The crisis of technological takeover—then and now
A reflection on Jaqueline McLeod Rogers’s “Crises Then as Now. Marshall McLuhan, with Urbanist Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and Artist Gyorgy Kepes”
Crises Then as Now explores the intellectual atmosphere of the time when humankind faced its first media crisis. The aftermath of WWII, the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, space exploration, and the profound cultural impact of television—all of this happened within the historically compressed period of the 1950s–60s and made the massive, planet-scale impact of technologies visible, perhaps for the first time in human history.
The Doomed City
In their 1972 novel The Doomed City, the Soviet sci-fi writers Strugatsky brothers imagined a mysterious City created by an unknown superior race. People from different eras and countries were abruptly taken from their lives and brought into the City for an obscure purpose, which they called the Experiment. Left to their own devices, they attempt to build a functioning society. They naturally try different social systems. Yet even when guided by the most capable among them, the City descends into division, chaos, violence, and authoritarian rule.
In the background of the story, a strange demographic selection lingers. Those brought into the City from different eras are engineers, scientists, workers, soldiers, doctors, and administrators. They all seem to be people of practical skills, who know how to run the system. And yet the Experiment fails time after time… or does it?
Was the meaning of the Experiment to see whether a society can be built by technocrats? Or was it meant to test whether meaning-making—culture, arts, and philosophy—can grow out of the pure functionality of practical people?
The Strugatsky brothers (most known in the West for their Roadside Picnic, adapted into the movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979) were icons of the Soviet intelligentsia in the era of the triumph of science and space exploration in the 1950s–70s, when people believed apple trees would soon be planted on Mars. The Strugatsky brothers were regarded as authorities in the debate over “the techies versus the poets.”
For the Soviets, science and technology were the sole engine of social progress. Culture was regarded as a means of maintaining human resources for socialist construction. Even writers were called the “engineers of human souls.” The technocratic approach seemed to work remarkably well. The Soviets were the first in space: the faint beeps of Sputnik 1 thundered across the West in 1957. And yet, just like the Doomed City, the Soviet Union eventually collapsed. Ideology could not replace culture, especially as this ideology regarded people as “nuts and bolts” of the social machinery (“socialist construction”). Perhaps the Experiment—a society filled with technocrats—was an early reflection of the collapse of the USSR, envisioned by the Strugatsky brothers.
A similar debate unfolded in the West, sparked by C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures in 1959, which questioned the split between science and the humanities/arts (“literary intellectuals”). It resonated decades later in Neil Postman’s 1992 Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. As modernity reached its peak and the postwar world created space and demand for rational rebuilding, society sought to define the roles of science and the arts. With humans walking on the Moon and technological breakthroughs arriving one after another, science delivered extraordinary advances that boosted humankind’s wellbeing and ambitions. But what about art? What place did art and culture hold? Was it merely another “industry,” producing “human resources” for social progress—consumers for capitalism or builders of socialism? Or was it becoming a postmodern quest for authenticity, self-expression, and social fragmentation?
Marshall McLuhan also entered this conversation, arguing that in a society shaped by rapidly advancing technologies, artists served as early-warning systems because their perception remained acute while most people were numb to the environment. Therefore, when the environment is increasingly shaped by technologies, artistic play with the senses creates an antienvironment that helps society perceive what it would otherwise remain blind to.
Environmental studies are media studies
It is precisely this intersection of media, perception, and human environments transformed by technology that Jaqueline McLeod Rogers explores in Crises Then as Now, a study of how three influential mid-20th-century thinkers—Marshall McLuhan (media theorist), Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (urban planner), and György Kepes (artist and visual theorist)—responded to a set of crises that were emerging in their time and remain pressing today.
Along with rapid political transformation, the Cold War, the nuclear threat, and persistent social inequality, another crisis emerged in the postwar world: technologies overwhelmed and reorganized human life faster than people could understand or adapt to it. At the same time—and largely for the same reasons—humans and their technologies began damaging the environment at an unprecedented scale.
