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.
Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (July 3, 1964, age 52). My statements are not opinions.
People seem to believe that I make things up out of thin air. It simply isn’t true. Everything that I say can be checked out, and if it doesn’t check out – à la Popper – it can be chucked out. If I was simply expressing a personal opinion I wouldn’t bother to say it.
Me (February 2010, age 57). Can we check this out?
Here is one of the statements of Marshall McLuhan: since the advent of TV Americans have become less visual.
(The visual he said perceive the world as “uniform, continuous, and connected” – like a page of printed text. To be visual is to view the world from a distance – to be uninvolved, objective, and rational. To view the world less visually is to perceive it more acoustically – acoustic space is “fluctuating, discontinuous, and disconnected” – the world viewed up close – intimately, emotionally and tactically. The less visual are less objective, less rational. They are involved.)
A case can certainly be made that this is true. Compare “The Dick Cavett Show” to “Oprah”, the “The Twilight Zone” to “Numbers” or “Perry Mason” to “Boston Legal.” America today has a more tactile less visual feel. Granted, it’s not a scientific test, but in a rough and ready way it does provide support for Marshall McLuhan’s statement.
Are we all becoming more or less visual? Is each generation less visual than its predecessor? If so, what difference does it make?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p.304
Tags: American mind, Communications, Technology, Television, Visual perspective, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (May 1964, age 52). North Americans are biased.
It is odd that North Americans will accept no other way of perceiving the world apart from the visual. The Brits have never gone this far, nor the French. To North Americans there is only one way for rational people to understand the world: in visual space. Visual space is continuous, uniform, and connected. That is the bias the North American brings to his understanding. Here only seeing is believing. There is no other way.
Me (February 2010, age 57). Today feeling is believing.
If Marshall McLuhan was right about the power of new electric media North Americans – especially those who are the second, third and fourth generations of TV kids – are no longer visually biased. The new bias is that of acoustic space, which is discontinuous, non-uniform, and disconnected.
Today seeing is no longer believing – feeling is believing. The good life is tactile: It’s “cool” “sweet” or “juicy.”
How many of the trends and assumptions of the world today fit with this new bias? Shortening attention spans, illiteracy and innumeracy, the failing of teachers rather than students, relative truth, the importance placed on intuition and feelings, emotional intelligence, grade inflation, political correctness?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p.300
Tags: Acoustic, American mind, Communications, Culture, Education, Technology, Television, Thinking, Visual perspective, Visual thinking
Marshall (November 17, 1976, age 65). This will show them
Sir Karl Popper says that Science is what can be disproved but is not. Took me two years of looking, reading, asking people the question, what is science? to get this gem. Finally I found the answer in Popper’s Objective Knowledge.
Now, Eric and I were talking and we came up with three laws of media pretty fast – things all media do – laws that put to the test cannot be disproved, and then after much thinking a fourth. Here they are: (1) all media are extensions of us, enhancing, extending or amplifying our minds, bodies, or spirits in some way; (2) in coming into being all media displace or make obsolescent some old condition, situation or thing; (3) at the same time as they displace they also retrieve some previously displaced condition, situation, or thing; (4) at the same time all media when pushed to the limit reverse, shifting 180 degrees in their defining characters or qualities. (For some reason the third law was the hardest to discover. Took me three weeks. The other three took half a day.) Here’s the kicker, I bet you can’t disprove even one of them. In fact I challenge anyone to disprove any of them.
Me (December 2009, age 57). Whatever they are McLuhan’s laws aren’t science
The problem with Marshall McLuhan’s Laws of Media is that they cannot be disproved because they’re not disprovable. They’re definitions pretending to be laws.
Newton’s laws of motion can be tested. McLuhan’s laws of media cannot be tested. The laws of media are descriptive. To be testable a law must be written in such a way that you can imagine a situation in which it does not hold. For example, water boiling at 99 degrees centigrade at sea level, or apples falling at 33 feet per second squared in a vacuum. But McLuhan’s laws cannot be imagined failing in the sense that if you observed “this” then you could say “that” did not happen.
The laws of media are like Monty Python’s theory of dinosaurs – small at one end, big in the middle, and small at the other end.
