Culkin, J. M. (1967, March). A schoolman's guide to Marshall McLuhan. The Saturday Review, 51-53, 70-72. Retrieved from http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1967mar18-00051
A SCHOOLMAN'S GUIDE TO MARSHALL McLUHAN
By JOHN M. CULKIN, S.J;, director and the schools. One thing is (_'ertain: world happens to be the present. Mc of the Center for Communications, ll is hardly a time for educators to plan Luhan feels that very few men look at Fordham University. with nostalgia, timidity, or old formulas. the present with a present eye, that they Enter Marshall McLuhan. tend to miss the present by translating it He enters from the North, from the into the past, seeing it through a rear DUCATION, a seven-year-old as Universitv of Toronto where he teaches view mirrol'. The unnoticed fact of our sures me, is "how kids learn English a·nd is director of the Center for present is the electronic environment E stuff." Few definitions are as sat Culture and Technology. He enters with created by the new communications isfying. It includes all that is essential the reputation as "the oracle of the elec media. It is as pervasive as the air we a who, a what, and a process. It excludes tric age" and as "the most provocative breathe ( and some would add that it is all the people, places, and things which and controversial writer of this genera just as polluted), yet its full import are only sometimes involved in learning. tion." More importantly for the schools, eludes the judgments of commonsense The economy and accuracy of the defi he enters as a man with fresh eyes, with or coutent-01iented perception. The en nition, however, are more useful in lo new ways of looking at old problems. He vironments set up by different media cating the problem than in solving it. is a man who gets his ideas first and are not just containers for people; they We know little enough about kids, less judges them later. Most of these ideas are processes which shape people. Such about and considerably more are summed up in his book, influence is deterministic only if ignored. than we would like to know about stuff. His critics tried him for not There is no inevitability as long as there In addition,learning, the whole process of for delivering these insights inU11derstand their most is a willingness to contemplate what is mal schooling is now wrapped inside luciding Media. and practical form. It isn't always happening. an environment of speeded-up techno cricket, however, to ask the same man Theorists can keep reality at arm's logical change which is constantly in to crush the grapes and serve the wine. length for long periods of time. Teachers fluencing kids and learning and stuff. Not all of McLu is nu or tru, but then and administrators can't. Thev are clos The jet-speed of this technological revo again neither is all of anybody else. This eted with reality all day long. In many lution, especially in the area of com article is an attempt to select and order instances they are CO··prisoners with elec- munications, has left us with more those elements of �lcLuhanism which . tronic-age students in the old pencil box reactions to it than reflections about it. are most relevant to the schools and to (_'ell. And it is the best teachers and the Meanwhile back at the school, the stu provide the schoolman with some new best students who are in the most trou dent, whose psyche is being programed ways of thinking about the schools. ble because they are challenging the for tempo, information, and relevance l\kLuhan'spromise is modest enough: system constantly. It is the system which by his electronic environment, is still "All I have to offeris an enterprise of in has to come under scrutiny. Teachers and being processed in classrooms operating vestigation into a world that's quite un students can say, in the words of the on the postulates of another day. The usual and quite unlike any previous Late Late Show, "Baby, this thing is cold war existing between these two world and for which no models of per bigger than both of us." It won't be worlds is upsetting for both the student ception will serve." This unexplored ameliorated by a few dashes of good
"The environments set up by different media are not just containers for people; they are the processes which shape people. The,·e is no inevitability as long a� there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening."
