Is social media impacting on print? Andy McCourt commentary

During PrintEx last week, I had a very pleasant coffee with a senior person from within our industry and the topic of social media came up. There is obviously some thinking going on at the top, both for using social media as a networking/promotional medium for print, and as a possible threat to certain print markets.

The conversation became almost philosophical; exploring the possibility that humankind itself is changing, evolving into a new phase of consciousness (or unconsciousness to the cynic!). We are all familiar with the Darwinian physical stages of human development; Neanderthals, Homo Sapiens and so forth. There was even a genus known as Homo Heidelbergensis (some might argue it still exists!). They were the ancestors of Neanderthals and apparently quite advanced, having language, using tools, burying their dead and painting their bodies. Identified from the first discovery of a jawbone in Germany, 1907, and named after the University of Heidelberg, some populations of Homo Heidelbergensis were tall and strong – over seven feet estimated from bones found in Southern Africa. But it is the cultural stages of mankind’s development that impact most on societies.

I found myself referring to Marshall McLuhan’s 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, a dusty copy of which sits on my bookshelf. McLuhan was a genius and understood media like no other. His vision has been proven correct time and time again as the digital era unfolds. The über-cool tech-mag Wired even adopted him as their “Patron Saint.” McLuhan identifies four major cultural stages of mankind:

• Oral tribe culture
• Manuscript culture
• Gutenberg typographic culture
• Electronic Age

Each one overlaps the next; we still have Oral cultures, we speak, we teach young children in an oral-tribal way in kindergarten. We still write, or at least some of us do. And of course we have print, the Gutenberg Galaxy that changed the world forever, ushering in the reformation and the emergence of an educated, literate middle class that became the backbone of Western civilization. But it is the Electronic Age that nor fascinates us most. In McLuhan’s 1960s, that mostly meant TV, Radio and a nascent computer industry. However, also in 1962, the first successful experiments connecting computers via a network were completed and what we now know as the Internet was born. Back then it was funded by the US defense Department’s Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) and became known as the Arpanet. McLuhan, as the world’s leading media academic, would have known about this for sure.

Back to print and its monumental affect on humankind, McLuhan’s Galaxy says:

“Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified.”

Here is the key; “… if men decide to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified.”

McLuhan’s overriding premise is that technologies are not simply inventions that people employ, but are the means by which people are re-invented. Does that strike a chord with today’s social media?

Nearly fifty year ago, Marshall McLuhan, in an update to the Galaxy, added a chapter ‘The Galaxy Reconfigured - or the Plight of Mass Man in an Individualist Society.’ How far-seeing was that, and how appropriate to what is going on in the world of media?

He quotes ancient sages who also understood the essence of ‘Man.’ Blake, Ruskin, Rimbaud, Proust and even James Joyce are all invoked to support his prediction that we would become a world of individuals, externalizing their innermost thoughts and sharing these with comparative strangers. Each man and woman becomes his or hers own ‘media brand.’

In quoting British education reformer GH Bantock, McLuhan published; “In a world of increasing socialization, standardization and uniformity, the aim was to stress uniqueness, the purely personal experience; in one of ‘mechanical’ rationality, to assert other modes through which human beings can express themselves, to see life as a series of emotional intensities involving a logic different to that of the rational world and capturable only in dissociated images or stream of consciousness musings.” If that doesn’t describe Facebook, Twitter et al, I don’t know what does.

Was not Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre social media? Were not Johnson and Boswell’s coffee-shops in eighteenth-century London social media? Is not an Aboriginal Corroboree social media?

What ever your views on social media, it’s not going away for to make it go away, another soul-satisfying method of human interaction would need to be invented. But what of print? Remember: “The Plight of Mass Man in an Individualist Society?”

Your ‘plight’, should you wish to resolve it, is to re-invent printed products and their distribution, so that they appeal to post-typographic man; a society of individuals who form tribal connections, sometimes quite irrationally, and harmonise print with social media – fuse it, progress it, twist it and de-form it.

For, as McLuhan wrote fifty years ago: “Our most ordinary and conventional attitudes seem suddenly twisted into gargoyles and grotesques. Familiar institutions and associations seem at times menacing and malignant. These multiple transformations, which are the normal consequence of introducing new media into any society whatever, need special study.”