Reading
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). Â 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
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Reading for this post
Philip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, 1989 p. 179.
The solution to the puzzle: Will the real Marshall McLuhan please stand up!
Marshall McLuhan (June, 2010, age 98). Â Foul play!
I assure you I had nothing to do with this puzzle. After all, as you should know, I’ve been dead and buried these past 30 years. Heaven has its perks – as Corinne continues to remind me – but writing blogs is not one of them. If you want my opinion, I think this puzzle was a bit of a cheat.
Me (June 2010, age 57).  Drum roll please!
Here are the four short passages once again. As I explained yesterday only one of these was actually written by Marshall McLuhan. Which one is the real McLuhan? If you just found this blog you may wish to try and solve the puzzle for yourself before reading the answer. If not simply scroll to “the solution to the puzzle.”
(1)   A modern movie actress who tries to play a role will seem old fashioned. To cope with this, actresses have cooled themselves way down, become numb blanks. Thus today’s stars are totally tranquilized. The smart thing for a girl nowadays is to play numb. Dumb actresses used to be in demand, now numb actresses are in demand. Rigor mortis is de rigueur.
(2)   There is a current issue of the TV Guide which contains a survey of convicts’ attitudes towards TV. That is people really up for a long time, many of them for life, and how they regard television. All convicts are apparently supplied with good TV sets. Such is the hardship of our prisons. They pass the word along: all the new gimmicks, all the new twists they find in crimes; and these are passed along quickly to the boys who are on the way out, and are tried out quickly in the community. There really is an astonishing story of how much television has helped to improve the level of crime.
(3)   The owner of a Hollywood hotel in an area where many movie and TV actors reside reported that tourists had switched their allegiance to TV stars. Moreover, most TV stars are men, that is, “cool characters,’ while most movie stars are women, since they can be presented as “hot” characters.
(4)   By filling the space of the TV with a mosaic of close-ups, The Hollywood Squares hypnotizes its audience by paralyzing their senses and numbing their eyes to other distractions. The movie-world is literally chopped up into nine squares, each of which contains a close up. The theme music is the ticktock of a hypnotists watch.
“The solution to the puzzle.”
The passage written by Marshall McLuhan is Number 3, which you can find on page 318 of Understanding Media.
Numbers 1 and 4 are the invention of Gary Wolf from his 1996 Wired magazine article “Channeling McLuhan.” See www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.01/channeling.html.
Number 2 is by McLuhan, but was spoken in conversation in 1977 rather than written. See the book edited by Barrington Nevitt and Maurice McLuhan, Who was Marshall McLuhan?, 1995, p. 61.
How did you do?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, 1989, pp. 35-37.
Will the real Marshall McLuhan please stand up!
Marshall McLuhan (October, 1934, age 23). Â A lesson from I.A. Richards.
I have had the most remarkable experience. I. A. Richards whose lectures I am attending here at Cambridge invited us to participate in an experiment. He handed out poems but did not tell us who wrote them and asked us to comment on them. It really was quite embarrassing. Thankfully not for me as I managed to escape for the most part with my dignity intact. But many of my fellow students said the most laudatory things about pure doggerel and heaped undeserved criticism on poets of canonical standing.
Me (June 2010, age 57).  A lesson from McLuhan?
Here are four short passages. It’s only fair to tell you that only one of these was actually written by Marshall McLuhan. Which one is the real McLuhan?
(1)   A modern movie actress who tries to play a role will seem old fashioned. To cope with this, actresses have cooled themselves way down, become numb blanks. Thus today’s stars are totally tranquilized. The smart thing for a girl nowadays is to play numb. Dumb actresses used to be in demand, now numb actresses are in demand. Rigor mortis is de rigueur.
(2)   There is a current issue of the TV Guide which contains a survey of convicts’ attitudes towards TV. That is people really up for a long time, many of them for life, and how they regard television. All convicts are apparently supplied with good TV sets. Such is the hardship of our prisons. They pass the word along: all the new gimmicks, all the new twists they find in crimes; and these are passed along quickly to the boys who are on the way out, and are tried out quickly in the community. There really is an astonishing story of how much television has helped to improve the level of crime.
(3)   The owner of a Hollywood hotel in an area where many movie and TV actors reside reported that tourists had switched their allegiance to TV stars. Moreover, most TV stars are men, that is, “cool characters,’ while most movie stars are women, since they can be presented as “hot” characters.
(4)   By filling the space of the TV with a mosaic of close-ups, The Hollywood Squares hypnotizes its audience by paralyzing their senses and numbing their eyes to other distractions. The movie-world is literally chopped up into nine squares, each of which contains a close up. The theme music is the ticktock of a hypnotists watch.
See you tomorrow with the answer to this puzzle.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, 1989, pp. 35-37.
The brevity of Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan (October 3, 1964, age 53). Â Watch out for the meat!
T. S. Eliot said the message of a poem is the meat thieves throw to the dog to distract its attention while they break into your house. Running this backwards, then, if you want to nail down the message of a poem or a book it’s not hard to do. All you need to look for is the meat that’s being thrown at you.
Me (June 2010, age 57).  Is it that easy?
My apologies for putting this idea into Marshall’s mouth. You will not find it in anything Marshall McLuhan wrote or said. But aside from the fact the focus is on the message not the medium, it does sound like something McLuhan might have said in a lucid, unmystical moment. Marshall McLuhan’s uncanny ability to go to the heart of a book with very few words was something that was very real and frequently impressed his friends and colleagues. For example, Ted (Edmund) Carpenter with whom McLuhan first began to work on media studies in the 1950s, says in an interview which you can find appended to the documentary film McLuhan’s Wake: “He had a way of getting to the point.” And “[I was] stunned by the brevity he could summarize things.”
