Technology
Guess if you can.
Me (September, 2010, age 58). Who can make sense of …
Rock ’n’ Roll kids, the surfers, and the hippies?
Swingers, poets, and artists?
New York City, Southern California, and Canada?
Topless restaurants, Playboy, and silicon breasts?
Sputnik, the DEW-Line, and the Cold War?
Suburbs, Watts, and Vietnam?
Howl, Mad magazine, and Dyslexia?
Teen age and Executive Drop Outs?
Computers and the mini skirt?
The sixties?
Marshall McLuhan (1964, age 53). Me.
You’re going to kick yourself when I tell you. In a word – television.
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Cordially, Marshall and Me
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Reading
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964i.
The secret is to avoid eye contact
Marshall McLuhan (1964, age 52). Isn’t it obvious?
“The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.”
Me (August, 2010, age 58). Really?
What did McLuhan mean by this? Read Douglas Coupland’s recent biography of McLuhan and you will find this quotation separated from its context and put up as meaning that a man’s name has a subliminal effect. If your last name is Rich, for example, people won’t think you’re poor. A somewhat kooky idea that McLuhan adopted in his analysis of the difficulties of Richard Nixon. (See this blog – The Power of Names – in which I must admit I did not see this distinction as clearly as I do now.)
Take a look at what McLuhan is actually trying to say with this line in Understanding Media (p. 49). He starts with the observation that “in a highly visual and highly literate culture” – read Canada, Britain or America – most people can’t quite catch the name of a person they’re being introduced to for the first time. Why? Because McLuhan says you’re so caught up in looking at the person that you don’t hear the name. It’s as if the sound is blocked out or dimmed. To get the name you then ask “How do you spell your name?” (How much more visual can you get?) This wouldn’t happen, he says, in a highly auditory ear culture. In such a culture – to reach the quotation at last – “the sound of a man’s name … is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.”
If you lived in an ear culture rather than an eye culture, McLuhan says, you’d hear the name. But we don’t do we? Even today after half a century of television and now the internet we still seem to be a highly visual culture. We still have trouble hearing names for the first time. What do we do to help people hear names at large business meetings and social events? We ask them to wear name tags. (How much more visual can you get?)
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, pp. 49.
What if he’s right?
Marshall McLuhan (1964, age 52). Here are two short lists.
Three things that haven’t worked in America since the coming of TV:
Movies
National magazines
Comic books
And two things that thanks to TV Americans have discovered a new passion for:
Skin diving
Small cars.
Me (August, 2010, age 58). Now what?
I wonder if it’s too late to make a call to my broker?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, pp. 417 and 421.
For your information, here is a question.
Marshall McLuhan (1960, age 48/49). The question is:
Why should the sending or receiving of a telegram seem more dramatic than the ringing of a telephone?
Me (August, 2010, age 58). The sending or receiving of what?
Anyone who has sent or received a telegram can attest to the truth of McLuhan’s observation.
Unfortunately, many of the readers of this blog may find the truth of McLuhan’s observation difficult to grasp because they have never sent or received a telegram.  It is also possible that they have never heard a telephone ring dramatically. Which raises the question: What is today’s dramatic equivalent of the telegram? I suspect that the answer is: there isn’t one. Which raises another question for your information: Is the history of media impossible?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, 1989, p. 150.
What the Apollo program was really all about.
Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1969, age 58). A man on the moon?
As usual the networks have missed the real story. I am not referring to their failure to report my birthday, but their coverage of the Apollo program moon landing.
“That’s one small step for man,” Neil Armstrong has been telling us on every newscast, “one giant step for mankind.” But this isn’t about putting a footprint on the surface of the moon. It’s about getting a look at ourselves. To see us as others see us. In other words, it’s been an “ego trip.”
Me (July, 2010, age 58). Take a look for yourself.
As Homer teaches, getting home can be a long hard journey.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan, 1994, pp. 230.
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). Â 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.
Prediction.
Marshall McLuhan (1966, age 55). It seems inevitable.
As the world speeds up what was formerly separate becomes joined. Politics is becoming entertainment and entertainment politics. Within fifteen years I think it is safe to say an actor will be elected president of the United States.
Me (July, 2010, age 58). And vice versa?
This is one of McLuhan’s predictions that seems spot on (Ronald Reagan) incredibly perceptive (who else would have thought such a thing) and a bit too good to be true (one wonders how seriously he took the idea.)
As I was playing with the idea it struck me that it should work the other way too. A politician should eventually succeed as an actor. It took a bit longer but Al Gore did win an Oscar for his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
What predictions of Marshall McLuhan’s do you find most startling?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
P.S. From Marshall: Corinne tells me it’s your birthday. Happy Birthday Michael. May there be many more.
Reading for this post
Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan? 1994, p. 198.