The study of media, and later media ecology, emerged to address this transformation, with McLuhan as one of its leading figures. Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, a McLuhan scholar and professor of communication with a focus on “space-making” and urbanism at the University of Winnipeg, shows how the urban planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and the visual theorist György Kepes responded, within their field, to the environmental crisis and the crisis of perception. She also traces how their personal and professional paths crossed with McLuhan’s. The three were connected, worked together at times, and each brought the others into different professional networks.
This perspective opens a new angle for understanding McLuhan, media, art, and environments. To deepen the interdisciplinarity, McLeod Rogers invited coauthors, Ellen Shoshkes and Charissa N. Terranova, who contributed chapters on Tyrwhitt and Kepes from within their respective fields.
While not agreeing on everything, McLuhan, Tyrwhitt, and Kepes, as McLeod Rogers writes, “did share his recognition that science and technologies were radically changing all we know and do, bringing challenges and opportunities; that the environment not inert and separate from humanity but sharing organic and vital principles, needed to support and reflect humanistic values; that publics needed to flourish under such advances; that citizens needed more scientific knowledge; and that the arts were epistemic agents and assets.”
Differences that illuminate
Through McLeod Rogers’ book, it is also insightful to explore the divergence between McLuhan and, for instance, architects and urban planners, to whom he was connected through Tyrwhitt.
McLuhan contrasted two modes of perception: visual space, shaped by literacy, in which vision creates cognitive focus while numbing the other senses, and acoustic space, innate to orality, in which the senses work together in the manner of hearing—simultaneously and from all directions, giving a holistic perception of one’s surroundings.
For McLuhan, Western civilization had a visual bias, with its linear and sequential perception that encouraged fragmentation, rationality, and categorization. In the meantime, electric media recreated the conditions of simultaneity, immersion, and multidirectional awareness that marked pre-literate, oral perception. With such sensory-cognitive conditioning, electric media disrupted the visual space of literacy and retrieved the acoustic space typical of orality—along with the features of oral culture, thus giving McLuhan the grounds to speak about “retribalization.”
This was not just an environmental crisis caused by new media but a crisis of perception, with far-reaching environmental and cultural consequences. In response, McLuhan called for training human perception to fit the new era (and culture) of acoustic space, or “aurality,” as McLeod Rogers calls it.
“Acoustic space,” created by electric media, is a notion of high abstraction—it describes a mode of perception, not a physical space of hearing. A typical difficulty in understanding McLuhan’s dichotomy of “visual vs. acoustic” is that it does not refer to their straightforward dictionary meanings. It represents a more complex dichotomy: “visual space/literacy/rationality vs. acoustic space/orality/relationality.”
In Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror, I translate this dichotomy as “detachment vs. immersion,” because vision, a frontally directed and “seclusive” (Ong) sense, fosters frontal and then inner focus, leading to environmental detachment, while “acoustic” was adopted by McLuhan to symbolize simultaneous, holistic, and spherical environmental awareness and immersion—just as humans perceived the world before literacy.
For example, it is not immediately clear why tele-vision creates acoustic space, as McLuhan argued with regard to electronic media. But if we talk about a mode of perception opposite to literacy, it becomes evident that the perception of television is holistic, resonant, inclusive, and immersive, producing spherical environmental awareness—especially once we accept another of McLuhan’s ideas: that media extend, or “outer,” human senses and that electronic media “outer” the entire central nervous system, placing our perception in a new, spherical, acoustic-like, but virtual, not physical, reality.
This theory was (and still is) not easy to grasp, especially for people who work professionally with “bricks and mortar,” such as architects and urban planners. How could they implement McLuhan’s call to train perception for the electronic environment of “aurality”? As Tyrwhitt wrote to McLuhan, “I have never commented on your structures of Visual Space versus other aspects of space. Of course you are right, but the only space architects can handle is physical space, which is basically visual space.” I believe such stories of intellectual misalignment between otherwise productive and mutually enriching collaborators help us understand McLuhan better.