For example, in a letter to Pierre Trudeau, McLuhan summarizes the famous Shannon-Weaver model of communication this way: “Shannon and Weaver were mathematicians who considered the side–effects of noise. They assumed that these could be eliminated by simply stepping up the charge of energy in a circuit.” [for more] And here is McLuhan’s summary statement of Peter Drucker’s Managing for Results: “[I]n every situation 10% of the events cause 90% of the events. The 10 % is the sector of opportunity, the 90 % is the area of problems. [Typically] the opportunity or environmental and innovational area is ignored. All sensible people deal first with problems – that is, the dead issues.”
Can McLuhan’s power of “brevity” be learned? If it can, how?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post:
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 311 and 542.
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.
Did you try it?
Marshall McLuhan (June 18, 1974, age 62). Well, did you?
Why is it that people insist that the study of media is difficult. All you have to do is look around you. Yesterday I suggested you look at Xeroxing. Well, did you?
Me (May 2010, age 57). Â What about another artifact?
The cell phone, of course, is still having affects on us and our other artifacts. Yesterday I went past the shattered remains of four telephone booths in a large public building in downtown Montreal. Each one had been killed by the cell phone. Other effects of the cell phone are: we are no longer tied to our desks, being out of touch is no longer easy to happen, charging a cell phone is now one of our daily tasks.
One more time – don’t worry about being profound – how are the artifacts about you changing your life and the artifacts about them?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 500.
The reading public no longer exists.
Marshall McLuhan (January 12, 1973, age 61). Thousands of reading publics exist
When I was at Cambridge, in the 1930s, the library of the English School maintained displays of a small number of relevant books covering a variety of different fields. Looking over the shelves I came away with the distinct idea that this was what you needed to know to know what was happening in history, poetry, or any other field. Today however such an impression is an impossibility. So much is being published – in America alone 39,000 books are published every year - there cannot be a reading public only publics. We read what we will and except for very modest area of overlap our reading separates us from one another.
Me (May 2010, age 57).  Thousands have become millions.
Every book club is a reading public. Each blog has its reading public, some large, most small.
What are the implications? Are programs like “Canada Reads” necessary to maintain a sense of community?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 462.
Deborah Hinton‘s post @ Communication Matters
Look to the media
Marshall McLuhan (February 27, 1962, age 50). TV!
Every family’s got a drop-out, magazine’s like Life are in trouble, the auto industry is veering out of control, the textbook industry and our schools are being completely overhauled. Why do so few people see that these things and a great many more are directly attributable to the impact of TV!
TV is not the first medium to have entirely reshaped society and it will not be the last. But in many ways it is the most obvious. The book escaped me for years. I caught on to TV in seconds.
Me (February, 2010, age 57).  What if he’s right?
Marshall McLuhan’s observation about TV suggests the connection between the rise of the internet and the decay of newspapers.
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! In Atlanta where I was early last month for a conference, the 5 star hotel I stayed in (thanks to the special deal the American Economic Association was able to arrange for its members) did not supply newspapers for its guests, as the big hotels do in Toronto. Their thinking being, I imagine that their guests would rather be on-line or in front of the TV. In Montreal the English language newspaper The Gazette is given away outside metro stations to commuters in the mornings and in the afternoons, but few appear to want to take a paper. Increasingly, the front page of the Gazette has become a showcase for advertisements, colour pictures and teasers about blogs and on-line stories. Some days, like last Monday, the lead story no longer leads on the front page.
The French seem to be lagging in the abandonment of the newspaper. The leading intellectual newspaper here is called Le Devoir. What English language daily would call itself Homework?
Are you more likely to get your news from TV, on-line, or from a newspaper? When the newspaper disappears, where will the radio morning shows get their stories?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
The Montreal Gazette, February 1, 2010.
Things change but we do not know it (continued)
Marshall McLuhan (November 18, 1961, age 50). The medium is invisible.
As I was saying no one sees the medium at work. It is invisible. It does its work on us and we go on differently, but do not see that everything has changed.
Me (January 2010, age 57). Another example?
PowerPoint has not only changed the world of work it has also dramatically changed the world of education. Consider this. Most lectures at universities – even in graduate school – are given using PowerPoint. Lecturers (or should I say PowerPointers) like it because they feel more in control of the lecture process. It gives them more confidence to have the slides at their command when they stand up to speak, say, for 1 to 2 hours in a large lecture hall. Students (the PowerPointed), however, also like it because it gives them more control over what they have to learn. How? PowerPoint typically reduces what students have to know for “the exam.” More and more, by tacit agreement between professor and student, what students are required to know is what is on the slides. And the slides reduce what students need to know. Conservatively, the maximum information you can reasonably get on a slide is 125 words. (Half the number of words you can fit on a single type-written, double-spaced 8½-by-11 inch page. But this is far in excess of the ideal of educational PowerPoint. The ideal is 5 to 7 bullet points each with no more than 5 to 7 words (The 5X5 rule or the 7X7 rule). The ideal reduces 125 words to 25 to 49 words a saving to students of 60.8 to 80 percent.
The medium of PowerPoint may be one of the more powerful and unseen forces that has driven the much-discussed decline in university education over the last generation. In education, unlike architecture or design, less may not be more.
Do you agree? Is PowerPoint enabling students to get by knowing less?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 280-281.