In my freshman seminar, we've been reading Marshall McLuhan's most famous book, Understanding Media. Ironically, this past week's reading assignments concerned chapters that covered modes of transportation: roads and paper routes (chapter 10); wheel, bicycle, and airplane (chapter 19); and motorcar (chapter 22).
McLuhan speaks, as most media scholars know, about the social consequences of these various "media." (His definition of a medium is a bit broad: it refers to any extension of the human body or, in the case of electric media, the central nervous system.) Societes organize themselves differently as they adapt to newer media. The old Roman roads were central to a specific mode of political organization; the airplane creates a different kind of city planning, etc. The car itself is without a doubt the most crucial invention of the 20th century; structuring cities around the automobile has had a profound impact on daily life in America. The scandal of the tearing down of the public transit system of Los Angeles by General Motors (alluded to in, of all movies, Who Framed Roger Rabbit) led to the city becoming the smog capital of the nation. As Ken Burns' documentary on New York City pointed out (with assistance from Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses), the hitching of the city's future to the automobile, and the building up of highways and gutting of whole neighborhoods (like those in the Bronx that were destroyed by the Cross Bronx Expressway) transformed the postwar landscape and in its own way contributed to the kind of bleak image New York had in the sevnties.
As you all know, all these systems basically were shut down when Sandy hit the Jersey shore and didn't really leave for about 48 or so hours. Many people lost power and/or heat; trees fell on cars and homes; airports were shut down (and many airlines canceled flights even when the airports re-opened). Even after the storm passed, fuel became a prized commodity; most gas stations were either drained of gas by panicked motorists or had been shut down because of a loss of electrical power. (You can't pump the gas if the pump has no electricity.) For the past two weeks, many citizens in the Northeast have been disconnected from the global village that elecrticity provides for them.
(Please note: I am not specifically talking about those who lost their homes, especially in the Rockaways. Nor am I referring to the lives that were taken by Sandy. Such losses are of a tragic proportion beyond the focus of my blog post.)
When circumstances like these arise, one can see the way that indeed our extensions of ourselves are really part of a central nervous system. Without these various media at our disposal -- car, airplane, etc. -- we become immobilized.
The mobile phone (McLuhan's chapter on the telephone was also on our list this week) did allow us to keep connections -- but only so long as one had power to use it. If you couldn't recharge your phone anywhere, you were off the grid completely when your battery died.
Obivously, a storm like Sandy generates new questions about the status of our infrastructure; in many ways the grids that we use -- electrical, road, water, natural gas, oil -- are several generations old. They were not meant to handle this much volume. Whatever specific energy sources we use, we need to fully rebuild the networks that transport these sources to us, or we will become stuck again the next hurricane that comes our way. But as we do this, let's think in the long-term about what are the social implications for these various extensions of ourselves.
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