I used to believe that technology is neutral, that the way we use it is what matters. But Marshall McLuhan argues the complete opposite. He says that Media, which he broadly defines as any kind of technology (any extension of our bodies, from sleds to smartphones), defines our understanding of the world. Instead of us using the technology, we become situated within it. In McLuhan’s view, we focus too much by what a certain technology is used for, or its content. This distracts us from the more comprehensive effect it has on our psyche and values.
Indeed, I could relate perfectly with a friend who spoke of the “Ctrl+Z” syndrome: we’ve become so accustomed to this shortcut for reverting actions on our laptop that we find ourselves pressing these imaginary keys in our minds when we make a minor mistake in real life.
If so, I thought, are nuclear weapons a medium? And what is their “message”?
I’ve come to understand that nuclear weapons are both an extreme embodiment and horrific reinforcer of the “electronic age,” as McLuhan puts it. In the electronic age, in contrast to the preceding machine age, things are connected electronically, enabling us to ignore physical limits like space and time. We can now communicate with people from the other side of the globe in real time, and batch process data in an instant, be it five sets or one million sets of data. In his Understanding Media, McLuhan devotes a chapter to weapons, where he says: “The electric techniques cannot be used aggressively except to end all life at once, like the turning off of a light.”
The atomic bomb does exactly that. With a push of a button, it instantly kills tens of thousands of people with its massive heat energy. As one article aptly put it, people were “vaporized.” In Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago, those at the epicenter just vanished, leaving only a shadow, if anything. And many of those who miraculously managed to maintain their physical form found themselves transformed to an unrecognizable state.
Nagatoshi Nishimura, who worked at a military factory a few kilometers from the epicenter in Nagasaki, recalls how he met a fellow student worker right after the blast. The female student was on her feet, but her clothes had been burnt off and the skin was dangling from her arms and legs. As he guided her to shelter, she mentioned her embarrassment for being in such a terrible state. More than 50 years later, he finally found the courage to record his experience as paintings. For one work he painted two versions of the student; one before the bombing, against a serene blue background, and one after.
Many atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha) were themselves seriously injured, or witnessed severely injured people. They recall rivers filled with corpses of those who had gathered there, frantic for water. They recall finding the carbonized bodies of their beloved friends and family, or having to cremate them with their own hands. And then there has been the long-lasting effects of radioactivity. Hibakusha have spent their lives battling or in fear of cancer.
In a sense, this brutality represents the violent application of an electronic mentality to the physical world, including but not limited to the human body (needless to say, all living things at the epicenter were instantly destroyed). It is the ultimate form of treating people like instantly deletable pixels.
Ai Tomiki 