Sense-making in crisis
Essentially, Crises Then as Now explores the intellectual atmosphere of the time when humankind faced its first media crisis. The aftermath of WWII, the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, space exploration, and the profound cultural impact of television—all of this happened in the historically compressed period of the 1950s–60s. The intensity and scale of technological changes turned this period into perhaps the first planetary-scale technological crisis, one that became visible to intellectuals and challenged them to mobilize the rest of society.
McLeod Rogers focuses on a response to this crisis suggested by Marshall McLuhan and largely shared by the circles of urbanists and visual artists linked with McLuhan through Tyrwhitt and Kepes. The response aimed, for a start, to make people recognize the role and effects of technologies. McLuhan suggested:
1) to recognize the alienating impact of technologies (specifically in the West due to the cognitive effects of the alphabet and printing),
2) to retrain and remodel the sensorium toward a more ecological mode fitting the new electronic environment with its “acoustic,” immersive characteristics.
Artists, with their focus on the senses, were the “antennae of the human race” (a phrase by Ezra Pound, popularized by McLuhan) and could serve as guides in such remodeling. McLuhan also had his own metaphor for this detecting function of artists: he compared them to the DEW line. The Distant Early Warning line was a network of radars in the Canadian Arctic designed to warn the Americans about approaching Soviet bombers—and McLuhan loved to use this metaphor for artists.
Another way to retrain the sensorium was to counter the print-driven, isolating focus on abstract conception, typical of the West, with the more ecological and holistic modes of perception associated with the East.
The revolution of perception is actually happening—but not in the way McLuhan proposed
At that time, those ideas were innovative and provocative. But now, in the era of tectonic digital reversal, some of them have begun to come to life naturally, although not in the way McLuhan meant. The revolution of perception has been accomplished not by artists or through retraining the sensorium to be attentive to media. What changed perception was the new medium itself: the digital device that enabled the reversal of text into texting.
Unlike the cognitive focus and environmental detachment typical of literacy, digital perception is immersive and holistic, just like McLuhan’s acoustic space retrieved by electronic and now digital media. It favors simultaneous and spherical environmental perception. So, this shift from alienating conception to immersive perception did happen. But has it made people attentive to media and their effects? Is the postliterate fish better aware of the water it swims in than the literate fish?
Holistic environmental perception does not seem to be a panacea for human alienation. On the contrary, digital immersion, however “acoustically” holistic, only exacerbates technological alienation and now even the social deprivation of users. This may call for a revision of the ideas aimed at environmental harmony, which emerged when mid-20th-century intellectuals recognized the crisis of authenticity caused by technologies.
Crisis then and now
Still, there is an important discovery made then and growing even more relevant now. It turned out that it’s not holistic perception but reactivating the natural sensorium that may serve not only to counter technological alienation but even to fight digital addiction (see Counter-digital resistance: the Awe Exercise to foster environmental Awereness).
The digital Doomed City, built by the techies, conducts the Experiment on all of us, testing our capacity to conceive sense-making anew—in conditions dominated by technologies as never before.
Will artists help with sense-making in the new technological environment? They should, as McLuhan suggested; the issue is that the new technological environment has also changed art itself tremendously. (I will speculate about it in the next post.) “What is the purpose of art in a brave new world dominated by science and technologies?” asks Kepes from the pages of McLeod Rogers’s Crises Then as Now. The question is still relevant, but the answer has become even trickier, as art has flipped from product to process and from seeking beauty to self-expression (see the next post).
Crises Then as Now traces the ideas that the first techno-environmentalists—media theorists, urban planners, visual artists—came up with then, when they faced the tech-induced crisis of authenticity. The book invites the reader to examine those ideas and see which of them might work now because, as McLeod Rogers writes, “only science enriched with humanistic values will support conscious life and planetary health.”
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
