A tribute to and a lament for Marshall McLuhan. Five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday, I present one of McLuhan’s observations and talk about its relevance today. 300 ideas. 300 days. 300 posts.
Acoustic
Marshall McLuhan (December 14, 1960, age 49). No joking around.
I was just remarking to Claude Bissell that the “current recession seems have had a bad effect on the flow of jokes.” The joke must be an exception to the universal rule that in the electronic age everything becomes substitutable for everything else.
Me (September, 2010, age 58). Ohio’s Phil Davison to the rescue.
In our own current recession which lingers on the jokes also seem to be drying up. Here for your amusement is some found humour.
With thanks to Writing Boots.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 274.
Tags: Acoustic, Communications, Electronic media, Personal branding, Rhetoric, Technology
Marshall McLuhan (July 1968, age 57). Poor old Nix-on
The Nixon campaign has been consulting me on the best ways Richard Nixon can use the media to win this year’s race for the Presidency. I told them that he should put his campaign ads on radio rather than TV. A hot character like Nixon is ideally suited to radio. His hot-stuff will not go over well on TV. If they insist on putting him on TV, I told them, they should make sure he says as little as possible. He should be as silent as his beloved ‘silent majority.’ That should cool him down. Unfortunately, Nixon can do nothing about his name. The ‘Nix’ sound in Nixon has a pronounced negative subliminal effect on voters. A name of course is a medium. And the medium is always the message. You can turn off your TV but you can’t turn off your name. Names are numbing blows from which we never recover.
Me (August, 2010, age 58). Good old Mars-hall?
Douglas Coupland has a good deal of irreverent fun with Marshall McLuhan’s name. He places “the name Marshall McLuhan into commonly available internet name generators” and generates for example McLuhan’s porn star name (Pud Bendover), pimp name (Slick Tight) and drag name (Vanilla Thunderstorm). He also uses a word scrambler to break and reassemble ‘Marshall McLuhan’ into a large number of three and four letter phrases such as ‘alarm small hunch,’ ‘clam hah small um,’ and ‘call sham man hurl.’ But these exercises – entertaining as they are in a smirking way – do not tell us much if anything about McLuhan or the power of names.
However, a case can be made that McLuhan may have suffered from a negative subliminal effect associated with his name in the more pedestrian way he alleges Nixon did. McLuhan’s name was played with by his academic enemies who mocked him by calling him ‘McLoon.’ How much of a blow was this? Did it encourage his readers to view his ideas as loony? On the other hand his boyhood nick name was ‘Mars’ the Roman God of War (from Mars-hall) which may on balance lent him considerable subliminal strength and contributed to his combative nature.
What does your name say about you? Or not?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan, 2009, pp. 2-9.
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger, 1989, p. 3.
Tags: Acoustic, Communications, Hot and cool media, Personal branding, Politics, Television
Marshall McLuhan (December, 1970, age 59). Cavett’s right!
Today, Dick Cavett made a remarkable observation. He and I were talking on his TV show and he asked me why it was that when people come out of a movie it takes them a while before they start talking to one another. It’s as if they’re overwhelmed by what they’ve seen. Film is a private rather than a corporate affair. One does not have this kind of experience watching TV. TV is corporate rather than private. It encourages talk.
Me (July, 2010, age 58). But, does it matter?
The experience Cavett talks about of leaving a movie theatre at a loss for words is I think a common one. We’ve all had it. And it was the exactly this type of real world observation that fascinated McLuhan and which he loved to talk to people about. (Others being that radio is a visual medium, the telephone a non-visual medium, and children like to watch TV close up. Still others that radio as background “noise” at work is not visual. People tend to shout on cell phones. And listening to music with ear buds while running or biking can blind you to the visual.)
These seemingly unimportant experiences may be the keys to understanding the effects of media. At least McLuhan was drawn to them.
What do you think? Was McLuhan on to something.
Are there other seemingly unimportant media effects have you observed?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Listening for this post
The Dick Cavett Show, December 1970.
Tags: Acoustic, American mind, Communications, Criticism, Culture, Electronic media, Entertainment, Learning, Movies, Technology, Television, Visual medium
Marshall McLuhan (May 1964, age 52). North Americans are biased.
It is odd that North Americans will accept no other way of perceiving the world apart from the visual. The Brits have never gone this far, nor the French. To North Americans there is only one way for rational people to understand the world: in visual space. Visual space is continuous, uniform, and connected. That is the bias the North American brings to his understanding. Here only seeing is believing. There is no other way.
Me (February 2010, age 57). Today feeling is believing.
If Marshall McLuhan was right about the power of new electric media North Americans – especially those who are the second, third and fourth generations of TV kids – are no longer visually biased. The new bias is that of acoustic space, which is discontinuous, non-uniform, and disconnected.
Today seeing is no longer believing – feeling is believing. The good life is tactile: It’s “cool” “sweet” or “juicy.”