With the laws of media you cannot test their truth, they are true by definition. No extension? No medium. But you can ask are they useful.
Are McLuhan’s laws useful? If so what are they useful for? What part of Mcluhan’s thinking is testable?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Forward Through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections On and By Marshall McLuhan. Ed. Paul Benedetti and Nancy DeHart. Scarborough Ontario: Prentice-Hall, 1996, p. 188.
Tags: American mind, Communications, Education, Genius, Learning, Medium is the message, Thinking, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (November 19, 1952, age 41). Writing in books
I have more fun writing in books than I do writing books. The End of the Gutenberg Era book is taking longer than I thought. Not surprising, as Corinne tells me I seem to be reading all literature for it. Here’s how I attack a book. First I dip into it and grab the big message then I go back and talk with the writer, that is I write to him in the margins. Take this new book that just came out, by William H. Whyte, Jr., and the editors of Fortune magazine, Is Anybody listening? Here’s the heart: PR types at G.M., G.E. and I.B.M. are spending a fortune selling capitalism and democracy to the world. And Whyte delivers the shocking news that despite the all expenses paid field trips to New York, London, Paris, and L.A. nobody’s listening!
Here’s one of the conversations I had with Whyte in the margins of his book. “Of course they aren’t. Nobody expects people are going to read advertizing copy before they actually buy it. You should talk with David Ogilvie he’ll give you the low down. It’s a well understood fact on Madison Avenue that people only read ad copy after they buy the product.” That’s what Corinne did when I went out and bought her that new vacuum cleaner she’s been asking for. Spent a whole lunch hour pouring over the glossy pamphlets provided by the good folks at Hoover. And that’s why Canadian teenagers don’t like Canadian history; they haven’t bought the product yet.
Me (November 2009, age 57). The problem with highlighting
Marshall McLuhan wrote in his books. If you go to the national archives you can see his writing in his copies of Saussure, Joyce, and the rest. I do much the same myself with McLuhan’s books. Except that I often write orders to myself. Things like “compare this 1952 outline for The End of the Gutenberg Era to the final table of contents of 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy.” Or “See Postman.”
There are different ways of marking in books. Many students I see studying at McGill and Concordia University seem to prefer highlighting. That is you work your way through a photocopied article or textbook assiduously highlighting in pink, yellow, or blue everything you think is worth keeping and ignoring the rest. This approach is a method of summarization. In the olden days, before highlighters, students would underline using coloured pencils or ball point pens to obtain a similar result. The idea being, I think, that the highlighted or underlined material was what you should pay attention to when you re-read the article or text when it was time to study for your final exams.
The problem is highlighting or underlining does not make you the equal of the article or text, it makes you subservient to it. May be that’s what you need to do to get an undergraduate degree at university; talking, conversing, writing in the margins is what you need to do to be the equal or the better of the writers of the books you read.
Do you write in your books? Do you underline? Do you highlight? Do use post it notes? Is it possible to read an electronic book or an article or book on your computer’s screen with understanding if you cannot mark it or make notes on it in some way?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
William H. Whyte, Jr. Is Anybody Listening? New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952.
Tags: Advertising, American mind, Books, Communications, Education, History, Hot and cool media, Learning, Management education, Reading, Technology, Visual medium, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (May 1959, age 47). Producers are becoming consumers
What an inauspicious day, Friday the thirteenth. Thank God my flight was yesterday. I flew in from Winnipeg where I spoke to the Winnipeg Ad and Sales Club. I led off with one of my favourite anecdotes, “Whenever I fly, I always carry a powerful bomb with me. This absolutely insures my safety, the probability of there being two such bombs on the plane being infinitesimally low.” They also liked my Newfie joke: “What’s written on the bottom of a Newfie beer bottle? Open other end.” Liked is a strong word, let’s say they were appreciative.