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The changing media: Egyptian hieroglyphics, a page from the Gutenberg Bible, and the television monitor "The individual's modes of cognition and perception are influenced by the culture he is in, the language he speaks, and the media to which he is exposed. Each culture provides its constituents with a custom-made set of goggles," will or a little more hard work. It is a the establishment whose wav of life is thing. The medium's the thing. McLu question of understanding these new predicated on the postulates he is ques han makes the truth stand on its head to kids and these new media and of getting tioning.The establishment has no history attract attention. Why the medium is the schools to deal with the new elec of organizing parades to greet its dis worthy of attention derives from its tronic environment. It's not easy. And turbers. other three meanings. the defenders of the old may prove to His medium is perhaps more disturb Meaning number two stresses the re be the ones least able to defend and ing than his message. From his earliest lation of the medium to the content. preserve the values of the old. work he has described his enterprise as The form of communication not only For some people, analysis of these . "explorations in communication." The alters the content, but each form also newer technologies automatically im word he uses most frequently today is has preferences for certain kinds of mes plies approbation of them. Their world "probe." His books demand a high de sages. Content always exists in some is so full of shoulds that it is hard to gree of involvement from the reader. form and is, therefore, to some degree squeeze in an is. McLuhan suggests a They are poetic and intuitive rather than governed by the dynamics of that form. more positive line of exploration: logical and analytic. Structurally, his If you don't know the medium, you unit is the sentence. Most of them are don't know the message. The insight is topic sentences-which are left undevel neatly summed up by Dr. Edmund Car penter: "English is a mass medium. At the moment, it is important that oped. The style is oral and breathless we understand cause and process. The and frequently obscure. It's a different All languages are mass media. The new aim is to develop an awareness about kind of medium. mass media-film, radio, TV-are new print and the newer technologies of "The medium is the message," an languages, their grammars as yet un communication so that we can or nounced McLuhan a dozen years ago known. Each codifies reality differently; chestrate them, minimize their mutual in a cryptic and uncompromising aphor each conceals a unique metaphysics. frustrations and clashes, and get the ism whose meaning is still being ex Linguists tell us it's possible to say any best out of each in the educational plored. The title of his latest book, an thing in any language if you use enough process. The present conflict leads to illustrated popular paperback treatment words or images, but there's rarely elimination of the motive to learn and of his theories, playfully proclaims that time; the natural course is for a culture to diminution of interest in all previous The Medium the Massage-a achievement: It leads to loss of the title to exploit its media biases.... " sense of relevance. Without an under calculated to drive typesetters and crit It is always content-in-form which is standing of media grammars, we can ics to hashish andls beyond. The original mediated. In this sense, the medium is not hope to achieve a contemporary dictum can be looked at in four ways, co-message. The third meaning for the awareness of the world in which we the third of which includes a massage of M-M formula emphasizes the relation live.We have been told that it is the prop importance. of the medium to the individual psyche. erty of true genius to disturb all settled The medium alters the perceptual habits ideas.McLuhan is disturbing in both his THE first meaning would be better of its users. Independent of the con medium and his message. His ideas chal communicated orally-"The medium is tent, the medium itself gets through. lenge the normal way in which people the message." The medium is the thing Pre-literate, literate, and post-literate perceive reality. They can create a very to study. The medium is the thing you're cultures see the world through different deep and personal threat since they missing. Everybody's hooked on con colored glasses. In the process of deliver touch on everything in a person's expe tent; pay attention to form, structure, ing content the medium also works over rience. They are just as threatening to framework, medium. The play's the the sensorium of the consumer. To get
