McLuhan's "Number" and Code

Marshall McLuhan has some weird ideas. Let’s just get that out at the beginning. The idea that McLuhan’s brand of media theory is as much of a cultural touchstone as it is continues to baffle me (I mean no disrespect, but it’s some pretty off the wall stuff, at the very least in terms of its scope, both past and future). And yet, McLuhan’s theory remains astounding in terms of how much of the current media sphere he accurately predicts, as well as how applicable his theory remains, and has remained since he was an active theorist.

The point of the aforementioned text being that I couldn’t stop thinking about coding when reading his essay on “Number”.

McLuhan’s coding relevance begins in his discussion of Oswald Spengler on page 110 of Understanding Media (ironically, not exactly in his discussion of the computer as being composed of “yes” and “no” on the same page, for reasons that aren’t very neatly expressed here without going off into a tangent). To jump slightly ahead into a more meaty bit of the text, on 111 McLuhan writes of the electronic’s fragmentation of traditional Western ideas of “number”: >By imposing unvisualizable relationships that are the result of instant speed, electric technology dethrones the visual sense and restores us to the dominion of synesthesia, and the close interinvolvement of the other senses.

To relate this modern abstracting of the number back to coding, I believe that code (and the field of programming by extension) works much like McLuhan’s idea of abstract math: by, as Spengler seems to desire, reducing number to a matter of real-world referents, one misses the point entirely, and the same is true of code’s areferential qualities. Thus far, code only seems to mimic reality as much as we want it to: the bulk of programming is dictated in an abstract form, without a constant visual reminder of progress, no field maps outside of the language itself and a result, either working or wrong. Per last week’s lesson, we can code ourselves a house, but code in itself cannot recall a house; code (at least in p5.js), much like calculus and quantum mechanics, is a language of description alone, and its individual mechanics often cannot describe what exactly is going on without some non-code help.

However, Diana’s post helps illustrate a weird oxymoron inherent in McLuhan’s work: “as we begin to assess the total “effects” of media, we begin to see the whole picture, an assortment of perspectives – much like one would in a Cubist painting. The electric age gives us “the means of instant, total field-awareness” (69).” So, we are able to see all, but not exactly understand what it means? I certainly don’t have any answers to this question. But the parallel’s interesting, huh?