Yes, Media Ecology is Technologically Deterministic

And that's perfectly fine.

Some sort of parlor game (from Indoor Games and Socials for Boys, 1912)

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that heaves, hefts, and hoists the principles of media ecology into the same loading dock as that of non-structuralist semiotics. Sorry this one’s a little late. I got a new job, and the hours are a little weird. You will forgive me.

I just realized that “technological determinism” has its own Wikipedia page. According to it,

Technological determinism is a reductionist theory in assuming that a society's technology progresses by following its own internal logic of efficiency, while determining the development of the social structure and cultural values.

That’s actually how they introduce the entire concept. The whole page is kind of a mess, it might be written be an LLM, and it should probably be deleted, but hey, there it is. It also is presented as a section under “Marxian economics,” and much of its writing seems poised to show that it is little more than the theory of “hyperglobalists” whose thoughts are clearly inferior to those of Marx. Of course, Karl Marx was a guy who thought that all of history is driven by economic relations, which seems, I dunno… a little reductionistic in its own right. But then again, check out the Wiki page for Marxism:

Marxism is a political philosophy^[1] and method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a dialectical materialist interpretation of historical development,^[2] known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict.

As you can see, it is a “political philosophy” instead of some mamby-pamby “theory.” And it doesn’t “assume” anything, either. Instead, it “uses a dialectical materialist interpretation.” And is it reductionist? Nah, get outta town. That word isn’t used anywhere on the page, and it’s not even used in the Wiki for economic determinism, which, for some reason, also exists. It is similarly noteworthy that the same charge of “reductionism” or being “reductive” is not made in any of the Wikis for Freudian/psychoanalytic theory, which is just as sexually deterministic as Marxism is economically determinist.

The Wikipedia page for “technological determinism” is dumb and it probably will be changed at some point. But at the very least, it demonstrates something I’ve noticed about media ecology, media studies, the philosophy of technology, and other related fields. The people who specialize in such areas are deeply concerned about being labeled “technological determinists” or “reductionists,” and thus the accusation is always made in a far more pronounced way than with other fields, even ones that are just as flagrantly reductive. To be labeled a technological determinist is a stain upon one’s reputation in a way that being an economic reductionist is not. And being called a “sexual” or “erotic” reductionist is a laughable thought; the person making the charge would only look silly.

Of course, the best-known and most enduring theories are typically reductionist. As John Durham Peters wrote in an essay¹ on the same subject, “A less single-minded Marx or Freud would not have been Marx or Freud.” The same could be said of Charles Darwin. Meanwhile, the guys who resist being reductive only wind up as footnotes in turgid academic pieces; they just don’t have a whole lot of punching power outside of the university. Niklas Luhmann, to give just one example, was successful in creating a wide-ranging theory of just about everything that concerns modernity, but there’s a reason he failed to spark a flame in the minds of the intelligent-but-not-credentialed. His stuff is just too complicated.

On some level, everyone kinda knows all of this. Yet still, there remains the question: why is “technological determinist” the great academic insult when, at the same time, so many distinct schools of thought within the humanities are themselves based on a single core observation to which the entirety of man’s affairs is shamelessly reduced? One reason is that the people being accused of technological determinism really hate being put inside that box. If you call Walter Ong or Marshall McLuhan technological determinists, their defenders will protest vehemently. The same could be said for Jacques Ellul, despite some of the all-encompassing claims he makes in The Technological Society (1954). It’s even true for basically secular thinkers and secular people like Lewis Mumford. When the critics strike the blow, the technological determinists don’t “no-sell” it. Instead, they writhe about on the floor, yelping and yowling in pain.

Perhaps they should learn something from the Neo-Darwinists. Whenever the New Age hippies, environmental activists, biosemioticians, Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) advocates, and other colorful characters accuse those guys of “reductionism,” they just shrug and say, “Yeah? Well, being reductive is what makes us right.” And that’s that. It’s like watching bullets bounce off of Superman’s bulbous chest. But the Neo-Darwinists proudly come from an entirely different background. They aren’t men of letters, they don’t belong to the liberal arts or humanities, and they have no problems with jettisoning thousands of years of accumulated wisdom if they feel that a chic new research paper gives better answers. Richard Dawkins once remarked that everything ever written concerning human nature prior to 1859 is worthless. Clearly, these people don’t care about making enemies.

The alleged technological determinists, however, aren’t in that position. They’re largely humanists of various backgrounds (Roman Catholic in the case of McLuhan and Ong, nonconformist protestant in the case of Ellul) and want to show people how to overcome the sway of technics. They don’t want people to submit. The blogger Clinton Ignatov recently wrote a lengthy post on McLuhan, denying that he was a technological determinist in any way, and it’s precisely because of his humanism and belief in the possibility for man’s spirit to prevail that he isn’t. Here’s a key passage:

The act of ordinary perception; the act by which each of us makes sense of the world, is a poetic act. I think this phrasing is far more elegant, and rich in potential, than the mechanistic term “constructed.” And the study of centuries of techniques of poetry, and sermon, and pedagogy, and exegesis—culminating in the techniques of modernist poetry—informed McLuhan’s techniques for most-gently shaking people up from their modern mechanized sleep. They’re comfortable in their rationalizations, their short histories, their group affiliations. And for loss of that, they’ll cling wildly to the next thing that comes along offering stability.

