Contrasting Plato and Mcluhan Regarding the Medium and Truth

Plato and McLuhan: Truth and the Medium

McLuhan does not directly address the idea of truth or reality but does state that by understanding the structure of various media forms, we can become more aware of how it shapes our thinking and our environment. McLuhan's idea of truth is to reveal the structure of media and thereby not succumb to its effects. He offers different ways in which we can attempt to unravel the structure of media. How does his approach contrast with Plato's method of knowing reality and Truth?

Plato's declaration in Phaedrus is basically that humans acquire knowledge through a recollection process. According to Plato, a person is born with an innate knowledge of the truth that is not acquired through learning or conditioning. When people recognize something as being true, it is due to this inherent concept within. They recall this "truth" when they are compelled by external forces. As Plato (32)[footnoteRef:1] describes it, we recognize reality by recollecting the things that our souls have once seen in the course of our journey as companions to a god. During this foray, our souls encountered the world in a heightened, more real state, and saw the true nature of things. Like the imprisoned individuals in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, we were taken outside of our two-dimensional world of shadows and shown the actual three-dimensional universe full of color and light. While there is a definite logic and reason applied to this mode of understanding, its premised on comparison to and evaluation of an ideal plane of existence we not only had access to, but memories of. [1: Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2002. Print.]

While the premise of inherent knowledge of the universe might not work well in the modern age, the analysis of how we experience the world and how our perception (or the mode by which we perceive something) warps "reality" is more timely than ever in this modern age of screens. McLuhan's focus is less metaphysical (does the world exist) and more epistemological (how do we know the world exists). If, as he says, the business of man is learning and knowing, then the "how" we learn or know something is crucial, especially in the this media saturated age. McLuhan's approach to media takes on a process of careful triangulation among its different forms. He uses the 'hybrid energy' of clashing media environments to demonstrate the specific qualities of each medium. This triangulation and comparison focuses on how do we know what we know and is this knowledge affected by the medium through which it is delivered? McLuhan attempts to identify the weaknesses, strengths, and dangers of the various mediums in order to understand "contours of our own extended beings in our technologies, seeking the principle of intelligibility in each of them"(7)[footnoteRef:2]. For example, he analyzes digital media and reframes it as translators of experience or metaphors. According to McLuhan, "all media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms"[footnoteRef:3] (85). In today's world, this is evident through the almost ceaseless translation of information into binary code and back again into some sort of representative presentation. [2: McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Ed. Terrence W. Gordon. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.] [3: McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Ed. Terrence W. Gordon. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.]

Content, as McLuhan, suggests is one medium being embedded within another. This basically means that in every medium, there is a hidden idea separate from the mode of conveying the content. What a person sees on TV might be an image of a juicy meat, but the hidden idea is basically to get the person to think about food and activate their taste buds to desire a juicy meat, which would distract them from what they are watching at that particular moment. More impressively, the viewer is "tricked" into forgetting his or her experience of sitting on the couch in front of a television and instead refocused on the idea of an ideal steak dinner, represented in a two dimensional screen. (This transportation is transformation is all the more skewed if one takes into consideration the production of commercials. For example, that blue cheese dressing being poured on a side salad, might actually be made of Elmer's glue because it "reads" more like dressing than dressing does on camera.) Perception plays a crucial role with regards to medium and truth. McLuhan deconstructs how the mode of information delivery affects both the perception of the deliverer and the perceiver. The question is whether the intellect of the perceiver is able to distill the truth or objective reality from the message. The reality of television is very seductive it fascinates and alters people's perception making them modify what they considered true. The advertisements that are placed on TV constantly alter the truth and change our beliefs. The ideas we hold dear have are changed and we start to view things differently. Because of TV, people have changed their beliefs, and they believe that what they see on TV is true and not a creation of advertisers. Our views of women have changed and we now judge women based on the women we see on TV. This alteration of reality is what embodies McLuhan's arguments, which embodies Plato's writings.

Ambivalence is the core of McLuhan's argument, which also appears in Phaedrus as skepticism regarding the utility of writing. Phaedrus and Socrates work to establish that a good speech and a bad speech is based on the form the speech takes. McLuhan argues that media acts as a translator or metaphor of experience. He explains that all media are active metaphors because of their power to translate different experiences into new forms, which augurs with what Plato was referring to when he said that speech is the ultimate determinant of what a person perceives. The relevance of his argument regarding translation and metaphors does support the notion about media implosion and expansion. By creating a single digital language that is flexible enough to describe countless number of experiences has allowed for the reduction of all human interactions into one media. TV has managed to implode and alter the reality of humans making them believe what they see and not what the once believed to be true. The metaphors we see on TV have led to people developing biases regarding the values they place on things, and women's bodies. All women's bodies are the same, but the reality has been modified and we now look at the perfect woman's body as been of a specific size and shape. This reality has been altered because of TV.