Marshall Mcluhan: Media Genius

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*Cause for Debate – 1 Marshall McLuhan: Media genius

Rowland Lorimer The following essay began as a result of a chain of events that arose from a letter I write to Gordon Graham point- ing out that in his list of “Books That Shaped the Cen- tury” the book attributed to McLuhan, The Medium is the Message, did not exist. It was then corrected to The Medium is the Massage. Perhaps, I suggested, the book intended was Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which is McLuhan’s main exploration of the Director of the Canadian Centre modern mass media. His other important book, I added, for Studies in Publishing is The Gutenberg Galaxy in which he outlines how the (www.sfu.ca/ccsp) and the world was changed by print. Historian Elizabeth Eisen- stein picked up McLuhan’s ideas and ran with them in a Master of Publishing program at more traditional scholarly fashion in her The Printing Simon Fraser University, Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Arguably, The Vancouver, Rowland Lorimer is Gutenberg Galaxy led to a vast expansion of an emerg- an active researcher and ing vector of literary/historical inquiry – the histoire du livre in France and the history of the book in English- consultant in mass speaking countries. communications and book While Gordon Graham seemed receptive to publishing. With colleagues, he my case, his colleague Dick Abel thought I was wrong recently established the and that he could build a serious case for The Medium Advanced Publishing Research is the Massage. Having read his piece “McLuhan Revisited” (12/1), I think that he also wanted to try his Lab (www.APuRL.org) where he hand at slaying McLuhan, a quest many took on in the is overseeing the development of 1970s. open source digital publishing The Medium is the Massage (which is a tools for non-profit journals and pun on “mass age”) is a somewhat ugly book of 160 pages, many filled with contrived pictures typical of the the reformulation of the scholarly late 1960s. While it provides in various parts a useful journal in electronic form. The distillation of some of McLuhan’s ideas, it also appears working model of this work is to be an attempt by the person named as co-ordinator, Cjc-online.ca. Jerome Agel, to help McLuhan, himself and their other collaborator, graphic designer Quentin Fiore, to popu- Email address: [email protected] larize, if not cash in on, McLuhan’s notoriety. (Agel did the same for Buckminster Fuller.) The book was released along with a film (that McLuhan reviled) and a record with the same title. The book was one of a pair by the same team. The other was War and Peace in * This article is a response to Richard Abel’s “McLuhan the Global Village. The Medium is the Massage Revisited” in 12/1. may have sold more than any other of McLuhan’s

Marshall McLuhan: Media genius

books, at least in the years immediately following its by his vision, and his attempts to explain it were release when sales reached over one million, but there not explanations but further applications. His are two reasons why it cannot be put forward as “probes” were flashes of insight that at times were McLuhan’s most important book: It is completely right on the mark and at other times completely off derivative from McLuhan’s other writings, and strictly base. But they did reflect an innovative and pro- speaking McLuhan did not write it. According to foundly significant perspective. McLuhan’s most authoritative biographer, Philip Marc- In this regard, The Medium is the Massage hand, Agel selected and massaged the quotes while Fiore presents, as Robin Perrin says, “an attempt to be provided the illustrations. McLuhan added the title and succinct and to illustrate how the media work us changed just one word (Marchand, P Marshall over completely and are thus agents of social trans- McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, p192). formation rather than information transmission”. While my interchanges with Gordon Graham McLuhan followed in the wake of the were transpiring, my colleague Paul Heyer offered me British modernists of the 1920s and ’30s (see the opportunity to sit on an examining committee of Tiessen in CJC-Online.ca) who saw the shift from what turned out to be a marvelous Masters thesis deal- writing to movies and radio as fundamentally alter- ing with McLuhan by Robin Perrin. Robin rekindled my ing the dominant ideas of society by virtue of their intellectual excitement with McLuhan, and her work being delivered in a different medium, thereby informs this essay which is, as Gordon requested, not inducing the use of our senses in different ratios – only my reply to Dick Abel but also an attempt to pictures, speech and sounds versus words and argu- explain why McLuhan’s ideas expressed in book form ments on a page. He melded these ideas with the are so important. writings of the Canadian political economist Harold Innis, who was intent upon showing that * * * * * Rome and Greece were fundamentally different societies. Innis’s claim was that ancient Greece was It is quite true, as Abel illustrates, that the writings oral but in transition to literacy, while Rome was of Marshall McLuhan are difficult to fathom and literate and organized by the developed ability to that his real contribution is difficult to articulate. In record what mattered and invent many of the fun- part, this is because his writing style is not concep- damental attributes of modern, literate society, tual, logical and linear. Rather, in part, it mimics including the written contract. the world McLuhan saw evolving. In another part, McLuhan’s genius was twofold. First was it is the writing of a lateral thinker. In still another his innovative and brilliant but never fully articu- part, it is the writing of a person with an inex- lated system of thought. Second was his manner of haustible need to assert his view of the world. expressing ideas which, frustrating to those of an With regard to the evolving world, just as orderly frame of mind, enticed the popular press, television convinces us by parading a miscellany of the electronic media (he’s talking about us) and the experts and images before our eyes, interrupted by advertising industry (he’s talking about us too) and commentators (who are witnesses to the case being allowed him to enter public consciousness. built) and advertisers (who hawk products that are To provide a rather mundane example of not jarring within the mindset television encour- just what McLuhan was talking about, I once ages), so McLuhan was inclined to bombard the attempted, in a mass communication textbook, to reader with fairly obscure and relatively undigested outline the elements of award-winning television factoids and analysis. These he asserted to be evi- investigative journalism. The TV documentary I dence from which he drew seemingly quite out- used as an example concerned how the Airbus landish conclusions. But they weren’t outlandish. A-320 was inherently unreliable and erratic. They were merely derivations of a never fully Because the article won the top award in its cate- developed system of ideas that McLuhan was for- gory given by the Canadian Association of Journal- ever striving to articulate. His system of thought ists, the transcript was made available in the was never fully developed, in part because, like a printed annual announcing the awards. Initially poet, novelist or artist, he appeared to be possessed expecting to find in the transcript the development