[…]

Among the techniques he demonstrated, thinking by analogy with great formality and precision was the most important. It was an art largely lost and discredited with scientific positivism. This is where he most gets into trouble: the analogies he perceives in history, which he offers as evidence for large systems in action beneath the threshold of conscious human awareness, are often artifice. They are poetic. He might stretch them to fit the proportions of the grand design he is painting.

But when it comes to perceiving complex systems—systems of non-linear causality which are irreducible to simple flow charts of cause and effects, poetry is the compression algorithm we need to think about them at all.

McLuhan’s goal was to expand our minds; the gaps in his thinking in his “cool” prose provide space for us to bloom. Space which eventually meets the outer world at some actionable interface not some fantasy catchment. The things he does mention: telephone lines, trade routes, satellites, etc. are the infrastructures around us which try, so hard, to remain behind the scenes. Today, as bezels recede behind our high definition touch screens, it is all the more important for those of us who understand technology to reveal what is hidden.

Ignatov, as some of you will already realize, knows pretty much everything about McLuhan that there is to know. He is way more educated on McLuhan than me. And accordingly, all of this is correct. He knows McLuhan’s underlying motivations extraordinarily well. But right off the bat, the problem I’m seeing in the denial is the acknowledgement that McLuhan himself used the “techniques” of poetry, sermon, pedagogy, and exegesis. These techniques, of course, belong to rhetoric, the most comprehensive academic subject that there was for about two thousand years. In Orality and Literacy (1983), Ong explains it like this:

In its Greek original, tékhnē rhētorikḕ, ‘speech art’ (commonly abridged to just rhētorikḕ) referred essentially to oral speaking, even though as a reflective, organized ‘art’ or science – for example, in Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric – rhetoric was and had to be a product of writing. Rhētorikḕ, or rhetoric, basically meant public speaking or oratory, which for centuries even in literate and typographic cultures remained unreflexively pretty much the paradigm of all discourse, including that of writing.

So even when we consider McLuhan’s approach, there is a McLuhan-ish explanation for what he’s doing and why it proves valuable, and it boils down to rhetoric, or tékhnē rhētorikḕ. In other words, it’s a flavor of technics; or τέχνη, if we wanna get fancy. And Ignatov, being a smart guy, will know that τέχνη and ποίησις (poíēsis, from where we get poetry/poesy) mean remarkably similar things, as Martin Heidegger famously pointed out. So even if we call McLuhan’s approach poetic, we’re still pretty much knee-deep in the world of techniques here.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with using certain techniques to liberate people from others, and there is absolutely something qualitatively different about the technics of the ancient, pre-print world compared to the technics of the electronic age (something McLuhan himself wouldn’t have been able to fully recognize in his time). In fact, I’ve specifically advocated for using arcane technologies to diminish the parasitic effects of modern ones in my much earlier blog post “The Techno-Expansivist Manifesto” (easily the best technology-related manifesto from the month of October, 2023). So if, for instance, you want to restore a sense of community from the atomizing effects of the digital age, you might want to consider harnessing the power of social rituals and the organization of human capital necessary to form clubs and societies like, y’know, the Freemasons, or whatever. That would help solve your problem of digitally-induced social isolation and allow you to put your hands on the steering wheel, so to speak. But let’s harbor no illusions about what you’re doing, here. On the one hand, your uniquely human spirit can prevail by recruiting certain tools to fight against others, while on the other, τέχνη still plays a starring role, even if it isn’t the newest and hottest variety.

There is a certain irony to the fact that McLuhan-inspired media ecology has become such a moralizing enterprise promulgated by humanists who insist upon the ultimate triumph of human agency (see Neil Postman, Ivan Illich, everyone on social media who complains about social media, et al.), especially when McLuhan presented himself as a totally secular, amoral figure. And when you consider McLuhan’s private Catholicism in contrast with his public persona, he does comes across as quite impressive, and it’s easy to see why he would inspire such people. In his private life — to the extent that such a thing still exists — he was a man of faith. But when he “descended into the maelstrom” and faced the public, he adopted the vernacular of the people and navigated his way around with them. This is a very Christlike gesture, of course. Yet the problem with such a descent is that the new environment into which one falls will always tincture the manner in which one’s message is received, even when one speaks it with the purest of intentions. McLuhan knew this very well, and he also knew that whatever his humanistic intentions, he was still leaving behind an approach for understanding the world that would surpass him. With the help of a slew of prior scholars like Albert Lord, Millman Parry, Eric Havelock, Harold Innis, et al., he created this approach, and it resembled a potent intellectual game, one which people would decide to take up and play for themselves. And this game, of course, relied upon a distinct perspective that treated technology as the engine of human development.

