Television
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.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
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.
The power of names
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.
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). 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.
Working with others.
Marshall McLuhan (October 8, 1966, age 55). What a day!
I spent the day with George Leonard, who is a Senior Editor at Look Magazine. We talked without interruption from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. about the future of education. Quite frankly education isn’t what it used to be since the coming of TV. George is going to write up our conversation and the article will appear in Look. I can’t wait to see the expression on the face of the Dean of Graduate Studies when I show him my latest publication. He’ll be apoplectic.
Me (July, 2010, age 57) Which raises questions
“The Future of Education: The Class of 1989,” appeared in Look (February 21, 1967) as an article jointly written by Marshall McLuhan and George B. Leonard. But, as Leonard explains in his memoir, “Jamming with McLuhan, 1967,” McLuhan had nothing to do with the writing of it. Leonard says that he enjoyed the intellectual experience of working with McLuhan. But after writing only one other article – “The Future of Sex” – Leonard decided to end the partnership. In short, Leonard thought he wasn’t getting the credit he deserved. He was doing the hard work of writing and a good deal of the thinking, but readers were assuming the ideas were all McLuhan’s.
Are unequal partnerships of this type destined to fail? How much of the writing of the later McLuhan – particularly in his co-authored work – is actually McLuhan?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan? 1994, pp. 227-230.
Hot’s not hot!
Marshall McLuhan (December 13, 1977, age 66). In a word, you need charisma.
Today, Peter Gzowski asked me if the age of the Sophia Loren woman – the movie star – was over. Of course it is. To succeed today you must be able to succeed on television. And on television you can’t succeed with that hot stuff. That’s what killed Senator Joe McCarthy. One appearance on television and his career was over. That’s what killed Nixon too. The key is you’ve got to look like a lot of other nice people. That’s charisma.
Me (July, 2010, age 57). The meaning of charisma.
If you watch the McLuhan interview on Gzowski’s show you can tell that Gzowski doesn’t really know what to make of McLuhan. 
Take for example McLuhan’s definition of charisma: looking “like a lot of other nice people.” Gzowski laughs. He isn’t sure what to make of this. But clearly there is something in that definition that rings true and yet is unexpected. The definition forces you to think in the way a typical dictionary definition does not. For example a typical dictionary definition of the word is: “A capacity to inspire devotion and enthusiasm.” (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.) McLuhan’s definition explains how that power or capacity is conferred with different media. On television, he is saying, the power to inspire devotion and enthusiasm is given to people who we think look like us. In McLuhan’s language they have a corporate or social image. But in the movies things are different. There the people who inspire devotion and enthusiasm – movie stars – do not look like us. They have their own unique private image. This is not a theoretical position. It is an observation.
Is it true? Is it true today? Is the same true for social media?
Cordially, Marshall and Me