Download Rethinking Marshall McLuhan

Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media/September 2006
Review and Criticism: Research Pioneer Tribute
Rethinking Marshall McLuhan:
Reflections on a Media Theorist
Donald A. Fishman
One of the striking features of mass communication theory in the millennial decade has been the reemergence of Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980). McLuhan’s
prominence is not what it was during the peak of his influence during the
mid-1960s, but McLuhan is currently undergoing a revival. Wired magazine and
various Internet-oriented publications have adopted McLuhan as the patron saint of
the digital age (Wolf, 1996). McLuhan’s phrases such as the “global village” and the
“medium is the message” provide support for those commentators who view
McLuhan as the oracle of the digital era. During the past decade, more than a
dozen new books and countless articles have been published focusing on
McLuhan, including Levinson’s (1999) Digital McLuhan, Gordon’s (1997) biography Marshall McLuhan, and Theall’s (2001) The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. The
media ecology movement spearheaded by scholars at New York University and
Fordham University has celebrated McLuhan as one of the major thinkers of the
20th century.
As a result of these developments, the moment is ripe to revisit Marshall
McLuhan and to reassess his legacy. By way of self-disclosure, this author must admit that he has not been an uncritical admirer of McLuhan. Although a member of
the media ecology movement, he has not displayed the boosterism of McLuhan
that is characteristic of that organization. McLuhan’s aphoristic way of speaking, his
elliptical style of writing, and his heavy reliance on “probes” hurts the ability to understand his ideas. However, McLuhan’s staying power is real, and the source of
this power deserves to be examined.
To comment on McLuhan, his ideas, and his critics requires a book-length publication. Instead, space limitations warrant that remarks be restricted to a few central
ideas. Thus, this brief article is divided into two sections. The first part looks at
McLuhan as a public intellectual. It mixes Richard Posner’s interpretation of a public intellectual with biographical materials about McLuhan. The second part focuses on McLuhan’s overarching thesis about the development of mass media, and
his paradoxical views on broadcasting: He mistrusted television’s influence while
he saw television as the ideal exemplar of his notion of a cool medium.
Donald A. Fishman (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Boston College. His research interests include media theory and communication law.
© 2006 Broadcast Education Association
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 50(3), 2006, pp. 567–574
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McLuhan as a Public Intellectual
In 2001, Posner published Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline. It was the first
systematic, book-length study of modern intellectuals who are academics but who respond to “market forces” in their nonacademic role as commentators on society.
Posner defined a “public intellectual” by using a multitiered definition. For Posner,
public intellectuals were “academics writing outside their field” or “writing for a general audience” (p. 1). Posner contended that because the modern university places
such a great emphasis on specialization, heavily favoring depth versus breadth of
knowledge, few academics are now trained, or inclined, to play the role of public intellectuals. To Posner, this narrow training and socialization process in the United
States explains “why so many of the most distinguished academic public intellectuals
active in the second half of the twentieth century were foreigners—individuals such
as Raymond Aron, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Friedrick
Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Amartya Sen” (pp. 4–5).
Using Posner’s terminology, McLuhan was a public intellectual whose legacy was
twofold: (a) his emphasis that mass communication has altered our perception of
20th-century life, and (b) his belief that the content of communication is dictated by
its form. As Czitrom (1982) explained, “McLuhan’s efforts instilled an urgent awareness of the media environment as a basic force in shaping the modern sensibility” (p.
165).
McLuhan invariably has been depicted as an academic rebel who did not follow an
orthodox outlook or doctrine in his writings. Although correct, such a characterization tends to obscure two biographical points. First, McLuhan followed a very traditional career path. Born in 1911, he received his B.A. from the University of Manitoba
in 1932, his M.A. from Cambridge University in 1939, and a Ph.D in English from
Cambridge University in 1943. He was trained in English as a “Joyce scholar” and a
student of modernism. Between 1946 and 1979, he taught at St. Michael’s College of
the University of Toronto. His book, The Mechanical Bride (McLuhan, 1951) was an
attempt to apply the methods of New Criticism to the tensions between modern media and popular culture.
Second, McLuhan’s entrance into public life was abrupt. Until 1961, McLuhan was
unknown except to his students at the University of Toronto and a small circle of academics who either followed his abstruse articles in small-circulation journals or had a
personal relationship with him. This group included Harry Skornia of the University
of Illinois, Neil Postman of New York University, and James Carey, then at the University of Illinois. However, with the publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and
Understanding Media (1964/1994), McLuhan became one of the hottest academic
properties around.
