Birthday: "A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding."

Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)

Author, educator

For twenty years, a Canadian college professor was one of the most famous men in the world. Educated in Manitoba and at Cambridge, McLuhan began with the Latin “trivium”- the study of grammar, logic and rhetoric- and ended up predicting the development of the Internet thirty years ahead of the fact.

Raised by Baptist/Methodist parents, McLuhan became a college agnostic, changing his major from engineering to literature to find his notions of the sublime and the beautiful. At 21, intoxicated by G.K. Chesterton,  he converted to Catholicism, and spent his career teaching in Catholic institutions.

One of his most famous students was the Jesuit semiotician, Walter Ong, with whom he developed a lifelong friendship and professional collaboration. Another, Hugh Kenner, became a noted expert on the works of Ezra Pound after McLuhan introduced the two on a visit to Pound at his asylum in 1948, as well as a prominent Joyce scholar.

McLuhan had his groupies from early on, and liked to keep his proteges close to home as well. Kenner recalled,"I had the advantage of being exposed to Marshall when he was at his most creative, and then of getting to the far end of the continent shortly afterward, when he couldn't get me on the phone all the time. He could be awfully controlling."

Later, when McLuhan wrote that the development of cartography during the Renaissance created a geographical sense that had never previously existed, Kenner sent him a postcard reading: "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, Yours, Hugh."

In 1944 McLuhan was installed at St Michael’s College, part of the University of Toronto. Applying his classical training to the new medium of television, he obtained Ford Foundation funding for a series of seminars on Communications and Culture. His first book, The Mechanical Bride (1951) presented a series of essays the reader could tackle in any order. Each took an article or print ad as the jumping-off point for McLuhan’s view on the surface and subsurface meanings; what it said, and how it came to be chosen to present a given point of view.

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) considered the effects of ubiquitous forms of communication, from moveable type through radio, movie, television and computers, on how humans think. His concept of “the global village” argued that the replacement of “cool” media- like movies, which are purely visual- by “hot” ones, like television, which require a more active participation and attention level to extract meaning, would, over time, change social organizations:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

McLuhan extended those ideas in Understanding Media (1964). As one commentator has noted,

McLuhan famously argued that in the modern world "we live mythically and integrally ... but continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age."

McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study—popularly quoted as "the medium is the message". McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society—in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example—the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.

At the same time human adapt to rapidly changing media,however, McLuhan argued they still do so with premedia cognitive habits:

The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backward into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land.

McLuhan argued the development of satellite technology, beaming images and sounds everywhere from techology boxes circling the planet, converted Earth into a performance stage- a global theater. With his wide ranging cultural references- he was at home skipping from riffs on absurdist drama, dadaism, Finnegan’s Wake as an archetype of future wars, and Zen Buddhist notions of robotics, McLuhan fit the zeitgeist of the Sixties perfectly. His books explored the concept of “bookishness” in their format and presentation of ideas.

Critics abounded; some faulted him as a poet rather than a prophet, a visionary trying to explain systems analysis. But by the mid-1960s, Toronto create d a Center for Culture and Technology to keep other schools from poaching him. With a large family, he used his fame to cultivate a lucrative media consulting practice with major world corporations. In many respects, McLuhan’s ideas- seen in his life through the lenses of TV, radio and movies- needed the rise of the Internet to be fully appreciated. That rise has generated significant new interest in McLuhan's’ theories, such his tetrad for analyzing the effects of media:

What does the medium enhance?
What does the medium make obsolete?
What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the "grammar and syntax" of the "language" of media. McLuhan departs from his mentor Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium "overheats", or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme.

Using the example of radio:

Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. Radio amplifies news and music via sound.

Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the importance of print and the visual.

Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.

Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.

He had an unusual facility for coining phrases: “Turn on, tune in, drop out”; “The medium is the message”; and the concept of fifteen minutes of fame all originated with him. By 1977 he was so famous Woody Allen used him for a Walter Mitty moment in the movie, “Annie Hall”:

A lined-up crowd of ticket holders waiting to get into the theater, Alvy and
Annie among them.  A bum of indistinct chatter can be heard through the ensuing
scene.

MAN IN LINE
(Loudly to his companion right
behind Alvy and Annie)
We saw the Fellini film last Tuesday.  
It is not one of his best.  It lacks a
cohesive structure.  You know, you get
the feeling that he's not absolutely sure
what it is he wants to say.  'Course, I've
always felt he was essentially a-a technical
film maker.  Granted, La Strada was a great
film.  Great in its use of negative energy
more than anything else.  But that simple
cohesive core ...

Alvy, reacting to the man's loud monologue, starts to get annoyed, while Annie
begins to read her newspaper.

ALVY
(Overlapping the man's speech)
I'm-I'm-I'm gonna have a stroke.

