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.
Understanding media
The understanding media pun contest
Me (August, 2010, age 58). Pun.
Part II of Understanding Media contains 26 case studies, one for each letter of the alphabet. Each deals with a particular medium or technology. McLuhan delighted in puns and so it is not surprising to find puns in some of the titles of these chapters: for example “Clocks: The Scent of Time,” “Movies: The Reel World,” and “Automation: Learning a Living.”
Your challenge, should you decide to accept it is to come up with punning or joking chapter titles either for technologies that did not make it into Understanding Media or for chapters that did but for which McLuhan did not provide a punning subtitle.
For example, “Toasters: A Slice of Leaven,” “The Passenger Pigeon: A Bird in the Band,” “The Sun Dial: Tempus Fidgit.”
Marshall McLuhan (August 2010, age 99). I like a challenge
What about: “The Microscope: To see or not to see,” “Etch-a-sketch: Pane in the Ass,” or “Invisible Ink: The Write Stuff.”
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, pp.xi-xiii.
Alter your reality.
Marshall McLuhan (Fall 1968, age 57). The extensions of us
It is obvious that media – in fact all of our artifacts – are extensions of us. The wheel extends the foot, clothing extends our skin. What is not obvious is the number and subtlety of the ways they extend us.
Me (August, 2010, age 58). The mind is opened
Philip Marchand says that the power of McLuhan as a teacher is that his “classes held the promise of permanently altering one’s appreciation of some aspect of reality.” (p. 3.) To get a hint of the effect of McLuhan as a teacher try this experiment. Take a five dollar bill out of your wallet. What do you see? What parts of us does money enhance or extend? Make a list.
Here is part of the list McLuhan comes up with in chapter 14 of Understanding Media.
Trade and choice – spending
Power
The price system
Specialization
Work and skill
Wishes and desires
Persuasion
The storage of value – saving
Information
The number sense
Or consider the number of extensions there are for our skin.
Clothing
Buildings
Central heating
Power
Attractiveness
Identity
Can you walk downtown and not see the big buildings differently? As enhancers of both our ordinary lives and the stuff dreams are made of?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The extensions of man, 1964, chapter 14.
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger, 1989, p. 3.
The difference involvement makes
Marshall McLuhan (1966, age 54/55). Tony understands.
I was talking with Tony Schwartz, the New York sound wizard, again today. I must say he embarrassed me with his total understanding of something I have written about in Understanding Media. In this electric age in which we live, I was saying, we are bombarded with instant information on all sides at once. The result is all our senses are involved in depth.
“Marshall,’ he said, “it’s the difference between getting a telephone call that your house is burning and receiving a letter telling you that your house has burned!”
Me (July, 2010, age 57). Is involvement a Trojan horse?
Businesses often say they want their employees to be more involved. Whether you’re a manager or an employee you might ask yourself whether it would actually be a good thing if all employees were more involved. Involvement, as McLuhan suggests, comes at a psychic price. Ringing phones may raise your heart rate, but do they make it easier to put out fires?
How involved are employees at the place where you work? Is increased involvement what businesses really want?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
PS: From me. Happy birthday Marshall! Please join us [virtually] as we raise a glass to toast the 99th birthday of Marshall McLuhan.
Reading for this post
Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan? 1994, p. 152.
The hard cover book is dead
Marshall McLuhan (1960, age 48/49). They didn’t want to hear it …
Thanks to my old friend Bernie Muller-Thym, I spoke today, to a group of book publishers meeting at Columbia University. I told them the news they absolutely need to know. The hard cover book is obsolete – in short, dead. From the restlessness of the natives I could tell they didn’t want to hear it.
Me (July, 2010, age 57). And yet …
It is one of the curious ironies in McLuhan’s life that at that meeting where he foretold the death of the hard cover book one of the editors in the audience came up to McLuhan after his talk to ask him if he would consider writing one for McGraw-Hill. McLuhan said yes and that book which appeared in 1965 was the best-selling Understanding Media.
For some time now it has appeared that the concept of the book as we know it – the centerpiece and center force of western culture – has been on its deathbed. Recently, however, some have suggested that e-books and the new electronic readers may give the book new life. Are they right? Should Tom Wolfe’s question “what if he’s right?” really be “what if he’s right eventually?”
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, 1989, p. 176.
The measure of Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan (May 6, 1966, age 54). Really?
Well, how’d I do Corinne?
You were magnificent Marshall. But surely Patrick Watson was exaggerating when he said that “no one can make sense out of more than ten percent of what” you say.
Me (June 2010, age 57). A test
While Marshall McLuhan was renowned for being difficult to understand to say that 90 percent of what he says is incomprehensible does seem an exaggeration. Granted Patrick Watson’s aim was to be controversial when he said this on the CBC television program “This Hour Has Seven Days.” (May 6, 1966) But this is as good an excuse as any to make the point that Marshall McLuhan is not as difficult to understand as is commonly thought. Or maybe he is.