Interestingly, the broadcast community played an important role in McLuhan’s rise
to prominence. During the late 1950s, McLuhan was introduced to academic professionals in communication through the intervention of Skornia, who asked McLuhan
to be the keynote speaker at the National Association of Educational Broadcasters
(NAEB) convention in 1958 (Marchand, 1998). It was through the sponsorship of the
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NAEB that McLuhan received a grant under the National Defense Educational Act to
develop a syllabus for 11th graders in media awareness. That document was published in 1960 under the title of “Report on Project in Understanding New Media”
(Marchand, 1998). Although the report was too advanced for high school students, it
served as the springboard for McLuhan’s (1964/1994) book Understanding Media.
Yet, by the early 1970s, McLuhan was dismissed as passé. His star had been in orbit
for a little more than a decade. All of his books published after 1964 were cowritten
ventures. His best theoretical and popular works, his historical writings, and his
prophecies appear to be products of the 1960s. It was a short but interesting ride.
Wrote Rogers (1994), “During his lifetime McLuhan did more than any other individual to interest the general public in communication study” (p. 489).
His death in 1980 meant the task of interpreting McLuhan for the digital age fell to his
admirers. McLuhan’s work preceded the CD-ROM, the personal computer, MTV, and
the information superhighway. Most of his admirers (e.g., Lapham, 1994; Levinson,
1999) argued that McLuhan was prescient in anticipating the role of communications in
society. Yet, there continues to be a persistent belief that McLuhan was a “populist
sage,” “the cracker barrel Socrates” (Marchand, 1998, pp. 7–8), or that the celebrity persona that McLuhan created was “something like a Renaissance fool, punning and blustering along in a rollicking intellectual slapstick” (Czitrom, 1982, p. 165).
McLuhan relished his role as a public intellectual, and he was a relentless seeker of
publicity. His desire to be a celebrity made others feel uneasy about him and led academics to treat his work with suspicion. However, Rogers (1994) was correct: No single individual brought more attention to the field of communication as a discipline
than McLuhan. McLuhan made “the history of the mass media central to the history of
civilization at large” (Carey, 1972, p. 305). It was a perspective that other scholars had
pioneered, namely Innis, but McLuhan publicized it and made it a part of intellectual
and social discourse in society.
Whether people perceived McLuhan as a charlatan or an oracle, it was he who set
forth the notions of a global village and the medium is the message, and who predicted an upheaval in society based on changes in communication technology. That
upheaval has occurred. The period between 1965 and 2005 has witnessed innovation after innovation in the field of communication. Just as the period from 1765 to
1800 is known as the age of industrialization, it is likely that the period between 1965
and 2020 will be known as the age of communication. The communication revolution has been uprooting and transformative (e.g., cell phones, cable television, hypertext, personal computers, and several hybrid information technologies).
When questions are asked about the history of these changes, Marshall McLuhan’s
name is likely to be discussed. If he was not the scholar and sage of these developments, he was the foremost press agent for the concepts that (a) society is fundamentally based on its system of communication, and (b) the communication system creates a foundation for the type of sensory perceptions existing within a particular era.
By pushing communication to center stage, McLuhan provided a paradigm shift for
others to utilize in analyzing and explaining the information revolution that accompanied the unfolding age of communication.
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McLuhan’s Central Ideas
McLuhan’s basic thesis is best understood alongside the work of his colleague and
fellow Canadian Harold Adams Innis. Innis (1950, 1951) argued that social change is
dictated by communication technology. Innis believed that new media arise to reach
larger audiences and strive to do so with greater speed; moreover, these new media
compete with older forms of communication for hegemony in society. At any given
time, one form of mass communication is dominant in society. Innis saw media progressing through different stages—oral, print, and electronic—and each new evolution in technology affected the social structure.
For Innis, print communication leads away from the communal aspects of oral culture and it fosters nationalism, individualism, and scientific authority. In the Bias of
Communication (Innis, 1951), he emphasized that an oral civilization is time-sensitive and bolsters a religious authority whereas a print civilization is space-centered
and allows for the development of empire and bureaucracy. In this interpretation, radio and television are space-oriented media, and they have the ability to create new
forms of associations across spatial divides.
McLuhan accepts the basic thesis that Innis propounded, but McLuhan’s work emphasized different concepts and outcomes. Carey (1972) noted that McLuhan took
the language of sociolinguistics from Sapir-Whorf and applied it to mass communication; for example, the grammar of television, sensory ratios between hearing (oral)
and seeing (print), as well as commentary on the power of smell and touch. McLuhan
believed that media tend to encourage an overreliance of one sense (e.g., sight over
hearing). As a result, for McLuhan a specific medium of communication offers a person a particular way of knowing and understanding the world heavily influenced by
that particular mode of communication.
