American mind
How much TV did Marshall McLuhan watch?
Marshall McLuhan (Summer 1952, age 41). A delightful chap!
This afternoon Hugh Kenner who is one of my graduate students brought around a friend of his, Fred Rainsbury, to chat in the garden of my house on St. Mary Street. Rainsbury is writing a Ph. D. thesis on The Irony of Objectivity in the New Criticism. I suggested he pay special attention to analogy, after all what’s metaphor?
Me (July, 2010, age 58). Apparently, more and more
According to Fred Rainsbury, who knew McLuhan in the early 1950s as a student, and went on to become Supervisor of Children’s Programming of Radio and Television at the CBC, “Marshall watched little television.”
Apparently over time McLuhan came to watch television more and more. In the mid 1970s McLuhan said in an interview that he had no time to listen to radio, no affection for movies anymore, but he did “see a good deal of television.” A remarkable admission from the man who is said to have pleaded with his children not to let his grandchildren watch too much TV and suggested the government limit the population’s access to TV. Which leads me to wonder how worried McLuhan actually was about the effects of TV? Did he change his mind? Did he believe himself to be immune? Was he purposely placing himself at risk in the pursuit of his research?
How much TV do you watch? Are you at all concerned about the effects of TV?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan, 1994, pp. 207 and 239.
The importance of the unimportant.
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.
I just don’t understand.
Marshall McLuhan (1960, age 49). Try the Coleridge method.
People can be a great mystery. Why do they think what they think? Or do what they do? The key is to understand them. But how? As I have often told my son Eric the Coleridge method (see his Biographia Litteraria) is most efficient. To find out what someone knows start with what they don’t know and work from there.
Me (July, 2010, age 57). OK, let’s try it.
Eric McLuhan notes that “Going the other way, it can take you as long (or nearly) to learn a man’s knowledge as it took him. Life is too short!”
What does this method tell us about Marshall McLuhan? There are two things McLuhan often professed ignorance of: small talk and numbers. What do these areas of ignorance tell us about what McLuhan knew? The absence of small talk implies the presence of big talk, suggesting that McLuhan was comfortable in the world of abstractions. The blank in numbers suggests, perhaps, that McLuhan’s explorations in understanding media were qualitative rather than quantitative. That is when he said TV had changed the world he was not saying it had changed a great deal because of TV. He was simply saying it had changed. He implied that it may have changed a great deal, but he had no way of telling how much.
What do you think? Is the Coleridge method helpful in understanding McLuhan?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan? 1994, p. 242.
Where do you get your information?
Marshall McLuhan (Fall 1953, age 42). Books!
“Marshall, must you spread your books throughout the house?”
“No, Corinne, but it serves me to do so. It reminds me of what I have read. Also I like to pick a book up and dip into it every now and again to add to and refresh my memory. Having them about me this way is a great help.”
Me (July, 2010, age 57). Books!
While McLuhan enjoyed talking to people, Philip Marchand says he got most of his information from books. On average, says Marchand, McLuhan read 35 books a week, which seems like a lot, even for a university professor. I get most of my ideas for this blog from books, but not exclusively from books. On average, though, I cannot say I read more than two books a week. (May be – like McLuhan – I should skim more.)
Where do you get your information? How many books do you read in a week?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, 1989 p. 179.
What’s wrong with Google?
Marshall McLuhan (March 3, 1959, age 47). Another breakthrough!
You have no doubt noticed that the first thing we do with a new invention is to use it in old ways. It is not a coincidence that the automobile was originally called “the horseless carriage,” the railroad “the iron horse,” and, at least in Britain, the radio was known as “the wireless.”
Me (July, 2010, age 57). Google may be leading us down memory lane.
Whether or not Google is being used in old or new ways, it is as McLuhan taught extending or enhancing some part of us, but what? Some months ago, Julien Smith blogged about how Google was making it unnecessary to remember things. And as a result, he suggested, we may be losing our power to remember. Who starred in that movie? Who wrote that book? How did that old song go? Don’t worry about it. Google it!
In artificially extending our memories the technology may be weakening our natural powers to remember. This is a concern. But it may also be that Google is doing more than our memory work for us; it may be leading us down memory lane. With it we can remember more than we ever could, and, as a result, find ourselves more interested in recovering old ideas than discovering new ones. This may be a greater concern.
