Hu Yong: When McLuhan drove on Tesla: a smart car as a medium

How cars die, or become "art forms"

On June 22, 1902, the New York Times published an article titled "Automobiles, the New Hot Spot of Urban Consumption." At that time, the automobile was just becoming popular in the United States, and in the field of commercial vehicles, electric vehicles occupied an absolute dominance. At that time, steam-powered cars and fuel vehicles coexisted.

But the upward momentum of electric vehicles did not last long, and it was subverted by Henry Ford's Model T. The internal combustion engine is not difficult to overcome the battery, and the decisive factor is the scale effect brought about by the innovation of production methods and the lower cost of fuel. According to the New York Times, the rise of the internal combustion engine car is also due to two external reasons: the gradual formation of the automobile production circle with the Great Lakes region as the manufacturing center, and the surge in demand for connections between rural and urban areas, which are precisely where railways cannot be extended and less durable electric and steam cars cannot reach.

Since then, the car has been mentally insulated from electricity, but has maintained physical contact in some details, that is, the combination of spark plugs and internal combustion engines. Electric cars can rely on batteries to drive the wheels, but how do steam engines and internal combustion engines get the original driving force? The steam engine car relies on manual water continuously on the way, and the internal combustion engine relies on the electric spark generated by the spark plug to ignite the air in the gas cylinder. As McLuhan put it, the power of electricity, a hybrid of the "biological" form and the mechanical form, is unprecedented.

Because it is a "hybrid", compared with the more purely electrified product, television, McLuhan does not think that the automobile belongs to the product of the electric age, it is more like the ultimate demonstration of Gutenberg technology, the swan of the mechanical age. McLuhan imagined before his death that there must be a new era of electronics to replace the car. Due to the limitations of the times, he did not outline what such an electronic thing really was.

Today, Musk and many participants in the new car-making movement have given the answer.

The new car-making movement we are talking about here is the destruction of the traditional automobile industry that fell from FORD by ICT technology, which includes all these links of research and development, production, sales, and service. The historical car-making movement has gone through three stages: the first stage is the 30 years between Carl Benz's invention of the first internal combustion engine car and the old Ford's application of the assembly line to the production of the T-car; the second stage is the 40 years that the Ford automobile assembly line has dominated the world; the third stage is the years when the lean production represented by Toyota has transformed the assembly line concept. Today, we are entering the fourth stage – a change in the concept of the car and the structure of the car, which in turn brings about a change in the overall value chain, which can be called the "smart car" stage. At this stage, the car that appears as a medium will inevitably die, but will regenerate in the form of new content of intelligent algorithmic systems.

Regarding the demise of the automobile, McLuhan once left a clear statement that "television makes the car obsolete". At the same time, he also wrote such strongly prophetic statements as "the electric revolution of technology is about to make drivers abandon cars and return us to the value scale of Ambudang cars" and "the future of automobiles will not belong to the field of transportation".

In order to understand McLuhan's often difficult prophetic words, I searched the vast amount of information left behind mcLuhan's body. As a result, it was surprising that in his 1975 lecture at Georgia State University, he found that the "patron saint of the digital age" (Wired) actually had a complete account of how television made cars obsolete:

The graphics of the car create a service background, i.e. messages, or social effects. Cars need an environment of highways, factories, and oil companies that are actually both the medium and message of the car. If television has already started bringing things out into the home, it could well be a factor in overturning the car. When a new service revolves around an old service, the old service becomes an art form. ...... When our electronic environment revolves around the old hardware of the car, it also tends to be an art form.

Let's take a closer look:

First, for McLuhan, the car is the old medium and television is the new medium because the car is threatened as an extreme form of privacy. In the process of conquering nature, americans regarded the outdoors as an enemy. They are vigilant about nature when they travel and when they need it. When television appeared, circuit signals could easily bring the world outside the home indoors, posing a huge threat to highways and cars that acted as extended feet.

