Respect

It is difficult to honor our modern communication tools that began as war clubs for those seeking supremacy and power for the survival of the fittest. Cyberspace is replacing the pen in hand that was mightier than the sword. Society, thinking itself civilized, has assimilated the television set and the World Wide Web into a different war played out on the drum of advertising.

At the speed of light, technology abuses the human in overt and convert ways, via subliminal messages that shoot like poison arrows into the subconscious mind and body. These brainwashing techniques form scars and tattoo images that change the molecular status of the mind and body, both personally and universally. Where once this human race spoke to one another in the making of history, it now clones ideas to separate and distance interactive community.

The natural humans in the cave rose and slept with the cycles of the sun moving across the horizon, grunted simple sounds and spoke to their neighbors over the hill by drumming on a hollow log. They made paints from Nature’s storehouse, coloring their bodies against swarming flies and the heat of the sun. The Indigenous humans painted upon leather skins, rocks and abode walls to invoke the blessings of forces beyond their control, that they did not comprehend. Cryptic smoke signals spoke in secret terms to traveling warriors and lookouts atop the highest hill. These were tools of evolution and sometimes tools of war, but on a small scale they seemed to balance the place of the people in the natural order of things. Recent transitions to the modern way of life have changed this scene entirely, and a different consciousness has crept past the sentries.

"The Canadian government has been pushing the native communities to accept free satellite dishes. Fifteen of the twenty-six villages had recently consented. The women had noticed startling and disturbing changes in those places." - Franke Wilmer.

During the 1990’s, Cindy Gilday, communications Coordinator for the Dene Tribe told one interviewer that the community was not getting a chance to deal with their own problems on TV. "There’s only one hour of local programs in the entire NWT, and only rarely do we see an Indian or Inuit face, even though we’re the majority population here. Instead, all the Indian people are sitting in their log houses alongside these frozen lakes with the dog teams tied up outside and the dried fish hanging on the lines and they’re watching a bunch of white people in Dallas drinking martinis around their swimming pools and plotting to destroy each other, steal from each other."

The women all felt that TV was glamorizing behaviors and values which are poisonous to life in the north. "Our traditions have a lot to do with survival here," one woman said. "Cooperation and sharing and non-materialism are the only ways people can live here and TV is in opposition to those. Worst of all, the storytelling has stopped cold. Storytelling used to be the main activity at night; all the kids sitting around the old people. We loved those stories and they taught us how to live here. But more than that they conveyed trust and love and admiration between the young and the old. The people were windows into the past -- that way we could see who we are as Indians. It was how the culture was passed on. We used to honor our old people but that’s all going now. The generations are all sitting together now, silently watching television. And on TV it seems like being young is all that matters and that the old have nothing to say" (Wilmer 122-3) "Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex" (McLuhan & Zingrone 149).

Marshall McLuhan wrote that the Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting, like robots, carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete detachment. The electric speed has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree for outside groups, and added are the Indigenous peoples, whose history emerges from an oral community and not a technological one. A majority of Anishanabe are intensely involved in the progress of the mechanical age, holding on to their refrigerators and the Eagle feather in balanced fashion, moving ahead while seeking lost identity in their culture, and struggling to keep a culture relevant and vibrant in the whirlwind of change.

McLuhan pointed out that while the aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjuct of electric technology, there is in every culture and every age a favorite model of perception and knowledge that is inclined to prescribe for everybody and everything (50) . The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. The indigenous peoples move into treaty processes with faltering agreement. Government uses television and web sites to evoke a message, while the public remains ill-informed of the impending changes.

For Marshall McLuhan the medium is the message. For him the content of speech is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal. Quoting Shakespeare, an oral man whose writings have become time-biased, McLuhan expands the study of the extensions of man. (151-2) It is interesting that, unlike McLuhan, Shakespeare refused to publish his work while he was alive. Perhaps McLuhan spoke to us via Shakespeare, hinting written secrets that were otherwise censored at the time. Perhaps, as in his selective television appearances, McLuhan’s oral communications were not as skilled and politically striking as the humour that came from him in the extension of his mighty pen.

In most oral societies, the sound surrounds and moves the whole human system by the enthusiasm and intelligence of the leaders. Action follows sound and habit, rule and law emerge from the wisdom of the elders in a time-biased communication. As Innis noted in The Bias of Communication, the oral tradition in Palestine and Greece implied emphasis on continuity (105). It created standards, manners and mores that were the soul of social organization attempting to perpetuate itself. The language was the physiological base of oral traditions. Education involved training and the cultivating of memory, and a bard was the carrier of traditions through poetry. The author’s work was not changed to any degree. The five senses worked together, balancing self and stimulating learning, when communication by the ear assumes a reliance on time. Spoken poetry leads back to the basic reality of time. It is possible these ancient arts will be lost with the emphasis placed on electrified skills.

Finally, used with respect, television and the World Wide Web are tools used for media communication and entertainment, not as icons of worship. As we honor Marshall McLuhan, the humour, cheekiness and trickster-like atmosphere in the classroom encourages learning and human interaction that enhances media study. We are also encouraged to write in scholarly fashion - we are asked to be scientific, to study the fragmented and the insignificant - to give assurance to our precision and our concentration.

WORKS CITED