What do you use Google for? The old or the new?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews. Edited by Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, 2003, p. 2.
Is this the apocalypse?
Marshall McLuhan (June 30, 1960, age 48). We have opened a door to a new world.
I have the uncomfortable feeling that I’m the only one who senses that something dramatic and unprecedented has happened. As I wrote in my Report on Understanding New Media, which was commissioned by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, “We are in great danger at the present of sacrificing the whole of our western culture with its unconscious bias based on alphabet and printing.”
Corinne said if I get this wrong I’ll come off like the boy who cried wolf. Perhaps, but I’m no boy and this is no ordinary wolf. When so much is at stake how can I remain silent.
Me (July, 2010, age 57). We are still waiting for the future to arrive.
An unnamed reviewer (L.H.) acting for the National Association of Educational broadcasters advised the group that they should exercise “caution in interpreting and generalizing … [the] results [of McLuhan’s report.” Caution is still being exercised. Nicholas Carr may be convinced that “Google is making us stupid,” but it is doubtful if anyone is losing any sleep over the subversion of our culture by electric media that McLuhan said was taking place some fifty years ago. Perhaps, at long last, we should be.
As I have said before the death of western culture appears to be a very long and circuitous process. Are you worried? Should we remain silent?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan. Report on Understanding New Media. 30 June 1960, preface p. 8.
Teenagers are not adolescents.
Marshall McLuhan (1967, age 65/66). The adolescent is now obsolescent
In the 1930s and 1940s adolescence was the stage children passed through on their way to adulthood. Adolescents were not adults they were adults in training. Today, electric technology, in particular the transistor radio and television have banished this rite of passage. Teenagers are not going through a stage today; they have become a different species.
Me (June 2010, age 57). Howard Gossage explains …
As I said yesterday Marshall McLuhan liked to assert ideas but he did not like to explain them. In McLuhan: Hot and Cool (pp. 28-29) Howard Gossage makes an attempt to provide an explanation for McLuhan’s idea that the teenager of the 1960s had become a different species.
“McLuhan’s theory is that this is the first generation of the electronic age. He says they are different because the medium that controls their environment is not print – one thing at a time, one thing after another – as it has been for five hundred years. It is television, which is everything happening at once, instantaneously, and enveloping.
A child who gets his educational training on television – and very few nowadays do not – learns the same way any member of a pre-literate society learns: from the direct experience of his eyes and ears without Gutenberg for a middle man.”
What about the teenager of today? Has the internet so speeded up the electric age that we share the world with another new species?
Is the concern about the internet making people stupid missing the point? It may be that it is not bringing us all down to some given preliterate level, but rather dividing generations more thoroughly and irrevocably than TV ever did.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Howard Luck Gossage, “You can see why the mighty would be curious.” In McLuhan: Hot and Cool, edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn.
Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the internet is doing to our brains,” The Atlantic, July, 2008.
Marshall McLuhan and the Future of the Book
Marshall McLuhan (August 1967, age 56). Read fast, read deep.
Eric told me the Evelyn Wood course in speed reading course would give me some ideas about the Future of the Book and he was right. Speed reading – by the way – is like X-raying a book to get a picture of what the author is thinking. In this sense it’s about reading in depth. Of course it’s very tactile and involving. And of course it does motivate you to read faster.
Me (June 2010, age 57). The future of the book is now
I’m not sure what ideas about the Future of the Book (a book project of McLuhan’s that was never finished), or anything else Marshall McLuhan actually got from taking a speed reading course. Philip Marchand says in his biography that McLuhan did find the course useful for reading advertising fliers.
His big idea about the Future of the Book seems to have come from his contemplation of Xeroxing or photocopying rather than speed reading. Xeroxing, of course, is a technology in which all who use it are publishers and loosely speaking writers too. Today the new social media allows more and more people to be writers and publishers. Given the millions of blogs that exist today, as McLuhan predicted, readers have truly become publishers and writers in the electronic age. And as usual not all are happy with the way this future has played out: especially the newspapers, magazines, book publishers and others whose markets have been shifted by the internet.
In this new world , publishing may be as solitary an activity as reading.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post:
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 345.