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Marshall McLuhan

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Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 - December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher,scholar, academic, professor of english literature, communications theorist and one of the founders of modern media studies. McLuhan became a pop culture figure in the 1960s with the publication of his seminal work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964) and The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (with designer Quentin Fiore), Random House, 1967.

Recognizing his lasting global influence he was honored by the government of Canada with his image on a postage stamp in 2000.

McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to Elsie and Herbert McLuhan and raised in a Baptist Scotch-Irish family. He would later convert to Roman Catholicism and remained a strong Catholic throughout his life and career. Some argue that his religion played a heavy role in his philosophical studies.

On this question ""Page 60 of Understanding Media contains the seed of enlightenment that does not germinate into full flower until Stoddart's posthumous publication of The Medium And The Light in 1999. On page 60 of UM, McLuhan tells us that "Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the content of the other, obscuring the operation of both."

""In TMATL, on page 103, he delivers the smoking gun punchline of what he meant all along: "In Jesus Christ, there is no separation or distance between the medium and the message; it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same." Christ was the Light of the world. McLuhan's whole life was coded theology in the new language of new media. All he discovered was a new metaphor to preach the old truth. From his first published article G.K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic (Dalhousie Review 15, 1936) to his last (his tombstone, "The truth will set you free"), his entire life was a witness to a single solitary Fact. A Fact about which he said, "The revealed and divinely constituted fact of religion has nothing to do with human opinion or human adherence." (p 85, TMATL)."" [1]

McLuhan felt that an understanding of media could bring spiritual enlightenment to mankind. Similarly, McLuhan espoused the idea of the Global Village, that he apparently borrowed from Wyndham Lewis, to express the view that the effects of extending the human nervous system outside the human body re-embodied self in the form of a global communication network, thereby creating proximity in effect, despite geographic distance. A related concept exists that although developed separately closely parallels his own concepts. It is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's idea of the noosphere; a layer of collective spiritual consciousness that de Chardin believed was enveloping the world.

Author Tom Wolfe stated that McLuhan might be the most important thinker since Darwin, Newton, Einstein, and Freud. Wolfe also implied that the association between McLuhan's concepts and de Chardin's is more explicit. De Chardin drew from religion and Charles Darwin's, Theory of Evolution for his ideas. The noosphere was for him the logical extension of a succession of layers of evolution eminating from the core of the earth. De Chardin, was a paleontologist, a geologist and a Roman Catholic priest. He was exiled from France by the Catholic church for his radical departure from creationist church doctrine. To this day, de Chardin's more controversial ideas are suppressed from some Catholic teaching. Theories of evolution have been very successfull in our time at explaining some of the mysteries of life. Lamarcke, Darwin, Edward O. Wilson, and Steven J. Gould's theories related to the phenomena of evolution are in some limited sense collaborative in that they treat the same theme in an interdisciplinary way. As do McLuhan's many collaborations.

Similarily McLuhan observed media and believed that communications media evolved from themselves. McLuhan's own radical departures from conventional academic inquiry remain controversial and poorly understood today. However as an example of how sought after and influential his opinions became, McLuhan served as special envoy for education to the Vatican. He also advised the US government on a media education curriculum. The latter commission resulting in the first draft for Understanding Media at once impenetrable and at the same time his classic text.

As a student at Cambridge University in England he employed the techniques of his teacher I.A. Richards, and the new criticism. The new criticism employed a multilevel approach to the study of literature that he then applied to media in general beginning with advertising with great success. This multileveled analysis was the basis of what McLuhan referred to as probes and resulted in the many aphorisitc phrases which found wide application, and acceptance for which he is especially well known. One of these aphoristic probes appears as a McLuhan quote on the autodidacticism (self-education) page.

Famous for aphorisms like "The medium is the message" (he later published a book whose title was a play on this phrase The medium is the massage) and "the global village", McLuhan became one of the early purveyors of the sound bite. In Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, McLuhan allegedly coined the term "software", but the Oxford English Dictionary traces usage of the word back to 1960. The phrase "global village" was coined by McLuhan in 1959, and appears in 1962's The Gutenberg Galaxy, his study of the psychological and cognitive effects of standardised printing. The title of the same book was the origin of the term " Gutenberg Galaxy".

In 1946 McLuhan became a professor of English literature at the Catholic University of St. Michael's College, at the University of Toronto, during which time he wrote some of his most important books. He continued to write, speak and teach there until his passing in 1980.