This game basically consisted of the following: you identify some social phenomenon or situation (new or old) and find a way to characterize it as a second-order effect of a hidden or taken-for-granted technological process or artifact. This process or artifact would typically take the form of an information medium like print, digital video, the radio, or plain ol’ literacy, but it could also include a technological device in general, which you would simply redefine as an information medium and thus part of the world of media. Sometimes the game would involve trying to find the most creative classification of “medium” that you could get away with, expanding “media” far beyond what people would have imagined. (In fact, in at least one case I can think of, the “media” are not technological at all but rather simply parts of the natural environment, like the sky and the sea; I reviewed it here). But for the most part, media just means technology, and that’s what everyone’s really talking about. Finally, in this game, you don’t cite McLuhan if you want to be taken seriously by the tenured professors — though if you must, you should do so with heavy qualifications and apologetics. If you don’t care about being taken seriously as a scholarly mind, however, you can cite him all you want, as many bloggers and editorialists do. And that’s about it. Now, when we reduce this game to its bare essentials, it sounds so silly, quaint, and formulaic… but then again, it has actually led to some great scholarship, like Brian Stock’s Implications of Literacy (1983), to name just one example off the top of my head.

The problem with this game, of course, is that it was and remains too caught up in the world of academia, and no one in that world can play it with McLuhan’s sense of playfulness. McLuhan, as everyone recognizes, said all sorts of crazy things — crazy to the point where it feels like if you try to argue against him, then you’re turning into the butt of some joke that you’re too dense to understand. But at the same time, I’ve found that if you talk to enough McLuhaniacs, McLuhanatics, McLuhantards, McLuhantoids, and McLuhany Toons, you discover that for the most part, they genuinely do believe in most of the principles he laid out (e.g. “hot” and “cool” media, the emphasis on the phonetic alphabet as opposed to literacy in general, his rather rigid late-career model of tetrads) and use them as the foundation of their own public and private speculations. So perhaps it’s fair to say that we should take McLuhan “seriously, but not literally,” as today’s popular saying goes.

All the same, however, media ecology extends far beyond McLuhan, and although people typically find themselves incapable of playing the game well, it is still basically a game. McLuhan was and is the biggest name associated with it, but he certainly didn’t invent it, and indeed it moved beyond him, finding new purchase outside the anglosphere, passing through such figures as Gilbert Simondon, Friedrich Kittler, and Bernard Stiegler. All those guys, not coincidentally, are associated with French post-structuralism — another sort of game, or assortment of games. But the beauty of the game of media ecology is that unlike, say, Derridean deconstruction, you actually have to say things that could possibly be wrong. You can’t be a coward, in other words. You’re making statements that people will think about and even ask to themselves, “Is that true?” and you’d better be comfortable with that. The gonzo journalist Tom Wolfe once posed the question about McLuhan, “What If He's Right?” No one who “got” Derrida ever asked that question about him, because they understood that there wasn’t too much that was actually being said.

So, when you compare media ecology to some of the other intellectual parlor games, there is a bit more at stake. If you’re outside the establishment, you can throw more things at the wall and see what sticks. If you’re inside of it, you’ve gotta be a bit less playful. But the main thing you have to do is take a technologically deterministic approach, stick with it, and with that limitation you’ve imposed upon yourself, you are now free to razzle and dazzle the world with your style, wit, lateral thinking, resourcefulness, and erudition, and there’s also the off-chance that you might actually be right once in a while. You might be a Christian humanist in your private life, or you might be a Hindu nationalist. Who knows. But for God’s sake, man, we’re playing a game here, and games are to be taken seriously. Not everything is about you.

And if you’re not yet fully convinced and still want to protest on behalf of the flexibility of media ecology, media studies, the philosophy of technology, and so on, then let me try to make one last point before I go. Man came into this world as a technological being, and he will leave this world in much the same fashion. He evolved with crude axes firmly in his hand and the flames of the hearth cooking his meat. Yes, he had a penis and some testicles, and yes, he would take private possessions for himself and covet his neighbor’s goods, but technology was always at least one guiding force that would determine the contours through which his libido and his lust for wealth might find their expression. And if we’re being real here, it was probably the most important one. There is thus no shame in putting on the “techno-determinist” cap, playing that role, and making some astute connections. You have plenty of solid ground upon which to stand. And when we want to discover “the real you” and peel back the layers of the onion, then we may somehow, someday find a beautiful soul that believes ultimately in man’s freedom. But no one will know that beautiful soul better than your dog, maybe your spouse, and almost certainly your grandma. A small few will piece it together from tertiary sources. The others will judge you only by what you leave behind. If you want to play this game, then you can partake in its regal dignity, but you’d best be sure to play it well. No crying allowed.

edit 8/5/26: some stylistic fixes, including a new sentence thrown into the fifth-to-last paragraph about whether or not you choose to be taken seriously when playing the game of media ecology

1. It is “‘You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong’: On Technological Determinism” from the Representations journal, no. 140 (2017).