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Marshall McLuhan
This page profiles guru Marshall McLuhan, sometimes hailed
as the "father of cyberspace".
It covers -
introduction
Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, famous for gnomic
utterances such as "the user is the content",
foresaw an information millennium in which print was obsolete
and we all lived - apparently quite happily - in a global
village.
McLuhan delighted in paradox and the substitution of aphorism
for argument. Much of his thought is ahistorical and reflects
his interest in mediaeval idealist philosophy. His harsher
critics have dismissed it as simply nonsense.
He is perhaps more quoted than understood. He is patron
saint of digital lifestyle mag Wired.
As a guru's guru - now safely dead - he receives genuflections
from enthusiasts such as John Barlow, Nicholas Negroponte
and George Gilder. His quips are used to legitimate the
incoherent mix of new age elitism and technological determinism
that Richard Barbrook generously described as the Californian
Ideology.
life
Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Canada. His father
was an insurance salesman and mother an elocution teacher.
He studied at the University of Manitoba and at Cambridge,
with an emphasis on the scholastic philosophers. His 1942
doctoral dissertation dealt with the rhetoric of Elizabethan
playwright and controversialist Thomas Nashe.
McLuhan converted to Roman Catholicism in 1937 and, as
his letters suggest, was deeply influenced by the writings
of St Thomas Acquinas. His career thereafter was spent
in Catholic tertiary institutions - including Fordham,
Assumption and St. Louis. His marriage to Corinne Keller
resulted in six children.
If he had died prior to the mid fifties he would be known,
if at all, for solid but unexciting work in the more arid
end of literary theory and his friendship with the former
vorticist and novelist Wyndham Lewis. Critical reception
of his 1951 The Mechanical Bride: Folklore & Industrial
Man was underwhelming.
In 1959 - amid hype about educational tv - he was appointed
as Director of the National Association of Educational
Broadcasters' Media Project, producing statements such
as
Television
is teaching all the time. It does more educating than
all the schools and all the institutions of higher learning.
McLuhan's
The Gutenberg Galaxy appeared in 1962, followed
by The Making of Typographic Man in 1962, Understanding
Media in 1964 and The Medium is the Message
in 1967 and War & Peace in the Global Village
in 1968. Other works are noted below. Composing his works
as collages of short statements or interviews presumably
assisted output of a book a year and numerous media appearances,
including a spot in Woody Allen's 1977 Annie Hall.
He was director of the University of Toronto's Center
for Culture & Technology (CCT)
from 1963. He died in Toronto in December 1980.
Like mystics such as Jacques Ellul and Teilhard de Chardin
he considered that technology is an extension of the nervous
system: technological changes create new environments
of perception and the form of media has a more significant
effect on society and knowledge than the information in
that media.
McLuhan's technological determinism - a reworking of Marx
for the age of electricity rather than steam - encouraged
a vision of inevitable progression to a communication
millennium that would be communitarian and borderless.
"Electricity does not centralise, but decentralises".
That vision centred on radio/television broadcasting,
rather than on computer networks. "The new electronic
interdependence recreates the world in the image of a
global village".
The
problem in the new politics is to find the right image.
Image hunting is the new thing, and policies no longer
matter because whether your electric light is provided
by Republicans or Democrats is rather unimportant compared
to the service of light and power and all the other
kinds of services that go with our cities. Service environment's
the thing in place of political parties.
Print
was dismissed as the
technology of individualism - about to become obsolete,
along with print-era institutions. Those comfortable with
the technology are the future; those who are not are simply
'history' (an unenviable fate since for McLuhan history
is simply a props box through which advertisers rummage).
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that McLuhan's
enthusiasm for his ideas led him to ignore economic processes,
power relationships and more broadly how people actually
relate to media and use content. His colleague Harold
Innis - unfortunately often as gnomic - did attempt to
address such concerns, for example considering why we
have few rather than many broadcasters and questioning
McLuhan's assertions about an electronic dialogue between
individuals in the global electronic village.