52. SRI Marc&:h .. 18..,.. 196 7 too. And it is this cross-mystification which makes inter-cultural abrasions so worthwhile. the Most people presume that their way of perceiving the world is way of per ceiving the world. If they hang around with people like themselves, their mode of perception may never be challenged. It is at the poles ( literally and figura tively) that the violent contrasts illu mine our own unarticulated perceptual prejudices. Toward the North Pole, for example, live Eskimos. A typical Eskimo family consists of a father, a mother, two children, and an anthropologist. When the anthropologist goes into the igloo to study Eskimos, he learns a lot about himself. Eskimos see pictures and maps equally well from all angles. They can draw equally well on top of a table or underneath it. They have phenomenal memories. They. travel without visual bearings in thefr white-on-white world and can sketch cartographically accu rate maps of shifting shorelines. They have forty or fifty words for what we call "snow." ·They live in a world with out linearity, a world of acoustic space. They are Eskimos. Their natural way of perceiving the world is different from our natural way of perceiving the world. mas Each culture develops its own balance this subtle insight across, McLuhan pun searched every day as he left the factory of the senses in response to the demands ned on message and came up with grounds. He was, of course, stealing sage. The switch is intended to draw wheelbarrows. When your medium is of its environment. The most generalized attention to the fact that a medium is not your message and they're only investi formulation of the theory would main something neutral-it does something to gating content, you can get away with tain that the individual's modes of cog people. It takes hold of them, it jostles a lot of things-like wheelbarrows, for nition and perception are influenced by them, it bumps them around, it massages instance. It's not the picture but the the culture he is in, the language he them. It opens and closes windows in frame. Not the contents but the box. speaks, and the media to which he is their sensorium. Proof? Look out the The blank page is not neutral; nor is the exposed. Each culture, as it were, pro window at the TV generation. They are classroom. vides its constituents with a custom rediscovering texture, movement, color, McLuhan's writings abound with aph made set of goggles. The differences in and sound as they retribalize the race. orisms, insights, for-instances, and ir perception are a question of degree. TV is a real grabber; it really massages relevancies which float loosely around Some cultures are close enough to each those lazy, unused senses. recurring themes. They provide the raw other in perceptual patterns so that the The fourth meaning underscores the materials of a do-it-yourself kit for tidier differences pass unnoticed. Other cultu relation of the medium to society. White types who prefer to do their exploring ral groups, such as the Eskimo and the head said, "The major advances in civili with clearer charts. V/hat follows is American teen-ager, are far enough away zation are processes that all but wreck one man's McLuhan served up in bar from usArt to provideimitates estheticlife. distance.The Silent the societies in which they occur." The barously brief form. Five postulates, Language media massage the society as well as the spanning nearly 4,000 years, will serve 2) In individual. The results pass unnoticed as the fingers in this endeavor to grasp Edward T. Hall offers the for long periods of time because people McLuhan: B.c.-All the senses get into thesis that all art and technology is an tend to view the new as just a little bit the act. extension of some physical or psychic more of the old. Whitehead again: "The 1) 1967 element of man. Today man has devel greatest invention of the nineteenth cen A conveniently symmetrical oped extensions for practically every tury was the invention of the method of year for a thesis which is partially cyclic. thing he used to do with his body: stone invention. A new method entered into It gets us back to man before the Phoen axe for hand, wheel for foot, glasses for life. In order to understand our epoch, we ician alphabet. We know from our con eyes, radio for voice and ears. Money is can neglect all details of change, such as temporary ancestors in the jungles of a way of storing energy. This external railways, telegraphs, radios, spinning New Guinea and the wastes of the Arc izing of individual, specialized functions machines, -synthetic dyes. We must con tic that preliterate man lives in an all is now, by definition, at its most ad centrate on the method in itself: That at-once sense world. The reality which vanced stage. Through the electronic is the real novelty which has broken up bombards him from all directions is media of telegraph, telephone, radio, the foundations of the old civilization." picked up with the omni-directionalThe Hunters an and television, man has now equipped Understanding the medium or process tennaeNanook of sight, of the hearing, North touch, smell, his world with a nervous system similar involved is the key to control. and taste. Films such as to the one within his own body. Presi The media shape both content and and depict primi dent Kennedy is shot and the world consumer and do so practically unde tive men tracking game with an across instantaneouslyContinued reels on from page the impact of tected. We recall the story of the Rus the-board sensitivity which mystifies the bu1lets. Space and time dissolve un- sian worker whose wheelbarrow was Western, literate man. We mystify them ( 70) 53 SH/ March 18, 1967 McLuhan the object of ridicule and fear outside Continued from page participation and involvement. It leaves the state's borders." It appears likely, 53 room for the response of the consumer. however, that Unruh and Miller will A lecture is hot; all the work is done. A persuade the legislature to vote higher seminar is cool; it gets everyone into the appropriations for the university and the der electronic conditions. Current con game. Whether all the connections are state colleges, but if Reagan decides to cern for the United Nations, the Common causal may be debated, but it's interest blue-pencil those increases there seems Market, ecumenism, reflects this organic ing that the kids of the cool TV genera to be only a slim chance that a two thrust toward the new convergence and tion want to be so involved and so much thirds vote can be mustered to override unity which is "blowing in the wind." a part Weof what'sshaped happening. the alphabet and it his veto. The outcome is not likely to be Now in the electric age, our extended shaped us. known before June. faculties and senses constitute a single 4) Figures provided by the State Co instantaneous and coexistent field of In keeping with the Mc ordinating Council for Higher Education experience. It's all-at-once. It's shared Luhan postulate that "the medium is indicate that California's "public higher by-all. McLuhan calls the world "a the message," a literate culture should education tax effort" ranks behind that globalLife village." imitates art. be more than mildly eager to know what of \Visconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and books do to people. Everyone is familiar other states. Clark Kerr often argued 3) We shape our enough with all the enrichment to living that California ranked twelfth among tools and thereafter they shape us. These mediated through fine books to allow us the thirteen \Vestern states in percent extensions of our senses begin to interact to pass on to the subtler effects which age of per capita income devoted to sup with our senses. These media become a might be attributed to the print medium, port of public colleges and universities. massage. The new change in the envi independentGod is deadof the contentGod involved. is love Since the state apparently can afford to ronment creates a new balance among Whether one uses the medium to say continue its "college for everyone" pol the senses. No sense operates in isolation. that or that icy, it may be that such a policy does The full sensorium seeks fulfillment in ( ------) , the structure of the not fit within the framework of Reagan's almost every sense experience. And medium itself remains unchanged. Nine conservative Republican political phi since there is a limited quantum of en little black marks with no intrinsic mean losophy.The New Yark Times ergy available for any sensory expe ing of their own are strung along a line Reagan denied a report by James Res rience, the sense-ratio will differ for with spaces left after the third and fifth ton of that he different media. marks. It is this stripping away of mean favors private higher education, at the The nature of the sensory effect will ing which allows us to X-ray the form expense of public institutions, but there be determined by the medium used. itself. is some evidence that this is so. Most of McLuhan divides the media according to As an example, while leoturing to a his advisers are from the private Univer the quality or definition of their physical large audience in a modern hotel in Chi sity of Southern California. USC admin signal. The content is not relevant in cago, a distinguished professor is bitten istrators and faculty members surely this kind of analysis. The same picture in the leg by a cobra. The whole experi are wise enough to realize that holding from the same camera can appear as a ence takes three seconds. He is affected back public higher education means glossy photograph or as a newspaper through the touch of the reptile, the gasp holding back all of higher education, wirephoto. The photograph is well-de of the crowd, the swimming sights before but this perception may not extend to fined, of excellent pictorial quality, hi-Ii his eyes. His memory, imagination, and the university's alumni and trustees, within its own medium. McLuhan calls emotions come into emergency action. some of whom are vigorous Reagan sup this kind of medium "hot." The news A lot of things happen in three seconds. porters. paper photo is grainy, made up of little Two weeks later he is fully recovered Academic people who have talked to dots, low definition. McLuhan calls this and wants to write up the experience in Reagan report that he resents the "free kind of medium "cool." Film is hot; tele a letter to a colleague. To communicate ride" he believes California students en vision is cool. Radio is hot; telephone is this experience through print means that joy ( though it costs about $2,000 to cool. The cool medium or person invites it must first be broken down into parts finance a year on a UC campus) and attaches great importance to the virtues of working one's way through college. "I went the dishwashing route myself," he told the