Marshall McLuhan

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's perhaps more quoted than understood. He's 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'd died prior to the mid fifties he'd be known, if at all, for solid but unexciting work in the more arid end of literary theory and his friendship with the former vorticicist 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 (here) 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".

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's 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's 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's 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.

     bibliography  

McLuhan's works include

Counterblast (New York: Harcourt Brace 69) with Harley Parker

Culture is Our Business (New York: McGraw-Hill 70)

Explorations in Communication (Boston: Beacon 60) co-edited with Edmund Carpenter

From Cliché to Archetype (New York: Viking 70) with Wilfred Watson

The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 89) with Bruce Powers

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 62)

The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962 (Toronto: McGraw-Hill 69) edited by Eugene McNamara

Laws of Media - The New Science (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 88) with Eric McLuhan

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam 67) with Quentin Fiore & Jerome Agel

Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 72) with Barrington Nevitt

Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper & Row 68) with Harley Parker

Understanding Media (Cambridge: MIT Press 94)

War & Peace in the Global Village (New York: Bantam 68) with Quentin Fiore & Jerome Agel

Appropriately The Video McLuhan (6 tapes) is anchored by Tom Wolfe.

     biography and letters

Terrence Gordon's Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding (New York: Basic 97) is dry; we preferred Philip Marchand's reverential but engaging Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding (Cambridge: MIT Press 98). Who Was Marshall McLuhan: Exploring a Mosaic of Impressions (Toronto: Stoddart 96) 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 87) edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan & William Toye.

     studies    

Since the electronic millennium hasn't 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 72), The Bias of Communications (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 91) and Staples, Markets & Cultural Change - Selected Essays (Toronto: McGill-Queens Uni Press 95) edited by Daniel Drache. There's a more accessible account in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (London: Routledge 92) by James Carey.

Graeme Patterson's History & Communications: Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan & the Interpretation of History (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 90), Daniel Czitrom's Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill: Uni of North Carolina Press 82) and Donald Creighton's 1957 biography Harold Innis: Portrait of a Scholar (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 78) 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 79) and Theories of the New Media: A Historical Perspective (London: Athlone Press 00) edited by John Thornton Caldwell.

Paul Levinson's Digital McLuhan: A Guide To The Information Millennium (London: Routledge 99) and Derrick de Kerckhove's The Skin of Culture: Investigating The New Electronic Reality (London: Kogan Page 97) are enthusiastic but to our minds unconvincing efforts to update McLuhan for the 'Age of the Internet'. Content rather than media is emphasised in Dan Schiller's more lucid Theorizing Communication: A History (New York: Oxford Uni Press 96).

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 96), Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design (London: Phaidon 96) 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're 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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