McLuhan continued to assert that each different medium is an extension of the senses that affects the individual and society in distinct and pervasive ways, further classifying some media as "hot"; media which engage one's senses in a high-intensity, exclusive way, such as typography, radio, and film and other media as "cool"; media of lower resolution or intensity, that require more interaction from the viewer, such as the telephone and the television. While many of his pronouncements and theories have been considered impenetrable, and by some absurd, or unfalsifiable in scientific terms. McLuhan's central message; that to understand today's world, one must actively study the effects of media remains ever more true in the electronic age. As does it's purpose; "the training of perception".

Wired magazine named McLuhan its patron saint when the magazine launched in 1993.).In fact "Wired style" in it's early days was almost identical to the style introduced by McLuhan and Fiore in The Medium is the Massage. McLuhan's work is sometimes compared with that of a futurist.This may be due to the wide sweep of his ideas and his stature as a visionary. Similarly today many see the internet and cyberspace as the prophetic embodiment of his ideas.

McLuhan appears as himself in Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall. This cameo performance in which McLuhan comes to his own defense when he proclaims to another professor that he "knows nothing of his work", is testament to McLuhan's fame and stature as a sixties popular culture icon. McLuhan's demise at the dawn of the electronic revolution was untimely. Along with other prominent public personalities Woody Allen petitioned the University of Toronto to keep the Centre for Studies in Culture and Technology open to continue his studies on media. While he was alive many other luminaries of the 1960's visited McLuhan at the centre including the Beatles and then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau.

Arguably what made McLuhan a "media guru" to sixties pop culture mavens in the "TV age", also made him "the patron saint" of the "electronaissance" to a new generation in the extended era of electronic media known as secondary orality. This term was coined by Walter J. Ong who was a graduate student of his. Secondary orality is characterized by the presence, growth and spread of media , new media, multimedia, and digital communications networks.

McLuhan once stated that he considered all of his work to be a "footnote" to the work of Harold Innis. Harold Innis, was a well known Canadian scholar and economist and a student of George Herbert Meade and Robert E. Parkes at the University of Chicago. Harold Innis has also influenced the development of ideas on the nature and significance of communications media to culture. Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication demonstrate the genesis and evolution of his ideas. "Innis's theory of communication divided media into two "bias"; time-binding media and space-binding media. Time-binding media such as manuscripts and oral communication have limited distribution potential. According to Carey (1992), time-binding media "favored relatively close communities, metaphysical speculation, and traditional authority" (p. 134). Space-binding media such as print and electronic media are concerned with expansion and control."

As irony would have it, McLuhan and Innis never met or collaborated in any real sense. Nevertheless, they are considered to be two of the founding pillars of the Toronto School of Communication. Another scholarly collaboration that McLuhan was to have made that never took place was with the legendary advertizing designer Tony Schwartz. Schwartz has written two books on media and communication The Responsive Chord and Media: The Second God. McLuhan and Schwartz were to have shared the Albert Schweitzer chair at Fordham University. Major health problems prevented McLuhan from taking up the chair.

McLuhan is universally acknowledged as the philosophical founder of the discipline of media ecology, a term McLuhan himself coined. Arguably the central problem that this emerging discipline seeks to address is the digital divide. An axiom that describes the growing gulf between those who have no access to information and those that have access to too much information. The causes of this phenomena are complex. A related phenomena is the disappearance of written text as the dominant mode of communication and expression of thought in Western society. This is being replaced by the uncontrollable and pervasive influence of nearly contentless, light-speed, acoustic, media technology such as television and the internet which is also a text based electronic medium.

Successors to McLuhan in this field, or those arguably influenced by him are numerous. They include Neil Postman, who is the author of many books on media and education and founder of the first school of media ecology studies at New York University. Another is Derrick de Kerckhove who is the author of The Skin of Culture and more recently Connected Intelligence. De Kerckchove was McLuhan's student, translator and later his successor as the director at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology that was the successor to McLuhan's Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. Another important influence is Eric McLuhan, who is McLuhan's son and co-author with him of "Laws of Media". Eric McLuhan is also the author of Electric Language. Paul Levinson who was also a friend of McLuhan's is the author of Digital McLuhan. Jean Baudrillard a post-modern educator and philosopher perhaps best known for his theories of hyperreality, and simulacra is sometimes referred to in the popular sense as "the European McLuhan."