A TV, a phone line, and a credit card can allow people to complete shopping at home without having to drive to a large warehouse-style supermarket more than a dozen kilometers away. The function of the car can be replaced by television, and there will be no more car mania of the early 20th century, which is what McLuhan said: "The car has lost its price in people's minds." But the car didn't really disappear overnight, the essence was the concession of importance. As we say of "consumer society," we refer more to the social landscape created by television media than to the automobile as the highest symbol of industrial society as a whole, as was the case in the first 20th century.

McLuhan once said that he did not want to explain the "medium as information" too much, because this sentence is not clear in two words. In the case of cars, for example, cars are not messages, but messages refer to the results of cars, that is, the environment of roads, factories, and oil companies. Once the environment is pulled away, the car loses its meaning. In other words, the car is the result of a particular environment, and the environment is the message. McLuhan boldly proposed that "it is the environment, not the technology, that makes people change." From this, we can deduce that innovation is not a technical or product-level thing, but refers to a set of "hidden service environments".

"Environment" has another expression in McLuhan's case, the structural framework, "which changes in tandem with the new technology, not just the frame." Still taking the car and tv as an example, the structural framework behind the car and the structural framework behind the TV are completely different. Influencing the existence of cars are urban and rural models, physical store shopping models, road models and energy models. What affects television is the electronic communication network and the content production mechanism. The former is more focused on the extension of human organs, while the latter is more focused on the extension of the nerve center.

When the structural framework of television is more decisive for human behavior, the structural framework of the car will slowly become obsolete until it is completely replaced. The car's function as an extension of the feet will be reduced, such as speed is not so important, cylinder explosive power is not so important, as long as it can make us "step into the car".

The car as a means of transportation no longer exists, and McLuhan believes it will make a comeback in the entertainment industry, just as the car played an important role in Hollywood movies. In short, the future of the automobile will not be in the field of transportation, but will become an "art form".

It must be mentioned here that the prophet McLuhan may be wrong about the future of the automobile. At least he did not follow his own "four laws of the medium" to deduce that the transportation function of the car can be "restored" by the new medium. And this "recovery" has already happened, which is reflected in smart cars.

How are smart cars a new species?

The deep combination of ICT technology and automobiles has made the current new car-making movement clear from the previous three stages. The automobile has moved from "hybrid" products to "pure electrification", which is a reversal process from the "hot medium" to the "cold medium" from the perspective of media theory. McLuhan proposed the "Four Laws of The Medium", namely "lifting", "discarding", "restoring", and "reversing". These four stages can be expressed as: what technology or medium makes amplified and improved; what makes it obsolete; what has been abolished returns; and what is reversed when pushed to the limit.

We believe that smart cars enhance the virtual capabilities of mobile terminals to reality, abandon the traditional sales and service model, restore the transportation and travel functions of cars, and reverse a new personal digital space. In this process, users ("audience" is not used here, but is based on the current network environment) always play the role of participants. And the higher the user engagement, the colder the medium.

If the car as a hot medium, user participation is extremely low, the reason is more that the car created by mechanical technology is a product that "shows" the user, and the intelligent car created by information technology is a product that "encapsulates" the user. From "display" to "packaging", smart cars have become a new species and new medium that is completely different from cars.

"Display" is everywhere in the body of the car with the combustion engine, the air conditioning button, the radio volume adjustment button, the front seat heating, the one-button start, and the electrochromized chrome, starry sky top and so on, which are advertised by high-end model manufacturers. These are like rows of assembly lines, which are displayed by manufacturers in front of users. Users only need to extend their senses according to their own needs. The biggest or most majestic display of an internal combustion engine car is the speed that accompanies the roar of the engine. In the indicators given by all car dealers, this speed is often manifested as 0-100 km/h.

The shorter the time, the stronger the sense of engine superiority, which is reflected in the tearing of the city air by the chic roar of the engine, and in the far behind of the vehicles of the same company. Mechanical speed comes from the workmanship inside the combustion engine, which is done in a closed state, reflecting the competitive spirit that symbolizes infinite games.

As a result, motorsport has become a noble sport in the era of internal combustion engine automobiles, which can better highlight the spirit of large-scale industry while testing the engines of manufacturers.