In retrospect he is also very much a child of the zeitgeist,
with a love-hate affair with consumer culture. The
Mechanical Bride echoed fashionable laments from Whyte,
Lukacs, McDonald, Packard and others that contemporary
mass culture was empty - hidden persuaders for passive
organisation men - and only offered the illusion of diversity.
Consumers were passive but could be liberated through
new technologies, which apparently weren't susceptible
to abuse. Time to fast forward to the Age of Aquarius
(and the 5 second sound bite for epigones such as Virilio
or Baudrillard).
Once
we surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the
private manipulation of those who would try to benefit
from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves,
we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes
and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like
handing over the common speech to a private corporation,
or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as
a monopoly.
There
is a concise summation in a review
by William Melody, who commented that
Now
that McLuhan has been dead for nearly twenty years and
cannot divert us with his dazzling elliptical metaphors
and bad puns, his work can be examined without raising
the passions the deliberately provocative oral communicator
managed to inflame in his prime. Adopting a stance of
arrogant superiority, he considered clarifying his ideas
an unworthy menial task for intellectual plodders, and
dismissed challenging questions with comments like,
'You don't like those ideas. I got other ones', and
the infamous, 'You think my fallacy is all wrong?' He
paid scant attention to facts and never conceded a point.
His ultimate put down was a benign explanation that
the question revealed the person was locked into the
uni-dimensional visual bias of the age of print and
could not really be expected to understand.
The
Gadfly more reverently commented
that
as
a cultural figure he is a museum piece who remains ahead
of the times. His powers of prescience are uncanny,
and his emphasis on the role of technological evolution
rather than biological and genetic determinism is a
vital tool for negotiating the brave new digital world.
... part medicine show huckster, part Zen master – he
foresaw how television rather than the voting booth
would win elections
a
statement that surely confuses the roles of the box and
the booth.
Lewis Lapham wrote
in 2003 that
even
as McLuhan passed across the zenith of his fame, in
the late 1960s, he was mistaken for a vaudeville entertainer,
a dealer in exotic aphorisms and rare conundrums—"the
electric light is pure information," "we are
the television screen...we wear all mankind as our skin."
Woody Allen placed him on the set of Annie Hall,
Andy Warhol appointed him honorary muse. The professor
became an eponym, and for the five or six years during
which his Delphic utterance remained in vogue among
fumblers after the season's stylish truth in Harper's
Bazaar as well as The New York Review of Books,
the magical word, "McLuhanesque," served to
explain otherwise inexplicable moral announcements and
fashion statements
bibliography
McLuhan's works include
Counterblast
(New York: Harcourt Brace 1969) with Harley Parker
Culture is Our Business (New York: McGraw-Hill 1970)
Explorations in Communication (Boston: Beacon 1960)
co-edited with Edmund Carpenter
From Cliché to Archetype (New York: Viking 1970)
with Wilfred Watson
The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and
Media in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press
1989) with Bruce Powers
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
(Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1962)
The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of
Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962 (Toronto: McGraw-Hill
1969) edited by Eugene McNamara
Laws of Media - The New Science (Toronto: Uni of
Toronto Press 1988) with Eric McLuhan
The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New
York: Bantam 1967) with Quentin Fiore & Jerome Agel
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1972) with Barrington Nevitt
Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting
(New York: Harper & Row 1968) with Harley Parker
Understanding Media (Cambridge: MIT Press 1994)
War & Peace in the Global Village (New York:
Bantam 1968) with Quentin Fiore & Jerome Agel
Appropriately
The Video McLuhan (6 tapes) is anchored
by Tom Wolfe.
McLuhan's 1969 Playboy interview is here.
A number of audio and video clips are accessible on the
Walrus Magazine site here.
biographies and letters
Terrence Gordon's Marshall McLuhan: Escape into
Understanding (New York: Basic 1997) is dry; we preferred
Philip Marchand's reverential but engaging Marshall
McLuhan: Escape into Understanding (Cambridge: MIT
Press 1998).
