Revisiting Marshall McLuhan

Here is another book about one of the more innovative thinkers in the last century, Marshall McLuhan.  David Carr reviews Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!” by Douglas Coupland in the New York Times. Thanks to Chris Coleman, EVP of Marketing at Yakabod, for pointing out the review.

I had the pleasure of attending some of McLuhan’s seminars while I was doing my graduate school work at the University of Toronto in the early 1970s. These were exciting experiences with rapid fire pronouncements from McLuhan.  He was full of ideas and quickly moved from one to another. Marshall did not like to take questions because, as he said, he was three or four ideas further down the road when a question was asked. Carr notes a similar trait when he writes, “He (McLuhan) loved teaching but was oblique in the extreme and had little use for the thoughts of others unless they were written down at length and subjected to rigorous analysis.” He might not have liked Twitter given the 140 character limit but I am sure he would something to say about it. 

David Carr writes that Coupland’s book is full of unconventional angles, ricochets and resonances, just like McLuhan. He notes that Coupland writes that it was “McLuhan’s ability to anticipate the homogenizing and dehumanizing effect of mass media when the phenomenon was in its infancy that made him remarkable.”  McLuhan felt that the fact that the medium is the message was a bad thing. He did not like the triumph of context over content. He was not a fan of Mad Men. 

What was especially impressive was that McLuhan offered these conclusions before there was any genuine understanding of how human beings process mediated information. He was ahead of most of the cognitive psychologists of his day. As Carr quotes Coupland: “One must remember that Marshall arrived at these conclusions not by hanging around, say, NASA or I.B.M., but rather by studying arcane 16th-century Reformation pamphleteers, the writings of James Joyce, and Renaissance perspective drawings. He was a master of pattern recognition, the man who bangs a drum so large that it’s only beaten once every hundred years.”

I was at the University of Toronto indirectly because of McLuhan. I had developed an interest in the effects of media on cognition through looking at how young children did art. David Olson, a psychologist at U of T, was looking at this issue. He had initially been motivated to look at the concept by McLuhan’s work.  So I choose to go to Toronto to study with David Olson. I have seen a lot of research that indicates that the communication channels we use help shape our messages and how we receive them. I did some myself. 

This was a new concept in cognitive psychology, as well as in the general dialogue.  Coupland quotes McLuhan, “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us,” and Carr notes that was “describing a television and telecommunications revolution, but he was also setting out the implications of the consumer Web four decades before it blossomed.”

This impact of the Web on our thoughts, relationships, and business continues to interest me. It is ironic that it grew from an interest in the 1970s in the cognitive thought processes that children use as they create art and was indirectly influenced by someone studying Renaissance art and literature mostly prior to the 20th century.  I looked at visual versus verbal thought but the same general concepts hold. Media does help shape cognition. I am pleased to see this new work. It both brings back memories and covers the still relevant work of a creative and complex thinker. 

 

Comments

[Ronaldjanki]

I agree that it would be interesting to understand the perspective of this great thinker on the advent of Twitter and other social media tools. I believe as well that the 140-character limit would have inspired other revolutionary statements. I also like the paradox of homogeneity and the dehumanizing effects of the medium as these are intrinsically intertwined with each other. These contradictory characteristics and their inherent division between them seem to grow exponentially larger as technology progresses. It is good to be reminded that we should continue to seek wisdom in unconventional places like the valleys of human history.

Best

Ronald

[John Maloney]

Hi - Thanks. 'Been a McLuhan evangelist for 30yrs. Despite all the hype, definitely think Marsh would have NOT been surprised by two recent things --

- The short life of social media apps
- The farce of TV-Internet integration

Yesterday Myspace laid-off 500 people, half its people. They follow the long-line of failed social media like AOL, Compuserve, Orkut, Friendster, etc. Trust me, Facebook will have their comeuppance and it will be ugly. If you want to know why, read McLuhan. The medium is the message.

Concerning TV, as Marsh predicted, it delivers the persistent vegetative state that viewers crave. After pouring asphalt or bookkeeping all day, the last thing people want is media interactivity. The Number One criterion for TV content is ease of watchability. The medium is the message.

Annoying media dilettantes see McLuhan’s notion of the “homogenizing and dehumanizing effect of mass media” as a pejorative. Absolutely wrong. Quite to the contrary, these media properties of the global village all led the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, capitalism, etc., etc. The medium is the message.

An ardent Roman Catholic, McLuhan attended Mass every day. His faith was the embodiment of his theories and vice versa. As many perceptions an observations originated from Oxford and Toronto as they did from The Vatican and Dublin. The fluidity and travel between idea and metaphor and rigor and perception was ultimately validated by Catholic faith. The medium is the message.

-j

[bill Ives]

Ronald and John

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. McLuhan continues to spark conversation and i think this is one of his contributions. he saw things differently than the norm and thus caused people to think, even if they disagreed. I think that he went too far in some ways but that is what often needs to happen to get people to think differently. In my view the medium is not the entire message. Content still has a role but the medium does a great deal to shape the message both for the creator and the consumer of content. However the "medium shapes the message" would not have been as provocative and not started as many conversations.

Bill

[John Maloney]

Yes, anyone that spawns so much thinking, conversation and, yes, disagreement, has to in the pantheon.

So here goes, the medium really IS the message. Content is completely irrelevant. For example, from professor McLuhan, the MEDIUM of movable type greatly accelerated, intensified and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes, aka, the MESSAGE.

Not to trivialize the prosaic, day to day uses of the MEDIUM, but it is how, in the fullness of time, the medium impacts humanity – that’s the real MESSAGE!

Anyway, debating HMM in a blog comment is like deconstructing Joyce in Taki Taki (341 total words in the language).

On favorite quote from Professor McLuhan that is germane…

“Catholic culture produced Chaucer and Cervantes. Protestant culture produced Milton, Tennyson and Winnipeg, Manitoba.”

-j

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