McLuhan believed that electrical speed would replace mechanical speed. For smart cars, the power from the new battery can completely bring out the speed of the Ford GT40 in the Battle of Le Mans in the 1960s. The GT40's zero-hundred-hundred-plus acceleration is within 4 seconds, which has almost become an indicator of engine excellence for nearly half a century, but for smart cars, it can be easily achieved.

However, if that were the case, the smart car would only be electrified in power. For smart cars, there is also a kind of bit speed that can be called bit speed instead of mechanical speed. It not only needs electricity as an energy source, but also an operating system that constantly digitizes all kinds of information. The implementation of bit speeds requires two conditions: external communication infrastructure and internal algorithms. External facilities are in a relatively stable state and are mostly related to the public environment. The algorithm is closely related to the user.

Algorithms are something McLuhan would never have thought of, and they can dominate not only the user experience, but also the safety and life cycle of the car. Because of the advent of algorithms, the automotive production process has changed. In the industrial era, manufacturers only need to do all the content that can be displayed well, and they can be delivered to the hands of users. Until the product retires, it also maintains the same content status as when the user first received it. For smart cars, automotive products are delivered to users on the line, which is at most a semi-finished product. The improvement of product content requires users to carry out with the assistance of algorithms. For example, OTA upgrades, streaming media content, user road preference memory, user driving habit analysis, and so on. In other words, as long as the user does not abandon the car, the self-improvement of the product will continue.

Algorithms give cars a biological life cycle, thus moving away from the product cycle in the industrial production sense.

Above the algorithm is the operating system, which provides the user with an actionable human-machine interface, just like Windows is to the PC. Internal combustion engine cars do not have an operating system, the cabin is used as a display stand, and when the operating system is applied to the car, the "display" is immediately replaced by "encapsulation". When we walk into the Tesla cabin, we find a stark contrast between the bare plastic interior and the huge operating system interface.

"Encapsulation" is a term from computer science and does not belong to McLuhan's time. It refers to hiding the properties and implementation details of the object, only exposing the interface to the outside world, and combining the abstracted data and behavior (or function) to form an organic whole. In electronics, packaging refers to the circuit pins on the silicon chip, which are wired to the external connectors for connection with other devices.

The concept of packaging is widely used in the PC and mobile phone industries, which needs to complete the sharing of computing power and communication within the product structure. There is no need for data sharing inside the internal combustion engine car, and each local electronic component will act independently. It is precisely because the automobile adopts an architecture that gradually shifts to a central computing model that the packaging concept will be used.

In addition to encapsulating in-vehicle systems, smart cars also encapsulate speed. First of all, for new batteries, speed is no longer the main problem, manufacturers will not spend half a century to spend a lot of money to study how to increase the acceleration time by 0.1 seconds. The speed of a smart car does not come from a separate physical container, but is combined with an algorithm to adjust the correlation between speed and road conditions through intelligent means. Someone once showed an ideal self-driving concept car, the steering wheel, throttle and other parts related to mechanical power have been eliminated.

Therefore, the speed of smart cars is the speed of information or the speed of calculation, which reflects the experiential spirit that symbolizes infinite games.

Battery power, algorithms, operating systems and packaging constitute the main technical characteristics of smart cars, in addition to the basic "content" of shells, four wheels and cockpit placement similar to internal combustion engine cars, smart cars have completely separated from the car.

We understand from the perspective of "medium is information" that smart cars are also an outcome, which does not represent information in itself. The message is composed of a 5G network, a smart charging pile, an assembly process similar to the mobile phone packaging model, and a smart travel environment composed of powerful content service providers that have been cultivated by smartphones.

Smartphones as an old medium are nothing more than the content of smart cars as a new medium. Similarly, cars are part of smart cars. But when we come to the conclusion that Tesla is an iPhone with four wheels, we already have the illusion that, as McLuhan puts it, "one medium obscures the workings of another by creating a content illusion." If you only think of smart cars as mobile phones, it will hinder the understanding of the working mechanism of new media.

In the case of smart cars, it is not the attempt to build the object itself, but to integrate it into people's daily lives, which is the real challenge.

Article source: The News Reporter, Issue 6, 2021