The ad men did a double take when I told them in the electric age, which is the age in which we live, things are moving so fast producers are becoming consumers. It’s a complex phenomenon, but basically a simple idea. Things are changing so fast producers have figured out ways to speed up, to go faster than the wave, and one way to do that is to understand consumers so well that you know them better than they do themselves. And when you do that you can anticipate their wants. That’s why the Russians launched Sputnik and why Prime Minister Diefenbaker is making a serious error in canceling the Avro Arrow. The biggest investment business is making today is in research and development. They do this not to create a lot of new machines, products, services but to speed up to stay ahead of all the change that’s built in to the system.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). The rule of 2
If Marshall McLuhan believed in the magical power of 3, he also believed in the logical power of the number 2. Pairs of concepts, the end points of a single dimension, opposites, either ors, this and that’s run through his work. Hot and cool, high definition and low definition, figure and ground, right brain and left brain, cliché and archetype, medium and message, visual and acoustic, eye and ear. So that even in his doctoral dissertation which he described as a history of the Trivium, the 3 disciplines of grammar rhetoric and logic which dominated schooling in the middle ages, for analytical purposes he reduced to a battle between 2 forces over time, the grammarians and the rhetoricians.
Twos are powerful precisely because they exclude grey middle possibilities. They force you to make clear distinctions, to make decisions, to avoid weaseling and waffling. All media he taught are hot or cool, not hot, warm, or cool. This bias for black or white bothered his quibble-prone academic readers, even those who viewed his work positively. For example, in his review of The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, Kenneth Boulding argues that to McLuhan the key dimension on which hot and cool media differed was “involvement.” But surely he argued other dimensions mattered too – such as “demandingness or effort,” “range in time and space,’ and,” “density or capacity.” These quibbles it’s worth noting all implicitly reject McLuhan’s starting point that what matters is the medium not it’s content.
For McLuhan, however, the power of a single dimension with 2 possibilities only was greater than the power of safer equivocating and qualifying multidimensional thinking. He believed in absolutes. Qualifications were for the intellectually weak of heart.
What other examples of 2s in McLuhan’s work are there? Which is the one you have found most stimulating?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 252-255.
Boulding, Kenneth E. “The Medium and the Message,” reprinted in McLuhan: Hot and Cool. Edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn. New York: New American Library, 1967, pp. 68-75.
Tags: Communications, Education, Gutenberg Galaxy, Hot and cool media, Humour, Jokes, Relationship, Rhetoric, Superstition, Understanding media, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (1965, age 54). What this restaurant is exhibiting is inhibiting
We went to one of those new restaurants manned by topless waitresses, the Off Broadway in North Beach, here in San Francisco. Ad men, Howard Gossage and Dr. Gerald Feigen, who are orchestrating the marketing of me, thought it would be a great experience. It was an experience. One of the party was a Mr. Herb Caen a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. He ordered the strip steak sandwich and carefully kept his eyes averted from our waitress’s breasts while she was taking his order. Claimed he was inhibited. I told him inhibited is an interesting word it’s the opposite of exhibited, and what is exhibited causes you to be inhibited.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). The extensions of woman is man
Marshall McLuhan was not inhibited by what was being exhibited by the topless waitresses at the Off Broadway restaurant when he went there in August 1965 with Tom Wolfe, Herb Caen, Howard Gossage, and Gerald Feigen. He was it seems too busy observing to be inhibited. Two examples:
(1) During lunch a topless fashion show took place in which the announcer a fully dressed woman told the audience they were too quiet. They should be clapping more. “Where,” she said, “was the applause?” “Now ,” McLuhan said, “the word applause comes from the latin ‘applaudere,’ which means to explode. In early times, audiences applauded to show their disfavour; they clapped their hands literally to explode the performer off the stage. Hence you might say that, that the silence here is a form of approbation, at least in the classical sense.”
(2) McLuhan at one point looked around and said something like “the girls are wearing us. They’re wearing our eyes.”
Who is wearing who? How do you think McLuhan reported this excursion to his wife Corinne? What were the ad men, whose mission it was to celebritize Marshall McLuhan, up to in taking McLuhan to this restaurant with two journalists in tow?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Tom Wolfe, The Pump House Gang. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968, pp 129-168.
Herb Caen, “Rainy Day Session.” San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, August 12, 1965, p. 25.
