The Porcine Press Club

A critique of the theory of Marshall McLuhan in relation to the American dollar

 

Gonzalo:When every grief is entertain’d that’s offer’d, Comes to th’ entertainer -

Sebastian:A dollar.

Gonzalo:Dolour comes to him, indeed: you have spoken truer than you purpos’d.

 

 

The effect that the American dollar has on society can be drawn back to McLuhan’s study of mediums and medias in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. By simultaneously applying the tetrad of media effects (McLuhan & McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science, 1988), a study of the historical to present relationship that the American dollar has with society can be observed.

The American dollar is far more then a mere token of currency used to trade goods and services. It has been transformed, through its medium, as a prime representation of the existing globalised world, and through that, the unprecedented influence America has over popular culture and the way the medium of the dollar shapes the psyche of society.

The phrase “the medium is the message” is one that McLuhan is most well known for. McLuhan argues that the articulation of culture is not through the contents of a message, but through which medium it is being transmitted from (McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964). Additionally, McLuhan observes that the effect that mediums have on society reshapes it based on a symbiotic exchange of“extensions” and “amputations” (McLuhan, 1964).

In 1729, Benjamin Franklin published a paper, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of Paper Currency (Department of American Studies, University of Groningen, 2003). In it, Franklin expounds the many virtues of converting to paper currency, from coins of gold and silver, which includes the convenient ability to mass-produce it quickly and hence, plentifully. The rationale behind this is that by being able to produce a large amount of paper currency, America will be able to employ, retain and maximize the skills of its local artisans and increase domestic trade:

“And since a Plentiful Currency will be so great a Cause of advancing this Province in Trade and Riches”(Department of American Studies, University of Groningen, 2003)

Applying McLuhan’s theory to the early beginnings of the American dollar, one could conclude that the message communicated through notes of paper currency is, for one to succeed in enterprise, one has to engage in protectionism and be able to offer services on a mass-produced scale that provides instant gratification.

In contemporary culture, mass-produced goods and instant services are one of the identifiable traits of American and Americanized societies. Terms such as “Coca-Colonization” (Wagnleitner, 1994) and “McDonaldization” (Ritzer, 1993) portray the values America is known for, and this supports the theory that cultural shaping occurs through society’s interpretation of a medium’s message (McLuhan, 1964).

The “extension” of human productivity through the exchange of services for money “amputates” the ability of an individual to take personal pride in the quality of the service offered. Instead, there is a biased focus on the quantitative over the qualitative; value of skills is pegged against the amount of dollars earned and exchanged from it.

For instance, big productions in media, and even government bodies, boast of how worthy they are by disclosing and at times featuring the budget of their projects publicly. Occupations dealing directly with money such as traders, brokers and bankers receive much higher salaries compared to occupations related directly to human interest and services such as teachers and counselors (Olsaretti, 2004).

Additionally, the medium of the dollar encourages an engagement of the senses. For example, the Spaghetti Western movie entitled A Fistful of Dollars (Leone, 1964) draws the image of holding onto an actual object physically. This connotes the idea that money is part of physical reality, and not simply a representation of value. It is with this imagery of “the character of the medium that is its potency”  (Federman, 2004) that causes a belief in society that the attainability of physical possessions is “within grasp” through the acquiring and exchange of dollars.

American cliché phrases such as “Put your money where your mouth is”,  “Money hungry” and “Money burns a hole in his pocket” reaffirms the notion that money and human senses are relational to one another. Hence, the “result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves” (McLuhan, 1964) creates a society that solidifies the mystique of the value of the dollar as a physical reality crucial to human life and expression.

However, the two dimensional piece of crisp paper that is the medium by which is the American dollar does not ‘fulfill’ society. Rather, it ‘compresses’ it. With every identical dollar, save for its individual production serial number, the message fostered to society is that the power of mechanical machinery to produce exact,generic clones triumphs over the imperfect, unique, production of physical human labor.

This message is especially crucial in shaping a society that is pre-disposed to the belief that more money equates to a more complete life (Diener & Suh, 2000), giving rise to both Industrial Revolutions which saw a transfer of production from small, family-based artisans to large-scale factories and faceless corporations. Therefore, culture is transformed through the ‘compression’ of human skills in favor of the replication by machinery, in relation to the message sent out by the medium of the dollar.

Consequently, the medium of the dollar is also responsible for its ‘disposable’ characteristics. Due to its generic form, society has not fostered deep enough a relationship deep with the dollar to treat it with the respect reserved for objects that are irreproducible and one of a kind (Mohr, 1985). On top of that, the dollar’s easily produced medium finds common ground with all classes of society to the extend that it serves as a form of political expression.

In the music video,Blue Magic (Jay-Z, 2007) of hip-hop impresario Jay-Z, reams of five hundred euro notes replaced American dollars atypical to American rap and hip-hop music videos. The video, inspired by the movie American Gangster (Scott, 2007) about the trappings of the American Dream (Travers, 2007), was shot in New York City and featured euro notes four times over the four minute long footage.

What is being implied by replacing the dollar with euro notes is that the dollar is unworthy compared to the euro (CBS, 2008). This political statement in popular culture is a backlash to the current downturn of the American economy amidst soaring oil prices and the war in Iraq. Through the message of the medium, Americans are nurtured to regard one of the representations of an independent United States of America (Davies, 2002) and by “extension”, American values and lives, as easily replaceable and unreliable.

Is the medium the message?

Applying the questions posed by McLuhan’s tetrad of media effects, the medium of the dollar enhances social interaction by appealing to human senses. The convenience of its availability and penetration into acquiring daily necessities means that the medium is exchanged through many individuals.

Paradoxically, the medium also limits social interaction by making individuality obsolete. This is due to the medium’s ability to be reproduced indistinctly through machinery, causing society, though the relationship of “extension” and “amputation”, to be alienated.

The medium retrieves the idea of democracy through its consistently uniformed copies. This pushes society to explore the innovation of machinery to ensure each individual receives exactly what the other possesses in goods. At the same time, the liberalized amount of the medium is portrayed as a sinful desire working against humankind in the phrase, “Money is the root of all evil”.

When pushed to extremes, the medium flips into a symbolic denomination through the exchange of virtual money. Furthermore, the medium is converted and used to purchase virtual possessions, financing a virtual economy (Ruff, 2008). Therefore, although the medium demonstrated its influence in shaping culture, it is not bound by its physical characteristics.

Hence, although it makes a fine argument to assume that the medium is the message, societies have the ability to transfer the meaning of a medium into another medium without cannibalizing the context of it. That said, McLuhan did stress that the message is “massaged” slowly over time (McLuhan & Quentin, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, 1967).

To conclude, the theory that the medium is the message is viable if each progression of culture is wrapped around the ideology of the relationship society holds with a medium. McLuhan foresaw the reliance society had on media and that became the basis of his studies.

However, society has a tendency to rebel against existing cultural norms and a rejection of mediums does not mean the message is lost. Society has a capability to think beyond their immediate environment and the receptors of which makes up culture. Hence, although mediums do influence culture in a large way, it is but one of many elements within society that does.

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