The Zoo that Explained the Message: A McLuhan Perspective

By Dallas Friesen

You suddenly become blinded by a row of airplane lights piercing your retina. The medium is the message. Words and images bombard you by flashing across television monitors at speeds that make comprehension unattainable. The medium is the message. Amplified music blares loudly enough to eliminate conversation with the person beside you. The medium is the message. People call it a worship experience, some call it audio-visual chaos, and others call it ZOO TV. It's a concert tour of arguably the most popular band in the world today--U2. ZOO TV an illustration of what Marshall McLuhan meant when he said, "The medium is the message."

For McLuhan, a media analyst, studying media was not about the content of a medium but the actual medium itself. Similarly, U2 in attempting to make a statement about Western culture through their live shows gives a practical demonstration of McLuhan's theory. The ZOO TV tour that ran through the early to mid-90's hit almost every major city in the world. The stage props--including multiple television monitors, old cars, and aircraft lights--produced the largest arena show in the world, topped only by the following U2 POPMART tour.

For the fan, the experience included an onslaught of images as thousands of still shots, words and video clips raced across hundreds of television monitors installed on the stage. The visual stimulus included, of course, the staging of the band, and the ever-changing lighting patterns. The result of this visual overload was a feeling of exhaustion from an inability to perceive everything thrown at the spectator, presumably the result U2 intended. The feeling of disarray is not from the content of the screens, but from being subjected to black boxes that control us on conscious and unconscious levels. This is what McLuhan meant by the medium being the message.

Satellite technology , video recorders, computers, and cameras orchestrated together in the U2 arena provided the source of images for the television monitors on stage. The video clips collided images of the past with those of the present. (U2's lead singer, Bono, carried a remote control to "watch what was on T.V."). McLuhan might clarify that the archive of images, shots of the audience, and the broadcast of real time T.V. are not significant; it's that these media are extensions of what our eyes would naturally see. The technology of ZOO TV allows fans to extend their vision to the past and the present simultaneously, without regard to geographical location. And that is the message.

McLuhan claimed in Understanding Media that, "The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message." The use of lights during a concert is the practical application of a medium without a message. Electric light allows us to see what would otherwise be unseen; it extends the range of our eyes just as television monitors connect us through satellites to any place on earth or the moon. The ZOO TV stage, equipped with hundreds of lights, allows the spectator to see what the naked eye could not accomplish on its own. At one point in the concert, lights typically used on airplanes for headlights are directed at the crowd, creating momentary blindness for the audience. As these bright airplane lights illuminate the arena, it becomes evident that electric light is a medium without a message.

The whole ZOO TV experience is not just about technology. It tells a story to listening ears. The beauty of the concert is that it is a dichotomy of high technology and primitive technology. As McLuhan would point out, the sound system is simply the extension of the ear that grants multitudes the ability to hear the story. The "content of any medium is always another medium." In practical terms, this means that the content of the microphone and the amplified sound system is the voice of the lead singer Bono. And the content of Bono's voice are the lyrics that make up the songs. Finally, the content of the songs is "an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal." The ZOO TV tour boils down to an amplified story told with a combination of music and visual effects--a primitive technology dating from the first storytellers chanting their tales in caves lit by fires.

The ZOO TV tour articulates an audio-visual commentary on modern culture by exploiting the verytechnology that produces the culture. U2, in creating the tour, looks past the content of what is on television and emulates the power of the television medium. The connection bbetween McLuhan's theories and the ZOO TV tour may not be perfect: U2 no doubt attempts to use the specific message of some visual images to communicate. However, the receiver will remember the presentation of the medium as the real message.