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.
Social media
Do you go out to do your homework?
Marshall McLuhan (December 14, 1960, age 49). Everything is now done in teams
A team or corporate approach characterizes schooling today. For example, you can see this “most emphatically in the study habits of high school students, who now say in the evening, “I’m going out to do my homework.”
Me (September, 2010, age 58). The beat goes on
Today the internet kids still go out to do their homework, but now thanks to cell phones, Facebook and computers they don’t have to go out to go out.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 275.
Perseverance
Marshall McLuhan (1974, age 63). I have doubts …
I don’t know perhaps it was late. I was tired. The Monday night seminar had just ended. Eric was driving me home and I said to him: “Is it worth it? All this effort to alert people, when they just attack the bearer of news and do nothing. Do I have the right to, am I supposed to, should I continue to keep investigating and making discoveries? Why bother, if the West is being discarded and no one will do anything about it or even listen.”
Me (July, 2010, age 57). But he never gave up
McLuhan had doubts about his ability to get through to people, to get people to think about, to comprehend, the power of media. He would have been a fool not to. His style insured him critics. But he never gave up. Today it is clear, as Douglas Coupland says, what with Google, Facebook, You tube, and everything else like this blog your reading on the internet, McLuhan “was right on the money four decades ahead of the biggest shift in human communication since the printing press.”
Am I getting through to McLuhan? What can we learn from him after all these years?
Like McLuhan I too have doubts. As we approach our 200th post questions come to me. What was I thinking when I committed to 300 posts? Should I keep going? It’s been great, but why bother? What good does it do to sieve through old ground? Is the medium a barrier to the message? But then occasionally there are discoveries …
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
W. Terrence Gordon. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding, 1997, p. 275.
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.
Separation is obsolete
Marshall McLuhan (January 26, 1976, age 64). Sheer stupidity
Last night I shifted 40 to 50 books off the sofa and miraculously Sheila Watson’s Coach House press collection of essays and stories, Open Letter, came to hand. It really is a delight. As I was reading her essays on Wyndham Lewis it hit me forcibly that we have all been fools. Here we are joined in a common interest and we have done less than we might to advance that interest because we no longer live in the same place. The wind has blown us and we have allowed ourselves to be scattered.
Me (May 2010, age 57). Has technology compensated for stupidity?
Unlike books, electric media now enable us to reconnect, work together and live apart in ways McLuhan could not. Whether this is a good thing or not, it is a fact. You no longer need to live in the same town to be part of the same community.
What discarnate, disembodied communities are you part of?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 516.
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
What is!
Marshall McLuhan (January 21, 1971, age 59). Frankly, I’m baffled!
What baffles me is the assumption many people make when they read my work. The assumption that whatever happens ought to happen. And taking things one step further whatever can happen should happen. These seem to me to be recipes for disaster.
Me (April 2010, age 57). Me too!
This should be obvious, but apparently it’s not. (These assumptions are made repeatedly in the discussion of social media. Facebook and Twitter have happened but is it clear that they ought to have happened? Or just because you can tweet you ought to tweet?)
A closely related idea to “Whatever happens ought to happen” is “Everything happens for a reason.” A comforting idea for people trying to deal with evils by reframing them as goods. For example, if my mother had not died I would never have known how much I loved her. Everything then has its silver lining. And nothing just happens. It happens for a good reason.
Or not.
When life deals you a lemon do you try to make it into lemonade? Or do you say, “Look a lemon, I wonder how it got here?”
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 421.
New media are hungry
Marshall McLuhan (August 10, 1964, age 53). Here’s a new idea!
This is an idea that hit me too late to be incorporated into Understanding Media, which I might add – and I will – has been doing ‘vurry’ well at the book stores. New media have a habit of swallowing old media and in so doing transforming them. The newspaper swallowed the book. Film swallowed newspapers and books. TV swallowed film. Film on TV became something quite different from what it was – shlock transformed into a high-class art form. Books when printed serially in newspapers became something quite different, too. Dickens and Conan Doyle ceased to be writers of pot-boilers and became literary masters. Here’s the rule: new medium eats old medium and the old becomes high art while the new is seen as low art.
Me (March 2010, age 57). Does the rule still work?
Let’s see. Are the series ‘Magnum PI’ or ‘Murder, She Wrote’ seen on DVD today different from what they were on TV in the 1980s? Seriously though the rule seems to have two parts:
- new media eat or swallow or contain old media; and
- the new media are seen as low class (kitsch, grade B, cliché) and the old media as high class (art, grade A, archetype).
And the first part is easier to swallow than the second. The cell phone has swallowed the watch. Watches have become chronometers. E-mail has swallowed the letter and the letter has become art. The computer has swallowed the filing cabinet (and a great many other things) and filing cabinets are becoming classy collectables.
What’s becoming art in your home?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p.308
Twitter’s changing the world
Marshall McLuhan (July 10, 1964, age 52). Complex.
People raised on books have some very simple-minded ideas about TV and other electric media. TV is not simply a new way to deliver news and entertainment. Just because people have these ideas does not mean electric media do not have complex effects on psyche and society. Change is all about us, but it is convenient for the vested interests to pretend that nothing has changed.
Me (March 2010, age 57). Complex.
People raised on TV seem to have a hard time understanding the new social media. Take Twitter for example. If there is anything obvious about what Twitter is doing to psyche and society it is that it is recreating the world as virtual high school. We all want to know what the cool kids are doing right now. Brad’s shooting hoops. Brittany’s nabbed a great pair of Manolo Blahnik pumps. Leo’s stuck at LAX. Life as we knew it is collapsing to 140 characters. But of course one could chose to believe that nothing has really changed. Twitter’s a faux-fad. There’s nothing to it. If we hold our breath it will all go away.
What’s your take? Simple or complex?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p.306-07