Marshall McLuhan: My Latest Obsession. Does This Mean I'm Stuck Looking in the Rear View Mirror?

Marshall McLuhan in the mid-1960's

I've become fascinated lately with media analyst Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) since reading an article about his mysticism, and possible mystical encounters with the Blessed Mother. A fuller examination of his faith can be read here. I always knew that he was a convert to Catholicism (his brother, incidentally, was a Presbyterian minister), but never understood how faith impacted his work, if at all. And for good reason: he never explicitly spoke or wrote of his faith in public, or the influence theologians like Teilhard de Chardin had on his work. Author Tom Wolfe, a friend and supporter, thought this omission had to do with the fact that Teilhard was somewhat persona non grata inside the Catholic Church in the '50's and '60's for his writings on Darwinian evolution, but was still considered a strange Catholic mystic by the secular intellectual elite. McLuhan could't win either way, and so kept the connection hush hush. By all accounts though, he was a man of deep faith; a daily communicant who would sometimes "trick" others into going to Mass with him where he taught, at the St. Michael's College chapel. According to his son and frequent collaborator Eric, his father would suggest to guests a midday walk on campus just as the bells tolled, calling the faithful to Mass. Of course while we're here, he'd say, why not go in to spend some time with the Lord.

Marshall McLuhan, who was born in Canada and spent most of his professional life teaching at the aforementioned University of St. Michael's College in of the University of Toronto, burst onto the pop culture scene internationally in the 1960's: a literature professor turned media analyst, whose pithy, enigmatic statements are still in use today. The odds are you've heard our contemporary mass media dominated, computer driven, social media connected world described as a "global village," even if you don't know that the "medium is the message" or can't tell the difference between a "cool" and "hot" medium. All these catch phrases were McLuhan's. He analyzed how media like movies, television and print transmitted their messages, changing us both individually and collectively. He didn't believe that the message being communicated was the important thing, but rather how it was being communicated that made all the difference.

Roughly 1964 to 1968 were his hay day as a public intellectual, when he was a best selling author, a much sought after guest on panel shows and did consulting work for ad agencies and major corporations. While his star had dimmed somewhat as the 70's wore on he was still seen as relevant enough to be called upon by the Today Show to give an analysis of the 1976 U.S presidential debates, from a purely media craft perspective (he found it wanting), as well as making a clever cameo as himself in Woody Allen's Annie Hall the following year. McLuhan was silenced the last 15 months of his life by a series of debilitating strokes that left him unable to speak or write. He died at the age of 69 in 1980.

He was, and still is frustrating to read or listen to because he wasn't a linear thinker. He liked to say that he worked in the intuitive right hemisphere of the brain, as opposed to the concrete sequential left brain. He left gaps in his thought, forcing the listener or reader fill in these gaps by using their "wits." He also didn't give opinions, he rather made observations, which led some to think he was enthusiastic about the emergence of mass media and instantaneous communication. This couldn't be father from then truth. His form of resistance was to understand the processes at work, the mechanism, if you will, so he could figure out where the turn off switch was.

He posited that the print dominated media of the preceding 500 years had led to the development of private identity as we understand it. Previously the oral tradition prevailed and information was passed on in a communal fashion, which resulted in a strong corporate identity among the people, but little or no sense of a private self. With the advent of the book each individual became the mediator of the information being passed on. Information wasn't so much memorized as take in, mulled over and understood one person at a time. With the coming of radio and television we were now regressing to that oral transmission, but with a difference. I could be wrong here, but he seemed to be saying that information now comes so quickly, from so many different sources and so primally that there isn't a chance to truly integrate what's being communicated. He used the language of computer programers of his day by saying, like a computer, when there is information overload our brains move into pattern recognition. We no longer truly comprehend but simply try to pick up on general structures and patterns of thought and hold on as best we can.  There is no private self any longer, since things are moving so fast that there's no time to process it all, to really come to understanding of what "I" believe, but nor is there a truly corporate identity either since the media are fragmented. Imagine, all he was dealing with was movies, TV and the radio. Telephones were still tied down by wires in the home or office, and besides, all they could do was make phone calls. Computers were still more or less tools for business and government usage, and the Internet revolution hadn't happened yet. If he thought we were heading toward a post literate world then, what would he think of the situation now?

If I can borrow from his method a bit, McLuhan works better on the "cool" medium of TV then the "hot" medium of books. His whole theory of hot and cold media is confusing at first because he's not using the words literally, especially in the case of cool. A so called "hot" medium is one that presents it's information at a high intensity level, in a straight forward presentation, leaving few gaps for the viewer to have to fill in. A "cool" medium, using the argot of Jazz, is low intensity, forcing the viewer to engage in a more intense way. TV was cool because it is a right brain intuitive way communicating, necessitating us to "fill in the gaps" more then movies or radio. Thus the Vietnam conflict was a hot war being played out on a cool medium. It being the first "televised war," people were repulsed by the images of carnage flooding into the intimacy of their homes and psyches. On radio or even the movies their "hot" nature forces the participant stands aloof, not needing to become too involved in the media itself, just as one stands apart from a fire rather than experiencing it from amidst the flames. So watching an interview with McLuhan is more profitable than reading him, at least in the case of the his 1967 classic The Medium is the Massage ("Massage" was a printer's error he eagerly embraced because it fit what was trying to say). Here he has text in his typical, almost beside the point, style mixed with images, some that make sense, others not obviously so. It can be a bit jarring to read if you're use to a straight ahead narrative or discourse. It's almost as if he's using a cool method in a hot medium. In the cool atmosphere of the talk show, where the interviewer can get him to try and clarify his thought (no easy task) he's a bit more easy to comprehend.

I wasn't intending this to be a summary of Marshall McLuhan's thought (at that this was very incomplete). But I am fascinated by an aspect of his educational theory. He believed that even those who are considered on the cutting edge are still looking at things through "the rear view mirror" of progress. If the latest gadget is in the hands of the public, or even the elites, right now it is a technology that is already obsolete, waiting to be replaced by the truly latest thing still haunting the test labs. With education, both in the '60's and now, we still more or less use a 19th century industrial model of education. The charter school we rent to has gone to a more module based, free form classroom set up where the students are free to move from one station to the next to work on tasks as they please. While the school director (good man that he is) probably thinks this is the latest in pedagogy, in reality they were doing this stuff at least as far back in the 1970's. So congratulations, they've moved from the 19th into the 20th century.

So where I go from here is asking: at this moment of history, where we are still debating the merits of capitalism versus socialism or communism, where our collective consciousness is still shaped by Darwin, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, are we 21st century people stuck looking into the rearview mirror intellectually at the 18th and 19th centuries thinking this is all new? When will the paradigm shift (and it will, eventually) and what will that shift represent? Will it be in our own time, or centuries from now? Obviously we can't answer these questions with certainty, but I would like to dig a little into these ideas next time, if not sooner.

Woody Allen (c.) Marshall McLuhan (r.) and some other guy (l.). From Annie Hall (1977)