Tags: Advertising, Communications, Medium is the message, Technology, Visual medium, Visual perspective, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (1965, age 53). Tom Wolfe got it wrong
Corinne read a bit to me out of that article Tom Wolfe wrote about me for the Sunday Magazine section of the New York World Journal Tribune, What if He’s Right? He said I like to wear 89-cent, Pree-Tide clip-on ties, the kind you can get in drug stores. Said something about the clip on mechanism being some sort of plastic cheater. Corinne says we should send him one of my ties so he could see how they really work. I told her we have better things to do than ship my ties, made to stay on by a comfortably fitting elastic band that goes around the neck, to the ever observant Mr. Wolfe for inspection.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). Tom Wolfe got it more right than wrong
“Clothes may not make the man,” said Kingsley Amis in a book about the James Bond novels, “but they can tell you quite a lot about him.” Whatever the clothes of James Bond tell you about the character of 007, the clothes of Marshall McLuhan, the extensions of his skin as he declared them to be, tell quite a lot about the character of high priest of pop cult, as Playboy was to call him. So much so that Tom Wolfe obtains a complete character analysis out just one piece of McLuhan’s clothing, his tie.
The tie in question is the opening subject of Wolfe’s essay: “The first thing I noticed about him was that he wore some kind of trick snap-on neck tie with hidden plastic cheaters on it. … I couldn’t keep my eyes off it.” And the tie is a subject Wolfe returns to repeatedly in the essay. While Wolfe did get – as Corinne pointed out – a key detail wrong, he was right, I think, about the importance of the tie for what it can tell us about McLuhan. It is, however, a symbol that cuts at least two ways. It is a fake tie. And the first image that pops up about McLuhan is that he like his tie is an imposter, a dealer in fake learning. The fake tie however has another message. The tie declares McLuhan to be middle class with no pretensions to style. Here is a way for a logical man in the tie-wearing 1950s and 1960s to bow to convention and obtain the virtues of comfort, low cost, and ease of wear.
Which is the real McLuhan? Which one does Tom Wolfe believe is the real McLuhan? What message(s) do the clothes you wear send? What message(s) would you want them to send?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Tom Wolfe, The Pump House Gang. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968, pp 129-168.
Tags: Communications, Medium is the message, Technology, Visual medium, Visual perspective, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (December, 1944, age 33). Wyndham Lewis’s sketch is insulting
Yesterday, recall, I said that great painter Wyndham Lewis presented me with a gift, a charcoal sketch that was really quite a shock. It upset me. Why he drew me this way I still do not know. The fact that it is insulting is obvious.
Michael Hinton (October, 2009, age 57). Why and how the sketch insults
The sketch, recall, shows Marshall McLuhan sitting, legs crossed, looking directly at you. McLuhan has one eye, a big left ear and the top half of his head, brain and all, is missing. McLuhan’s biographers say the portrait upset McLuhan, but they do not say why. It could be McLuhan was hurt because the portrait was unflattering, but that is unlikely.
Here is what I think McLuhan found insulting about the drawing. Lewis did not idly draw McLuhan as one-eyed. The one-eyed figure of Greek and Roman mythology is the Cyclops. A race of giants who work in mines deep below the ground, with lamps hung from their foreheads to light their labours, making iron for the god Vulcan to forge thunder bolts for Jove. In this poison-pen portrait McLuhan is the Cyclops, labouring away in the mines of academia teaching English literature and Lewis is Vulcan. Vulcan, if you look up the legend, fell from grace by conspiring with Juno in a plot against Jupiter and was cast off Mount Olympus. Vulcan landed on the island of Lemnos. (Lewis was cast out of London and landed with McLuhan in St. Louis.) Because Vulcan’s wife Venus had an affair with Mars, Vulcan is also known as the patron of cuckolds.
The portrait is a medium. And Lewis’s poisonous message is that Marshall McLuhan is an intellectual slave. [McLuhan was inspired by Wyndham Lewis's writings. In particular, his idea of the critical role artists play in society and the way technologies wrap around and enclose people, separating them from one another and their sense of the world about them.]
Both McLuhan and Lewis were trained critics. For them this way of thinking in terms of ancient legends and symbols was not a leap, but a natural and obvious step to take.