Here by way of a test is a bit of what Marshall McLuhan had to say on the program.
[The interviewer, Robert Fullford, asks.] “Has [the world] changed because of TV?”
[McLuhan replies:] “Television gave the old electric circuitry that’s already here a huge extra push in this direction of involvement and inwardness. You see, the circuit doesn’t simply push things out for inspection, it pushes you in. It involves you. When you put a new medium into play, people’s sensory life shifts a bit, sometimes shifts a lot. This changes their outlook, their attitudes, changes their feelings about studies, about school, about politics. Since TV, Canadian, British and American politics have cooled off almost to the point of rigor mortis … .”
What do you think? Is 90 percent of this something “no one can make sense out of?”
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Who Was Marshall McLuhan, edited by Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, 1995, pp. 135-36.
The coolness of TV and PowerPoint too
Marshall McLuhan (1965, age 54). TV is cool!
As I have pointed out in Understanding Media, TV is a cool medium. It is low definition. It provides information sparsely, not richly, which means it is extremely involving. All the senses are put to work. Naturally it induces high participation in an audience.
Me (June 2010, age 57). So is PowerPoint!
Like TV, PowerPoint is a cool medium. Although little recognized as such, PowerPoint’s coolness is one of the reasons – McLuhan would have said the chief reason – it has come to dominate the world of presentation and at the same time attract widespread criticism as a tool for oversimplifying communication.
Last year I saw a PowerPoint presentation given by the chief economist of a bank in which it was easy to see how cool the medium was. The presentation took place in a large ballroom in a hotel in Montreal. Two large screens glowed on either side of her. While she was obviously a good speaker and the audience seemed to be very involved in the talk hardly anyone looked at her. Instead all eyes were riveted on the screens. After the presentation was over I asked someone at a neighbouring table what they thought of the talk. Their answer: “Too simple.”
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1965, p. 319.
Another lesson in the practicality of Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan (June 3, 1968, age 56). Don’t Do It Pierre!
I have been trying to explain to Pierre Trudeau why he should refuse to participate in TV debates. It has nothing to do with his skills in political debate or his suitability to the medium. It is the medium. TV and debates do not mix.
Me (April 2010, age 57). A Change of Heart?
As was noted yesterday, according to Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan’s most recent biographer, the last thing you should look for in the work of Marshall McLuhan is usefulness or practicality. “There are, perhaps, no practical political, religious, or financial applications to Marshall’s work,” he writes. “It could even be argued that it should be seen as a rarefied artifact unto itself, an intricate and fantastically ornate artwork that creates its own language and then writes poetry with it.”
And yet here again what McLuhan says to Pierre Trudeau about debating and TV seems to have a practical aspect to it. The idea is that TV is a cool conversational medium not a hot debating medium. McLuhan’s advice to Trudeau is to refuse to debate on TV. This is practical advice. However, it is not without its difficulties. How Trudeau could have explained such a decision persuasively to the press and his political opponents is far from clear. It also represents an apparent change in McLuhan’s thinking on the subject. In Understanding Media, for example, McLuhan suggests that only hot personalities have problems with debates on TV. He says Kennedy beat Nixon in their debate on TV because Kennedy was cool and therefore more naturally suited to the TV medium while Nixon who he said was hot looked bad on it.
Have political debates on TV been a misuse of the medium? Can cool personalities win in debates on TV? Or do we all lose?
Dip into the Kennedy Nixon debates and weigh in.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan, Toronto, Penguin, 2009, pp. 142-43.
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 352.
Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media, 1964, pp. 329-30.
Don’t read your critics, write them!
Marshall McLuhan (March 9, 1965, age 53). Critics!
I’m delighted that Harold Rosenberg has written a review of Understanding Media in the New Yorker. I don’t think I will ever get around to reading it, however, I do think I’ll drop him a line to tell him where he went wrong.
Me (March 2010, age 57). A critical response
Harold Rosenberg’s review of Understanding media published in the February 27, 1965, issue of the New Yorker was one of the pieces that helped make McLuhan famous. (You can find it reprinted in Gerald Emanuel Stearn, ed. McLuhan: Hot & Cool, 1967) McLuhan wrote to Rosenberg on March 1, 1965 to complain that Rosenberg was wrong to say that his writing was repetitive. McLuhan insisted that he did not repeat things. Rather – if I understand him correctly – with each return to an idea in a different context he was actually revealing small and subtly different meanings in it. In his words the ‘scenery does not change but the texture does.’
It is remarkable that McLuhan would write to a critic to set him straight (this does not seem to me to be a wise thing to do) and even more remarkably that at the time he wrote him he had not actually read Rosenberg’s review himself (which also does not seem to me to be a wise thing to do.)
How do you deal with critics?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 318.