Board of Regents recently, referring to his experience at Eureka College in Illinois. So far there have been only these tantalizing hints of a conservative's approach to public higher education, but they help to explain why Governor Reagan can contemplate re ducing the rolls of the university and the state colleges by several thousand stud ents without noticeably flinching. The problem, said a faculty member at Santa Barbara, is whether the public will support higher education: "Do we degrade the university and the state col leges or don't we? Do we believe in maximum fulfillment of talent and abil ity for those members of the society who have proven themselves capable or don't we? Do we believe that society has the potential to transcend the mun The medium and the message-author John Culkin and subject McLuhan. dane or not? It isn't a question of money, it's70 a question of values." SR/March 18, 1967 and then mediatnl, eyedropper fashion, one thing at a time, in an ,tbstrnct, lin Md,1thmi Migrates 8011th ear, fragmented, sequenthtl way. That is b; SEPTE:,.1111,:11 Dr. t-larshall \lcLuhan will go to Fordham University in the essential structure of print. And once i\:ew York to assume the Albert Schweitzer chair i11 the humanities. He �viii a culture uses such a medium for a few be working with n team of media researchers, including the author of this centuries, it begins to pen:eive the world article, who !ms been studying and interpreting �IcLuhan for more than in a one-thing-at-a-time, nbstract, linear, (en years. �lcLulian ·s theories will be analyzed in depth by media special fragmented, se(1uential way. And it ists at Fordham·s two summer film study eonferences in New York, July shapes its organizations and schools ac 5-8, and in Los Angeles, August 16-19. cording to the same premises. The form of print has become the form of thought. The medium has become the message. cal ( Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese), are strong in their world, of understand For centuries now, according to :-lc sometimes it is regional or personal ing the obstacles to communication, of Luhan, the straight line has been the ( 125th Street-ese, Holden Caulfield-ese, sensing their style of life. Communica hidden metaphor of literate man. lt was unrbody-ese). It has little to
SR/ March 18, 196i bombards him from all sides with infor school system, surely he would have \Ve have to introduce them to the form, mation from radios, films, telephones, shaped man differently." Kids are being structure, gestalt, grammar, and process magazines, recordings, and people. He tailored to fit the Procrustean forms of of the knowledge involved. What does a learns more things from the windows of schedules, classrooms, memorizing, test math man do when a math man does cars, trains, and even planes. Through ing, etc., which are frequently relics do math? This approach to the formal travel and communications he has ex from an obsolete approach to learning. element of a discipline can provide a perienced the war in Vietnam, the wide It is the total environment which con channel of communication between spe world of sports, the civil rights move tains the philosophy of education, not cialists. Its focus is not on content or ment, the death of a President, thou the title page in the school catalogue. detail but on the postulates, ground sands of commercials, a walk in space, And it is the total environment which is rules, frames of reference, and premises a thousand innocuous shows, and, one invincible because it is invisible to most of each discipline. It stresses the modes may hope, plenty of Captain Kangaroo. people. They tend to move things of cognition and perception proper to This is all merely descriptive, an ef around within the old boxes or to build each field. Most failures in communica fort to lay out what is, not what should new and cleaner boxes. They should be tion are based on disagreement about be. Today's student can hardly be de asking whether or not there should be a items which are only corollaries of a scribed by any of the old educational box in the first place. larger thesis. It happens between disci analogies comparing him to an empty plines, individuals, media, and cultures. bucket or a blank page. He comes to the TH E new learner, who is the product The arts play a new role in education information machine called school and of the all-at-once electronic environ because they are explorations in percep he is already brimming over with infor ment, often feels out of it in a linear, tion. Formerly conceived as a curricular mation. As he grows his standards for one-thing-at-a-time school environment. luxury item, they now become a dy relevance are determined more by what The total environment is now the great namic way of tuning up the sensorium he receives outside the school than what teacher; the student has competence and of providing fresh ways of looking he receives inside. A recent Canadian models against which to measure the at familiar things. When exploration and film tells the story of a bright, articulate effectiveness of his teachers. Nuclear discovery become the themes, the old middle class teen-ager who leaves school students in linear