Cell Phone Mania: McLuhan Revisited in the Digital Age

Hmmm, are we closing in on the day when the cell phone fulfills McLuhan’s prophecy?

According to the International Telecommunications Union, the number of cell phones will exceed the world population in 2014. That means 7.3 billion active cell phones. Let’s put that in figures for dramatic effect – 7,3000,000,000.

This does not mean that every person will have a cell phone or even that cell phone service will exist everywhere. What is driving this statistic is the number of users who own multiple devices.

The same article that quotes the above figures notes that there are more than a hundred countries in the world where the number of cell phones already exceeds the population. Apparently, Asia – in particular, China – is the cell phone mecca. Smartphone manufacturers are salivating to tap its potential.

The United States is not far behind: 91% of American adults have a cell phone, 56% have a smartphone, and 34% have a tablet computer.

In short, cell phone mania is sweeping the world and shows no sign of slowing down. There is no shortage of cell phones to choose from with over 80 brands in the market.

Fifty years ago, Canadian Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” in his landmark book Understanding

Media: The Extensions of Man. The essence of that now famous phrase is that the form of the medium embeds itself in the message and influences how the message is received.

The digital age had not yet arrived when McLuhan was mapping the subtleties of media and its impact. But it seems to me that the principles he put forth are readily transferable. More than 30 years after McLuhan’s death, that phrase resonates more profoundly than ever before.

A face to face conversation and a cell phone conversation can evoke entirely different responses even if the words used are identical. As our message is squeezed into that electronic device, transmitted through space, received and processed by another electronic device, it seems to get remixed in the translation.

I can’t help but wonder what the impact of the medium on the message will be on that day when the number of cell phones exceeds the number of cell phone users worldwide. Will we have reached the point where themedium becomes more influential than the message?

Yes, I know I’m straying into treacherous philosophical territory here. But I believe that McLuhan’s theory is scalable and may just reach its full realization on the day we cross that threshold.

The medium is the message was a metaphor in its own time for the fact that we had created an organism – the media in all its incarnations – which we could not entirely control. On that landmark day in 2014, the metaphor will be reborn in an entirely new dimension. McLuhan will be smiling down on us from above when that happens.

~ Michael Robert Dyet is the author of “Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel” – double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com or the novel online companion at www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog .

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