A tribute to and a lament for Marshall McLuhan continues. If he had lived Marshall would have been 100 on July 21, 2011. Join me in the countdown to his centennial, and an exploration of more of his observations on the way media work in the electric age in which we live.
How did Russia beat the U.S. into space?
Marshall McLuhan (August 24, 1964, age 53). They didn’t have a nineteenth century.
The Russians are people of the ear rather than the eye. They didn’t have an Industrial Revolution. They went directly from an oral age to an electric age, skipping the mechanical age. This acted like a sling shot to fire them into space.
Me (February, 2011, age 58). Again, no wonder his colleagues at Toronto University thought he was nuts.
And on this one I’m inclined to agree with them. And yet it is a thrilling idea. And certainly a more entertaining one than, say, the Soviets were good at engineering and math and not shy of spending resources on a space program their economy couldn’t sustain.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading:
David Thompson, “How to learn economics in a rowboat,” Toronto Daily Star, August 24, 1964.