Perhaps as a measure of the scope of his ambitions McLuhan intimated through journals during his early life the intention to codify a set of universal or generalized laws or principles at some point in his career. The fullfilment of this ambition is best exemplified by Laws of Media. Arguably it represents a concerted effort to make explicit a unified field theory of culture. In essence, it draws from the aphorism "the medium is the message" to ask, is there a minimal set of messages, or effects, that are common to all media. If so, then we are able to know what human artefacts are media, and which are not. After a decade-long search, Eric and Marshall McLuhan discovered that there are four such messages or characteristics that they posed as probes: What does the artefact extend, enhance, accelerate or enable? When extended beyond the limit of its potential, into what does it reverse? What does it obsolesce or cause to lose its dominance? What does it retrieve from the past that had been formerly obsolesced? Given that these can apply to all conceptions and creations of humankind, all human artefacts - be they tangible or intangible - are media. Using the four media laws allows us to find connections and equivalencies among things and ideas that are not obviously connected, thereby assisting us in becoming aware of the hidden ground.

Some posit a fifth law of media: What current medium does the new medium put-on or satirize? This notion arises from McLuhan's insistence that "Most of my writing is Menippean satire, presenting the actual surface of the world we live in as a ludicrous image." (Letter to Michael Hornyansky, October, 1976.) As well, the fifth chapter of Laws of Media, Media Poetics, relates the four media laws as forms of metaphor using permutations of two figures and two grounds, but omits the obvious permutation for satire. Completing the pattern by "filling in the blank" is characteristically McLuhanesque - making his Laws of Media very "cool" indeed.

McLuhan's wide intellectual influence extends to other branches of thought and learning such as cultural studies and communication studies as well as media studies. His work heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. McLuhan's work is linked to other philosophical movements of the Twentieth Century such as postmodernism especially through it's precursor deconstuction and Derrida and the disciplines of linguistics and semiotics through the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and with the study of mass media.

"According to deconstructive readers, one of the phallogocentrisms of modernism is the distinction between speech (logos) and writing, with writing historically being thought of as derivative to logos. As part of subverting the presumed dominance of logos over text, Derrida showed that the idea of a speech-writing dichotomy contains within it the idea of a very expansive view of textuality that subsumes both speech and writing. Deconstruction, text can be thought of as "dead", in the sense that once the markings are made, the markings remain in suspended animation and do not change in themselves. Thus, what an author says about her text doesn't revive it, and is just another text commenting on the original, along with the commentary of others.

In this view, when an author says, "You have understood my work perfectly," this utterance constitutes an addition to the textual system, along with what the reader said was understood in and about the original text, and not a resuscitation of the original dead text. The reader has an opinion, the author has an opinion. Communication is possible not because the text has a transcendental signification, but because the brain tissue of the author contains similar "markings" or signs as the brain tissue of the reader. These brain markings, however, are unstable and fragmentary."

Many experts agree that text as we know it now has a subservient or radically altered use in our mediated world, some would say it has been obsolesced altogether, a greater understanding of textuality and it's role in the restoration of literacy may hold the key. In linguistics text enters at least two types of contrasts. One is that between system and text, system being understood as the ability of the speakers to communicate using verbal signs, and text being understood as the product of this ability. The other is between text, understood as written text, and speech, spoken text.

For many McLuhan's ideas will always be associated with the tumult of the 1960's. The University of Toronto never saw fit to have a Phd program in media studies. But the U of T brand, McLuhan's legacy and the centre he founded there that now bears his name are forever linked. Meanwhile worldwide a revival in the relevance McLuhan's way of looking at and solving problems is underway as universities scramble to fashion a response to the knowledge explosion. Universities that under print regimes produced 1-2% of new knowledge per year are imploding when faced with the new electronic environment that doubles new knowledge every few years. Instituting media studies programs at Universities is part of a strategy to remain relevant and to avoid the kind of knowledge obsolescence McLuhan was concerned about by restoring language; humankind's first technology; and(the word) to it's original state of grace as part of a creative process again in the evolutionary sense. Whether or not this strategy will have a desirable effect remains to be seen.

McLuhan died New Years Eve December 31, 1980 of a cerebral stroke which rendered him speechless during the last year of his life.The inscription on his headstone is from the new testament. The street in Toronto where the centre is located has recently been renamed "McLuhan Way".

Contributed by Terrance Mockler "Developing Creativityin writing for Post Literate Generations." Updated by Mark Federman of The McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology

Bibliography

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