How many of the trends and assumptions of the world today fit with this new bias? Shortening attention spans, illiteracy and innumeracy, the failing of teachers rather than students, relative truth, the importance placed on intuition and feelings, emotional intelligence, grade inflation, political correctness?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p.300
Tags: Acoustic, American mind, Communications, Culture, Education, Technology, Television, Thinking, Visual perspective, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (May 1960, age 49). Perhaps I should have stuck with High Definition or Low Definition
TV like the telephone is low definition and therefore a cool medium. Very different from press, movie and radio, which are hot, high definition media providing a great deal of information. Most people don’t get this. They think TV is visual. It’s not, Radio is visual. TV’s acoustic, tactile and very involving because your senses must work hard to make sense of the meager data at hand. TV doesn’t work the same way as visual media. It’s an inward-looking medium. When you watch it you are driven inward because you are the screen.
Me (January 2010, age 57). Perhaps
It is remarkable how confusing most people find McLuhan’s idea that TV is cool. A director of programming for a TV network, whose major at university was communications, once said to me in conversation, “Are you sure McLuhan said TV is a cool medium?” And when I assured her he said it was, remained doubtful. It’s not surprising. Cool today means “interesting” hot means “sexy.” As in “she’s hot.” You’re going snowboarding? “Cool.” McLuhan took “hot and cool” from the world of jazz, where ”hot” jazz is a big rich sound with a lot of brass, and “cool” jazz is a smaller, ivory-tapping, more impromptu sound. Most people don’t associate hot and cool with the jazz world of the 1940s and 1950s. They use them the way California Valley-girls do. And so if you turn to a recent book on McLuhan co-authored by Terrence Gordon, Everyman’s McLuhan, you will find a list of hot and cool media, in which TV is listed as a hot medium and the movie as cool. This Gordon assures me is an error of the printer. He does not believe TV is a hot medium nor does he think that it has changed from cool to hot over time as TV technology has changed from the wood cabinet rabbit-eared box of the 1950s to the HD digital flat-screen of today. What is interesting about this error is that it is an error that is easily made. The terms hot and cool confused McLuhan’s readers in the 1960s. And they continue to confuse readers, and printers, today. (More on hot and cool tomorrow.)
What about other media? Is PowerPoint hot or cool? Is Facebook hot or cool? What about LinkedIn?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
W. Terrence Gordon, Eri Hamaji & Jacob Albert, Everyman’s McLuhan, New York: Mark Batty, 2007
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 270.
Tags: Acoustic, Communications, Hot and cool media, Medium is the message, Movies, Technology, Television, Understanding media
Marshall McLuhan (1960, age 48). The telephone blinds us to its power
The other day Everett Munro, a businessman here in Toronto, and one of my leading fans in the Hogtown business community, spoke to me about a problem he was having. Normally he said, “speaking to my boss is not a problem. But whenever we speak on the phone I’m gripped by fear. My voice shakes and I have difficulty breathing. I don’t understand it. It seems so irrational. I actually like my boss. We get along. Sure he’s demanding. Wants things right and wants them right now. But I’m the same way with the guys who work for me. Is there anything I can do to stop this? It’s driving me crazy.”
I was able to set him right. “Your problem, I said, “Is that you do not realize the power of the telephone. The telephone is such an intense auditory experience that it blacks out the visual. It blinds our power to see. You’ve got to work to involve the other senses, to counteract the power it’s having on the balance of your senses. Here’s the bottom line. Try to visualize to picture your boss when you’re speaking to him.”
Me (November 2009, age 57). What if he’s right?
This story is told by Philip Marchand in his 1989 biography of McLuhan. It is difficult to tell what Marchand himself thinks of the advice McLuhan gave to the nervous businessman. He writes matter-of-factly that Marshall McLuhan’s advice “doubtless would have sounded farfetched to many people, but the businessman tried it and it worked.” But we are left wondering whether McLuhan’s advice is really all that useful or is it actually something of a scam. Something that appeared to help but in actual fact was just a coincidence, or a placebo.
This is the story, however, that stimulated my own fascination with McLuhan. For like the nervous businessman I often found myself feeling nervous speaking to people on business calls. Curious, I tried McLuhan’s suggestion, and I found that it worked.
Does McLuhan’s advice sound far-fetched to you? Do you ever find yourself feeling nervous speaking on the telephone? Why don’t you try McLuhan’s suggestion too and let me know what happens? What have you got to lose?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger, 1989. P. 150.
Tags: Acoustic, Communications, Conversation, Listening, Relationship, Technology
Marshall McLuhan (1962-1963, age 51-52). The good of talking it out
I am happiest talking. Talk is a technology to deliver understanding of what you think right now. Writing is a technology for preserving what it was you used to think. I prefer to talk about what I’m thinking now rather than what it was I used to think. The academic boys don’t get this. Plato got it. He has Socrates say that writing is a dangerous technology that allows you to deliver someone else’s thinking as if it’s your own.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). How Marshall McLuhan talked it out
To find out more about Marshall McLuhan and his methods of thinking and preference for talking over writing, a conversation I told you a bit about yesterday, I spoke with Professor Abraham Rotstein, professor emeritus in economics, at the University of Toronto, who was a member of McLuhan’s circle in the 1960s. Here is what he told me about McLuhan’s methods for talking it out.