One of the major themes within McLuhan’s work is his treatment of media as extensions of the human body. McLuhan’s adaptation of Innis’s work emphasized the media as extensions of an individual’s capabilities and attributes. Just as clothing is an extension of the skin, the ax is an extension of the hand, and the car is an extension of
the foot, the media are an extension of the mind. These media create perceptual environments, and these environments influence what kind of facts are privileged as important, and what type of stimuli are ignored or overlooked. One of McLuhan’s most
astute insights is that “content serves as a distraction from awareness of how the medium is molding consciousness” (Morrison, 2005, p. 13).
McLuhan’s writings are filled with dualisms: oral versus literate, content versus
form, time versus space, preliterate versus postliterate, and literate versus electronic.
Perhaps the most controversial of these dualisms is the distinction between a hot and
cool medium. A hot medium is one that provides a single definition of a situation and
a high amount of data, which requires little effort by the audience to fill in the information. On the other hand, a cool medium requires the listener or viewer to draw inferences to complete the information. Cool media, therefore, require active mental
participation. Radio and newspapers were hot media, whereas television and the tele-
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phone were cool media, forcing their users to draw inferences. Declared McLuhan
(1964/1994), “Hot media do not leave so much to be filled or completed by the audience” (p. 23).
McLuhan has been closely associated in the public’s mind with the medium of television. However, McLuhan’s thoughts on the medium were more complex than the
commonplace image of him as a simple-minded promoter of television.
McLuhan had five key ideas on television. First, McLuhan saw television as the
dominant medium of the times. Television became a filter for many of his observations on the conflict between one medium and another, allowing him to update the
earlier examples of conflict between oral and print cultures. Indeed, television had
gained remarkable legitimacy during its coverage of the 1960 presidential debates,
and the Kennedy assassination in November 1963 and its penetration rate into U.S.
homes had surprised intellectuals and policymakers.
Second, McLuhan was able to contrast the oral style of television against the hot
style of a print culture. For him, television was the ultimate exemplar of a cool medium. It required participation by the audience to follow the sequence of action. Its
images were multisensory, and the interpretation of television programs was endlessly
open. These images were discontinuous and nonlinear, giving television the features
of a mosaic (McLuhan, 1964/1994). Television creates what McLuhan called the
“ear-view mirror,” because “the eye never receives a complete picture from the
screen, just as the ear never receives a word in isolation from a stream of speech”
(Gordon, 1997, p. 210).
Third, McLuhan contended that television bolstered the “need for in-depth empathy and participation” (Gordon, 1997, p. 194) especially among the young, who were
visibly frustrated by print media . For McLuhan, television encouraged a shift from the
detachment of print media to the constant involvement and engagement that television stimulated.
Fourth, McLuhan saw television as an audile-tactile medium rather than a visual
one. This was a counterintuitive concept. For McLuhan, an individual decodes the
525 lines per second of a rapidly changing image on a television screen, and the eye
acts as if it were a hand touching the image and re-creating its central features. It is as
if one were creating a piece of sculpture. In a print medium, the eye and brain work
together to create information; in television, the eye works with the brain and hand in
reassembling the dots from the cathode ray gun into a meaningful image.
Fifth, McLuhan saw television as a unifying medium. It reverses the process of fragmentation and specialization that the print media fosters. It bolsters a seamless web of
experience and engenders a global village, re-creating the five senses of preliterate
and preprint culture. The auditory and tactile sense are thus reawakened and reintegrated into social life.
Meanwhile, McLuhan was mistrustful of television’s content. He was worried
about the numbing effect of television programming. Because of its state of perpetual
flux resulting from 525 lines of information per second, television deprives the audience of closure. It creates high sensory demands on people who might expect closure
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or a fixed image, and it was a poor tool for conducting the kind of pedagogical exercises that an individual would expect from a print medium. On a personal note,
McLuhan warned his son Eric to keep his granddaughter Emily away from too much
television: “Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug
which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young” (Gordon, 1997, p. 212).
McLuhan also devoted attention to the impact of radio, although he continued to
highlight the fundamental differences between television and radio. McLuhan
(1964/1994) depicted radio as creating the speed-up of information with the invention of wireless communication. Radio “contracts the world to village dimensions
size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumor, and personal malice” (p.
306). Unlike television, radio does not have a homogenizing effect. Instead, it tends to
reawaken tribal memories and to give voice to small, linguistic groups. Thus, radio is
a decentralizing and pluralistic medium. Interestingly, radio was initially a form of
group communication with various individuals gathered around a receiver creating a
communal experience. However, as it matured, radio allowed individuals to retreat
into private space and enjoy the program and subculture of their choice. Thus, the inherent bias of radio is that it appeals to particularistic values and tends to create subgroups in society.