schools make for some lines between art and science begin to because there's "no reason to stay." He tense times in education. Students with fade. We have to guide students to be daydreams about Vietnam while his well developed interests in science, the coming their own data processors to op teacher drones on about the four reasons arts and humanities, or current events erate through pattern recognition. The for the spread of CKristianity and the need assistance to suit their pace, not media themselves serve as both aids to five points such information is worth on that of the state syllabus. The straight learning and as proper objects of study the exam. Only the need for a diploma line theory of development and the uni in this search for an all-media literacy. was holding him in school; learning formity of performance which it so fre Current interest in film criticism will ex wasn't, and he left. He decided the union quently encourages just don't fit many pand to include all art and communi ticket wasn't worth the gaff. He left. needs of the new learner. Interestingly, cation forms. Some call him a dropout. Some call him the one thing which most of the current And since the knowledge explosion a pushout. educational innovations share is their has blown out the walls between sub The kids have one foot on the dock break with linear or print-oriented pat jects, there will be a continued move and one foot on the ferryboat. Living in terns: team teaching, nongraded schools, toward interdisciplinary swapping and two centuries makes for that kind of audio-lingual language training, multi understanding. Many of the categorical tension. The gap between the classroom media learning situations, seminars, stu walls between things are artifacts left and the outside world and the gap be dent research at all levels of education, over from the packaging days of print. tween the generations is wider than it individualized learning, and the whole The specialist's life will be even lonelier has ever been. Those tedious people who shift of responsibility for learning from as we move further from the Gutenberg quote Socrates on the conduct of the the teacher to the student. Needless to era. The trends are all toward whole �·oimg are trying vainly to reassure say, these are not as widespread as they ness and convergence. themselves that this is just the perennial should be, nor were they brought about These things aren't true just because problem of communication between gen through any conscious attention to the Marshall McLuhan says they are. They erations. "fain't so. "Todav's child is premises put forward by McLuhan. Like work. They explain problems in educa growing up absurd, becaus� he lives in the print-oriented and linear mentality tion that nobody else is laying a glove two worlds, and neither of them inclines they now modify, these premises were on. When presented clearly and with all him to grow up." Says McLuhan in The plagiarized from the atmosphere. 11c the necessary examples and footnotes Medium is the J.fassage. "Growing up Luhan's value is in the power he gives added, they have proven to be a liber that is our new work, and it is total. :\Iere us to predict and control these changes. ating force for hundreds of teachers who instruction will not suffice." There is too much stuffto learn today. were living through the tension of this Learning is something th&.t people do McLuhan calls it an age of "informa cultural fission without realizing that the for themselves. People, places, and tion overload." And the information causes for the tension lay outside them things can facilitate or impede learning; levels outside the classroom are now selves. McLuhan's relevance for educa they can't make it happen without some hii[her than those in the classroom. tion demands the work of teams of cooperation from the learner. The learn Schools used to have a virtual monopoly simultaneous translators and researchers er these davs comes to school with a vast on information; now they are part-time who can both shape and substantiate reservoir c;f vicarious experiences and competitors in the electronic informa the insights which are scattered through loosely related facts; he wants to use all tional surround. And all human knowl his work. McLuhan didn't invent elec his senses in his learning as an active edge is expanding at computer speed. tricity or put kids in frmt of TV sets; agent in the process of discovery; he Every choice involves a rejection. If he is merely trying to describe what's knows that all the answers aren't in. The we can't do everything, what priorities happening out there so that it can be new learner is the result of the new will govern our educational policies? dealt with intelligently. When someone media, says :\IcLuhan.And a new learn "The medium is the message" may not warns you of an oncoming truck, it's er calls for a new kind of learning. be bad for openers. We can no longer frightfully impolite to accuse him of Leo Irrera said, "If God had antici teach kids all about a subject; we can driving the thing. McLuhan can help pated the e,·entual structure of the teach them what a subject is all about. kids to learn stuff better. 72 SR/ March 18, 1967