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Marshall McLuhan holding a mirror in
1967.
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Marshall McLuhan changed the trajectory
of media studies.
During the mid-twentieth century,
McLuhan was a Professor of English literature at the University of
Toronto. While there, he wrote a number of books that advanced
several key concepts critical to modern theories of media, though
some of his ideas would not become widely accepted until the spread and adoption of Internet technologies.
In 1964, McLuhan's seminal book,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, would launch the
professor into the international spotlight. A younger generation
thirsty for radical new ideas would embrace his work as prophetic.
The established media and academic cultures, however, were more
critical of his work. Both would frequently misinterpret his writing.
The main thesis of Understanding
Media was that media can be assessed independent of content –
that the form a communications medium takes is what determines how it
will be used. The first chapter, titled “The Medium is the
Message,” opened with a summary of this process: “This is merely
to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium –
that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale
that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves,
or by any new technology.”
Concurrent with this theme was another,
more prophetic notion: that humanity is in transition between two
major periods: the print era and the electric age. McLuhan saw the
ability of electricity to deliver instantaneous information as the
beginning of a paradigm shift that would cause people to slough off
the fragmentation and mechanization engendered by the printed word
while reconnecting with their tribal roots in a wider “global
village” (a term McLuhan coined).
The second half of McLuhan's book
tackled individual forms of media and their different impacts on life
and culture. He pointed out, for instance, that literary-minded
people who are accustomed to linear arguments and cohesive
storytelling misunderstand the press, which, he noted, has tended
“not to the book form, but to the mosaic or participational
form...not a detached 'point of view,' but participation in process.”
In addition to books, television, and
other formats that are traditionally thought of as media, McLuhan
included chapters on cars, clocks, and electric light.
Ironically,
Understanding Media
can be difficult to understand, with passages that are at times dense
and esoteric. Rather than approach the field in a systematic fashion,
McLuhan often embedded his ideas in analogies and anecdotes. As
Lewis H. Lapham describes in his introduction to the 1994 MIT Press
edition, “quite a few of the notions to which he [McLuhan]
off-handedly refers in the early pages, as if everybody already knew
what he meant, he doesn't bother to explain until the later pages,
often by way of an afterthought or an aside.”
Predictions about the coming electric
age were one of the most controversial aspects of Understanding
Media. McLuhan, who
identified himself as a product of the literary world, nevertheless
insisted that that the power of print would soon be overtaken by
fundamentally different electric technologies.
Some predictions came true, such as his
suggestion that televisions would become common in the classroom and
shift the emphasis of education to reflect new expectations about
becoming involved with processes, rather than simply learning about
them. Other prognostications were slightly off the mark, such as the
assertion that the car would be replaced by “electrical successors”
within ten years.
McLuhan's predictions for the electric
age were unpalatable to some for at least two major reasons. First of all, the
dominant media and academic institutions of the time had built their
legacies through print media, which McLuhan seemed to claim were
doomed.
The second reason for skepticism is
more understandable: many of the changes he foresaw were as yet
barely imaginable.
The first desktop computer was a decade away, and
commercial Internet Service Providers wouldn't appear for more than
twenty years. Cell phones, video games and Facebook were the stuff of
science fiction.
Despite McLuhan's initial fame, much of
his work lost traction during the 1970's. It would not be until a
generation later that his books would get a fresh look – and now,
with a burgeoning online culture, would make a lot more sense.
In fact, McLuhan's once-radical insight
into how the forms of media shape our lives is a widely accepted,
much-discussed topic today, and is obvious to anyone who has
witnessed the changes wrought by Microsoft, Apple or Google. McLuhan,
it turns out, truly was ahead of his time.
