Infrastructural media and discrimination: McLuhan’s method as an ethic of understanding

Abstract

In the field of media studies, Marshall McLuhan has often been celebrated as either a prognosticator of media development and social change or maligned as an interesting but otherwise inconsistent theoretician lacking rigour. However, wherever one falls within this spectrum McLuhan did have practical ideas that can provide insight into contemporary digital environments. This claim itself is unremarkable; however, perhaps more controversial a claim is that he also provides resources for a critical sensibility regarding racial discrimination and social justice. My goals for supporting this contention are threefold: first, I argue that McLuhan’s work might be constructively framed by what I call an ethic of understanding, which both responds to a common critique of McLuhan’s work as moral-neutral but also allows researchers to utilize his keen insights for revealing both overt and tacit modes of discrimination. Second, I unpack McLuhan’s use of the term media to demonstrate how common usage (largely limited to communication technologies) constrains our ability to identify vital connections among other forms of racial discrimination such as infrastructure and urban planning, which are also forms of media as conceptualized by McLuhan. Finally, I argue that to treat infrastructure media as distinct from and unrelated to contemporary digital platforms impedes our awareness of how current discriminatory behaviours are merely extensions of long-existing ideologies and institutional practices of coordinated (and often intentional) racial discrimination.