Strengths and Limitations of McLuhan
Even in a brief survey of McLuhan’s ideas, it is important to identify the strengths
and limitations of his thought. Such a survey may help to account for his controversial
stature in the field.
There are three strengths of McLuhan’s work that should be mentioned. First, the
development of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s made
McLuhan’s notion of a global village an instant reality. McLuhan had been ahead of
his time in discussing communication in terms of information processing. For instance, in a 1959 address to the American Association of Higher Education, he declared: “The movement of information round-the-clock and round-the-globe is now
a matter of instantaneous configuration” (McLuhan, 2003, p. 5). McLuhan’s use of
metaphors and literary allusions has allowed his prose to outlive the topicality of
the day, giving it a visionary force. Thus, although McLuhan offers no sustained vision of a society guided by computers, servers, and protocols, his work resonates
with the evolving digital culture. His ideas, for instance, on the electronic media reversing producer–consumer relationships aptly apply to the multiple user and
value-added effect of the computer revolution.
Second, McLuhan was ahead of his time in discussing sensory ratios. He depicted
media as having a different influence on the eye, ear, brain, and central nervous system. Indeed, modern neuroscience is moving in the direction that McLuhan recommended. Thus, McLuhan’s writings provide an intriguing backdrop for recent experimental works on the effects of the media.
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Third, television has continued to be the dominant medium of our era, even in the
millennial decade. In the long run, TV may lose some of its luster as programming becomes Web based and the computer becomes an important vehicle for transmitting
signals—the growing trend of webcasting. However, as discussions of television’s role
in society continue, McLuhan’s theories will be mentioned.
At the same time, there are some major limitations in McLuhan’s approach. Four
limitations are emphasized here. First, McLuhan was weak on the effects of media on
social organizations (Carey, 1972; Czitrom, 1982). Second, McLuhan’s distinction
between hot and cool media, although provocative, was applied haphazardly so that
it does not provide a sound basis for making meaningful distinctions. It is a novel idea,
but in retrospect, it seems superficial and inconsistent. Third, McLuhan’s thought
tended to legitimize the status quo in advertising and broadcasting. He desired to ingratiate himself to business leaders, and he wanted to arouse corporations “into realizing the relevance of what he and his group were doing” (Gordon, 1997, p. 194).
Consequently, his work tended to minimize criticisms of corporate activities that were
expolitative or intellectually vapid. As Czitrom (1982) wrote, “McLuhan’s glorification of television slid very easily into an apology for the corporate interests that controlled the medium” (p. 182).
The fourth and final limitation is an important feature: McLuhan’s claims went far
beyond the evidence that he provided for his various assertions. Support for his contentions has to be culled carefully from McLuhan’s work because the author tended to
write in an elliptical style. There is a stream-of-consciousness style of writing to
McLuhan’s work that is interesting but distinctly offputting. It is not an argumentative
or scholarly approach to discourse. In fact, the evidence for his contentions is neither
self-evident nor presented in a logical fashion.
Conclusion
McLuhan’s role in the communication revolution is still ambiguous. McLuhan
alerted people to the diverse effects of media, and he asked probing questions about
how media transformations result in changes in the nature of society. His discussion
of the evolution of communication from oral to print to electronic is challenging, and
his willingness to look at the impact of technological innovations such as the telegraph, light bulb, and typewriter has encouraged scholars to revisit topics that were
once thoughtlessly passed over. Part of McLuhan’s recent popularity comes because
he placed a strong emphasis on the role of communication technology in transforming society. Especially in an era of massive technological change, McLuhan’s writings
seem prophetic.
At the same time, part of McLuhan’s popularity comes from the very ambiguity of
his statements—his conceptual elusiveness and his widespread use of metaphors—and the fact that later generations of commentators may interpret his comments in a variety of ways. McLuhan was both ahead of his time and ignorant of
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emerging technologies. He did not anticipate the interactive nature of the digital
revolution or predict the World Wide Web and the Internet. He did not foresee the
24/7 world that the digital revolution would create, although such an environment
could be broadly explained through McLuhan’s writings.
However, McLuhan is more than an oddity from the 1960s. McLuhan’s legacy will
be that of a provocative thinker, a popularizer of other people’s ideas, and a public intellectual who was willing to engage in a wide-ranging dialogue about the role of media in society. He made the field of communication more well known, and his ideas
anticipated the professional convergence of journalism, broadcasting, and speech
into one field now called communication. Overall, he was an engaging public intellectual who left a body of work that, 40 years after its publication, is still worth examining. The work is of a mixed quality, but the controversies that McLuhan inspired
have lived on longer than his detractors ever imagined.
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