Rotstein: McLuhan worked as an oral man in research. He spoke through his books dozens of times. His monologues [it is said that McLuhan was a very polite listener, he never started to speak until he saw your lips had stopped moving) were his way of writing books. He had a hierarchy or stable of people called to whom he would rattle on. Basically there were four groups of people [he would phone to talk to in the evenings]: (1) 9pm-10pm graduate students; (2) 10 pm-11pm faculty; (3) after 11pm special people; and (4) up to 1 am [Tom] Easterbrook and other close buddies.
When McLuhan called he would rattle on at great speed. McLuhan presented orally work that later became written. He put down on paper what he had already thought out through extensive oral repetition.
Compare McLuhan’s style in his letters or interviews with his style in his books. Can you see the difference? How do you think the people in McLuhan’s stable handled being phoned and rattled on to? Is this the price they were willing to pay to be close to genius?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
See the pre-1968 interviews of McLuhan on www.digitallantem.net/mcluhan
Tags: Acoustic, American mind, Communications, Conversation, Creating, Education, Listening, Medium is the message, Relationship, Technology, Writing
Marshall McLuhan (1962 - 1963, age 51 – 52). Talking it out
I am primarily an oral man, a word man, not a numbers man. Writing is not my genius, talking is my genius. That is why I like to talk my books out. The problem is that it’s easy to undershoot and overshoot. With some books I probably should have stopped earlier with others I should have spent more time. The ideas got me going, always more ideas. I had to keep moving on, so much to discover.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). To understand McLuhan is to hear McLuhan
I spoke with Professor Abraham Rotstein, a professor emeritus, at the University of Toronto, who was a member of McLuhan’s circle in the 1960s. We spoke on the phone in August. I had a picture of him in my mind as we spoke, Professor Rotstein in the late 1970s, which was when I first met him, at the Monday night economic history seminars, which I attended as a graduate student in economics at Toronto. He’s wearing I imagine a dark jacket and tie, his hair is thinning and slicked back, he has a cigarette going in holder which lends him the appearance of a scholarly Jewish FDR. His trade mark was the question with such a long preamble that you had to fight to remember the question. Fortunately I’m asking the questions. I begin by asking him about how he first met Marshall McLuhan.
Rotstein: I was invited to a seminar, in 1962 or 1963. McLuhan was a friend of my thesis supervisor, Tom Easterbrook. I gave a presentation to McLuhan’s graduate students and onlookers on the idea of the various senses as extensions of man. I pointed out that the idea was present in the writings of the early Marx: the idea that man’s economic activities are extensions of man and in extending him they alienate him. McLuhan nodded when I said this but you could tell he wasn’t paying very much attention.
Me: The extensions of man, of course, is the subtitle of Understanding Media, which is probably McLuhan’s best bought if not best read book. Many people find it hard to read. I did myself. Was that your experience?
Rotstein: I don’t know if I’ve ever had a lot of difficulty understanding McLuhan. Understanding McLuhan is basically an oral exercise. I was always listening to him. I never read Understanding Media. Didn’t have to, McLuhan spoke it to me.
(The interview continues tomorrow)
What is your experience reading McLuhan? Do you find him difficult to understand? Can you think of ways to recreate the oral experience Professor Rotstein is talking about?
Relevance to your life: Are you an oral man or woman? How do you think things through?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
See the pre 1968 interviews of Mcluhan on www.digitallantem.net/mcluhan
Tags: Acoustic, American mind, Communications, Conversation, Creating, Medium is the message, Writing
Marshall (December 1947, age 35). Art is necessary
If you haven’t developed sensibility in contemporary art – where everything hits you all at once from all directions – you can’t understand the minds of the middle ages and you can’t understand your teenager’s minds. Artists live, medieval men lived, your TV kid lives in acoustic space.
Me (September 2009, age 57). Surround yourself with art
More than half of the people in the world today live in acoustic space. If you’re running a business and you’re over 50 you need to surround yourself with contemporary art to develop the sensibility you need to understand the people who work for you.
If you’re younger, you probably need to build up a visual perspective, to understand the people you work for. How? Listen to radio (NPR, CBC, BBC) as McLuhan recognized so long ago, it’s a visual medium.
Do you do anything to develop a visual perspective?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
P.S. See you here tomorrow
READING FOR THIS POST
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Selected and edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and Wiliam Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 190
Sorry, Out of Gas: Architecture’s Response to the 1973 Oil Crisis. Edited by Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini. Montreal: Canadian centre for Architecture, n.d.
Tags: Acoustic, Art, Business, Global village, Medium is the message, Visual medium, Visual perspective