert sand, visual-world natives believe that they are dying, and that only a transplantation can save them.
Through the Looking Glass
McLuhan compares the shift from the eye to the ear to the adventure that began when Alice stepped through the looking glass. The adventure is marked by transitions from:
Writing to orality.
Image to sound.
Private identity to collective identity.
Monotheism to polytheism.
Structure to fluidity.
The masculine to the feminine.
Specialism to generalism.
Agriculture to hunting and gathering.
Unidirectionality to multi-directionality.
Goal-seeking to role-playing.
Transparency to secrecy.
The Left Brain to the Right Brain.
Living in the past and the future to living in the present moment.
No doubt, the transition is jarring, destabilizing. However, I'd like to offer a hypothesis to every water lily stuck in the story of its exile into desert sand. The hypothesis is that the transition from the visual to the acoustic world isn't the beginning of our exile, but rather its end, marking our return to the culture that had first cast us into consciousness.
As Marshall McLuhan put it: “The unconscious is a store of everything at once. When you begin to move information electrically, you begin to create a subconscious outside. Until recently, the conscious was our environment; now the subconscious has become the environment.”
I may develop this message further, but it's good to pause to consider the hypothesis that the world isn't ending, just getting infinitely more interesting.