The TV Mosaic

Cloudy Skies

No man is wise at all hours. The idea that the low resolution of the standard TV image (720 x 480) prompts spontaneous fill-in and confers a magical enhancement of human consciousness, is among the most controversial and least persuasive ideas in Understanding Media. According to Philip Marchand, McLuhan had a Procrustean tendency to force a point:

[McLuhan] offered the hypothesis that the mosaic of light and dark spots that made up the television screen presented a low-definition image, which the viewer was forced to complete in his or her own head. (McLuhan insisted on this point so strongly that his colleagues began to joke that McLuhan owned a poor television set.) These pseudoscientific explanations were really attempts to substantiate in some way the insight Mumford had initially offered in Technics and Civilization — that the new civilization based on electricity was organic in character. —Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (p.123)

However, though McLuhan's thesis seems tendentious and wrong-headed, there can be no doubt that the soft-focus of the ghostly and fuzzy TV image robs pictorial ads of their slick hard-edged glamor and reveals them for shabby manipulative eye-cons, which may have been what McLuhan meant to say after all. Moreover, it is worth noting that the genius of men like Freud, Einstein, and McLuhan, wasn't always in the solutions they provided, but the questions they asked (and the original methods they developed to deal with these questions). They identified and tackled problems their predecessors had not begun to grasp.