Who Was Marshall McLuhan: Exploring a Mosaic of Impressions
(Toronto: Stoddart 1996) edited by Barring Nevitt is a
lively collection of memoirs by McLuhan acolytes.
For the correspondence see Letters of Marshall McLuhan
(Toronto: Oxford Uni Press 1987) edited by Matie Molinaro,
Corinne McLuhan & William Toye.
studies
Since the electronic millennium has not arrived understanding
McLuhan's thought can be assisted by consulting gutenberg
artefacts - what one spinmeister dismissed as dried treeflakes
encased in dead cow.
For Harold Innis see his Empire & Communications
(Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1972), The Bias of Communications
(Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1991) and Staples, Markets
& Cultural Change - Selected Essays (Toronto:
McGill-Queens Uni Press 1995) edited by Daniel Drache.
There is a more accessible account in Communication
as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (London: Routledge
1992) by James Carey. Biographical studies include Marginal
Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis (Toronto: Uni
of Toronto Press 2006) by Alexander John Watson.
Graeme Patterson's History & Communications: Harold
Innis, Marshall McLuhan & the Interpretation of History
(Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1990), Daniel Czitrom's
Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan
(Chapel Hill: Uni of North Carolina Press 1982) and Donald
Creighton's 1957 biography Harold Innis: Portrait of
a Scholar (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1978) explore
the relationship.
Our Print & Reading profile
points to studies such as Elizabeth Eisenstein's superb
The Printing Press As An Agent Of Change: Communications
and Cultural Transformation in Early-Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1979) and Theories
of the New Media: A Historical Perspective (London:
Athlone Press 2000) edited by John Thornton Caldwell.
Paul Levinson's Digital McLuhan: A Guide To The Information
Millennium (London: Routledge 1999) and Derrick de
Kerckhove's The Skin of Culture: Investigating The
New Electronic Reality (London: Kogan Page 1997) are
enthusiastic but to our minds unconvincing efforts to
update McLuhan for the 'Age of the Internet'. de Kerckhove
co-authored McLuhan for Managers (New York: Viking
2003) with Mark Federman, an addition to the genre that
encompasses Wess Roberts' Leadership Secrets of Attila
the Hun (New York: Warner 1987) and Moshe Kranc's
The Hasidic Masters' Guide to Management (New
York: Devora 2004).
Susan
Jacobson's paper
Shannon, McLuhan and Baudrillard would presumably
have been applauded by the master. Content rather than
media is emphasised in Dan Schiller's more lucid Theorizing
Communication: A History (New York: Oxford Uni Press
1996).
There's more specialised questioning of his assumptions
about the content-carrier relationship in Ken Garland's
A Word in Your Eye (Reading: Uni of Reading Dept
of Typography 1996), Design Writing Research: Writing
on Graphic Design (London: Phaidon 1996) by Ellen
Lupton & Abbott Miller and in our Design guide.
in the age of the web
John Fowles complained that McLuhan's From Cliche To
Archetype was
as
elegant and lucid as a barrel of tar ... it makes one
wonder whether Marshall McLuhan's celebrated doubts
over the print medium don't largely stem from an incapacity
to handle it.
McLuhan's
mannerisms arguably became the man and have had an unfortunate
influence on writing about the web. John Brockman, for
example, chants that
value
is in activity. Content is no longer a noun. Content
is context. Content is activity. Content is relationship,
community. Content is not text or pictures as distinct
from the interactive components that provide access
to them. Content is the interactive quality. Content
is a verb, a continuing process.
We
are not quite sure what to make of McLuhan statements
such as
Heidegger
surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly
as Descartes rode the mechanical wave
people don't actually read newspapers - they step into
them every morning like a hot bath
the city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost
for tourists
with telephone and TV it is not so much the message
as the sender that is being sent
one can stop anywhere after the first few sentences
and have the full message, if one is prepared to 'dig'
it
if it works, it's obsolete.
Tomorrow is our permanent address.
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