Take a look at the sketch. (You can find it in Fitzgerald’s book on page 56.) What do you think? Is it insulting?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Fitzgerald, Judith. Marshall McLuhan: Wise Guy. Montreal: XYZ Publishing, 2001, pp. 56-62.
Gordon, W. Terrence. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into understanding. Toronto: Stoddart, 1997, pp. 117-121.
Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989; 1998.
“Cyclops,” and “Vulcan” in The Brewer Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
Tags: Art, Communications, Culture, Global village, Medium is the message, Relationship, Visual medium, Visual perspective, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (December, 1944, age 33). Why does Lewis want to hurt me?
This year Lewis presented me with a gift, a charcoal sketch that was really quite a shock. Why he drew me this way I do not know. I did make a comment about his self-portrait, but I meant no harm. His cranial profile in his self-portrait did look just like a tomahawk. Really, since his coming here, I have only tried to help him with his work, his painting, to find him people who will pay him cash to paint their portraits. He needs the money. And he insults me this way. I do not understand.
Michael Hinton (October, 2009, age 57). Lewis’s drawing is a medium of communication
Why Wyndham Lewis – a brilliant English painter and writer temporarily down on his luck that McLuhan admired and wanted to help – was angry with McLuhan is not known. We know he took offense easily, struck out viciously when angered, and was a social boor, and in 1945 would tell McLuhan he wanted nothing more to do with him. We can speculate on what it was exactly that caused him to flame out at McLuhan, but that is not I think very helpful. Instead I want to look at the ways Lewis’s drawing of McLuhan was insulting. That is to examine the way Lewis crafted it to spew forth his venom and have the effect that it did on McLuhan. Why? Because this is the method McLuhan learned from his teachers at Cambridge to analyse a poem or a novel, and which he employed to study media: Look at their effects. Understand how they are produced. Here is a charcoal sketch, a medium of communication. How does it have the effect that it does?
The sketch shows Marshall McLuhan sitting, legs crossed, looking directly at you, with one eye, a big left ear and the top half of his head, brain and all, missing. McLuhan’s biographers say the portrait upset McLuhan, but they do not say why. It could be vanity, but that seems unlikely, for the portrait is quite arresting, and if say a Picasso drew you would you be upset if he made you out of cubes and didn’t make you handsome? (To be continued.)
Have you ever been insulted by someone you thought of as a friend? How did they insult you? In what medium or media? With what result?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Fitzgerald, Judith. Marshall McLuhan: Wise guy. Montreal: XYZ Publishing, 2001, pp. 56-62.
Fritz, Robert and Rosalind Fritz. “R is for relationships,” a seminar. Robert Fritz Inc.
Gordon, W. Terrence. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into understanding. Toronto: Stoddart, 1997, pp. 117-121.
Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989; 1998.
*This is part of what Robert Fritz calls the “arithmetic of relationships”.
Tags: Art, Communications, Global village, Medium is the message, Relationship, Robert Fritz, Social media, Visual medium, Visual perspective, Visual thinking
Marshall (December, 1948, age 37). The arts can’t exist in America today
The American mind is 100 percent 18th century. Jefferson, Voltaire, Dr. Johnson. Rational beings. Relentlessly logical beings seeking a rubbing together kind of causal understanding of the world. Minds ordered by the eye, by print. The arts are all about the ear. Minds alive to the textured, primitive, acoustic world where things happen all at once. Not just one thing at a time.
Me (October 2009, age 57). The arts cannot but exist in America today
Today the American mind is 100 percent 21st century. Oprah, Letterman, Dog Bounty Hunter. Primitives. Minds ordered by the ear, intuitive. A world where the Arts cannot but exist. This makes our world – for we are all Americans now – far more complex and complicated than that long vanished world of 1948. We are all in need of ways to reach out, to build a bridge as Neil Postman said to the 18th century. We need that strength visual thinking gives us to find the solutions we need to see through to the end of this century – solutions for the economy, the environment, the polity and society.
Do you see the world becoming less rational?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Selected and edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 207.
Neil Postman. Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the past can improve our future. New York: Knopf, 1999.
Tags: American mind, Communications, Global village, Medium is the message, Visual thinking