ANNIE
(Reading)
Well, stop listening to him.

MAN IN LINE
(Overlapping Alvy and Annie)
You know, it must need to have had its
leading from one thought to another.  
You know what I'm talking about?

ALVY
(Sighing)
He's screaming his opinions in my ear.

MAN IN LINE
Like all that Juliet of the Spirits or
Satyricon, I found it incredibly ...
indulgent.  You know, he really is.  He's
one of the most indulgent film makers.  He
really is-

ALVY
(Overlapping)
Key word here is "indulgent."

MAN IN LINE
(Overlapping)
-without getting ... well, let's put it
this way ...

ALVY
(To Annie, who is still reading,
overlapping the man in line who is
still talking)
What are you depressed about?

ANNIE
I missed my therapy.  I overslept.

ALVY  
How can you possibly oversleep?

ANNIE
The alarm clock.

ALVY
(Gasping)
You know what a hostile gesture that is
to me?

ANNIE
I know-because of our sexual problem,
right?

ALVY
Hey, you ... everybody in line at the
New Yorker has to know our rate of
intercourse?

MAN IN LINE
- It's like Samuel Beckett, you know-
I admire the technique but he doesn't ...
he doesn't hit me on a gut level.

ALVY
(To Annie)
I'd like to hit this guy on a gut level.

The man in line continues his speech all the while Alvy and Annie talk.

ANNIE
Stop it, Alvy!

ALVY
(Wringing his hands)
Well, he's spitting on my neck!  You know,
he's spitting on my neck when he talks.

MAN IN LINE
And then, the most important thing of all
is a comedian's vision.

ANNIE
And you know something else?  You know,
you're so egocentric that if I miss my
therapy you can think of it in terms of
how it affects you!

MAN IN LINE
(Lighting a cigarette while he talks)
Gal gun-shy is what it is.

ALVY
(Reacting again to the man in line)
Probably on their first date, right?

MAN IN LINE
(Still going on)
It's a narrow view.

ALVY
Probably met by answering an ad in the
New York Review of Books.  "Thirtyish
academic wishes to meet woman who's
interested in Mozart, James Joyce and
sodomy."
(He sighs; then to Annie)
Whatta you mean, our sexual problem?

ANNIE
Oh!

ALVY  
I-I-I mean, I'm comparatively normal
for a guy raised in Brooklyn.

ANNIE
Okay, I'm very sorry.  My sexual problem!  
Okay, my sexual problem!  Huh?

The man in front of them turns to look at them, then looks away.

ALVY
I never read that.  That was-that was
Henry James, right?  Novel, uh, the
sequel to Turn of the Screw?  My Sexual ...

MAN IN LINE
(Even louder now)
It's the influence of television.  Yeah,
now Marshall McLuhan deals with it in terms
of it being a-a high, uh, high intensity,
you understand?  A hot medium ... as opposed
to a ...

ALVY
(More and more aggravated)
What I wouldn't give for a large sock o'
horse manure.

MAN IN LINE     
... as opposed to a print ...

Alvy steps forward, waving his hands in frustration, and stands facing the
camera.

ALVY
(Sighing and addressing the audience)
What do you do when you get stuck in a movie
line with a guy like this behind you?  I mean,
it's just maddening!

The man in line moves toward Alvy.  Both address the audience now.

MAN IN LINE
Wait a minute, why can't I give my opinion?  
It's a free country!

ALVY
I mean, d- He can give you- Do you hafta
give it so loud?  I mean, aren't you ashamed
to pontificate like that?  And-and the funny
part of it is, M-Marshall McLuhan, you don't
know anything about Marshall McLuhan's...work!

MAN IN LINE
(Overlapping)
Wait a minute!  Really?  Really?  I happen to
teach a class at Columbia called "TV Media
and Culture"!  So I think that my insights
into Mr. McLuhan-well, have a great deal of
validity.

ALVY
Oh, do yuh?

MAN IN LINE
Yes.

ALVY
Well, that's funny, because I happen to
have Mr. McLuhan right here.  So ... so,
here, just let me-I mean, all right.  Come
over here ... a second.

Alvy gestures to the camera which follows him and the man in line to the back
of the crowded lobby.  He moves over to a large stand-up movie poster and
pulls Marshall McLuhan from behind the poster.

MAN IN LINE
Oh.

ALVY
(To McLuhan)
Tell him.

MCLUHAN
(To the man in line)
I hear-I heard what you were saying.  
You-you know nothing of my work.  You
mean my whole fallacy is wrong.  How you
ever got to teach a course in anything is
totally amazing.

ALVY
(To the camera)
Boy, if life were only like this!

McLuhan suffered a stroke in 1979, which left his power of speech impaired, and died in his sleep in 1980.