The internet age has done a hell of a job burnishing the reputation of Marshall McLuhan.
After all, the famously cerebral Toronto media theorist more or less foretold the world wide web back in 1978, when he said that “a computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.” [But this quote did not appear in print until ‘The Global Village’ (1989) by Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers, p. 143].
One of the reasons McLuhan had such a vast perspective on emerging media is that he didn’t limit himself to august sources like books and radio.
He took in the whole media landscape, which inevitably included television, as well as comics, billboards, magazines, even fashion.
Before McLuhan, few people paused to consider the subtle messages being conveyed in such low-brow art forms. To him, they were more than just consumer prompts or escapist entertainment — they were expressions of the zeitgeist.
In writing about them, McLuhan legitimized popular culture.
Dissecting Dagwood and Blondie
One of McLuhan’s early fascinations was with the syndicated comic strip Blondie (created in 1930 and still running), which stars Blondie, a model of domestic decorum, and her dunderheaded husband, Dagwood.
McLuhan viewed Dagwood as an emasculated male, undone by the daily grind of work and Blondie’s recriminations at home. The analogy is perhaps unfair, not to mention sexist; at the time, McLuhan had recently become a parent, and was likely discomfited by his own domesticity.
Whether you agree with it or not, his take on Blondie showed a willingness to consider comics as more than just a source of fleeting amusement.
He offered more candid interpretations in The Mechanical Bride (1951), a wide-ranging collection of essays that tartly deconstructs comics, movie posters, magazine covers and well-known ads of the day.
We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.– Marshall McLuhan
McLuhan called out Superman for his “strong-armed totalitarian methods” and “immature and barbaric mind,” characterized Reader’s Digest as “Pollyanna Digest,” and argued that the appeal of western movies was that they illuminated “the primordial image of the lonely entrepreneur.”
1960s Superman
McLuhan was particularly concerned with the evolving tactics of advertisers. The book’s title was largely a reference to the postwar passion for the automobile, but it also captured his broader conviction that mass media was inciting an almost sexual obsession with new technology.
In his 2010 McLuhan biography, Douglas Coupland called him “arguably the first person on earth to be a metacritic” — that is, the first person compelled to examine the form and meaning of modern media.
Arguably McLuhan’s most important book, Understanding Media (1964) synthesized all of his major themes, which can be distilled in the axiom “the medium is the message.” It essentially holds that every new communication technology alters our perception of the world — or, to use another McLuhanism, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
MAD theories
Understanding Media raised our awareness of the cumulative effects of modern communications. It also made a rousing case for the importance of MAD magazine.
McLuhan wasn’t being flip. Television, with its mesmerizing flurry of images, had diminished the storytelling impact of comic strips like Blondie and Lil’ Abner, which depicted “a pastoral world of primal innocence from which young America has clearly graduated.”
What makes Understanding Media vital is not that McLuhan was always right, but that he was engaged enough to seek meaning in seemingly ephemeral art.
The new comic paradigm, according to McLuhan, was MAD magazine, which employed the visual vocabulary of TV and advertising to spoof all facets of American culture, from politics to psychoanalysis, drug culture to Disney cartoons. In McLuhan’s words, it was “a kind of newspaper mosaic of the ad as entertainment, and entertainment as a form of madness.”
Understanding Media is a heady text, filled with insights that remain startlingly on-point more than 40 years later. But the book also contains its share of overripe prose, and at times even seems to contradict itself. (Perhaps as a hedge against his critics, McLuhan once quipped, “I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.”)
What makes Understanding Media vital is not that McLuhan was always right, but that he was engaged enough to seek meaning in seemingly ephemeral art.
Without his lead, it’s quite unlikely that serious journalists nowadays would write book-length volumes on the history of comic books or dissect the political resonance of last night’s episode of Game of Thrones.
McLuhan showed a keen interest in pop culture, and pop culture gamely returned the favour, finding ways to name-check the fusty-looking academic. His very name became a poetic refrain on the U.S. sketch show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (“Marshall McLuhan / what are you doin’?”), and he made an unforgettable cameo as himself in the 1976 Woody Allen film Annie Hall.
Several years ago, McLuhan received one of the highest compliments in contemporary pop culture, earning a mention in an episode of the Emmy-awarding cable drama Mad Men, a suave examination of the ad world in the 1960s. In addition to being clever, the scene was written with a knowing wink — Mad Men, for one, would be inconceivable were it not for McLuhan’s penetrating look at pop culture more than half a century ago.
(Source: https://tinyurl.com/2p2kj4rr)
Peter Raymont – Executive Producer
Canadian Edition published by McClelland & Stewart (2003); MIT Press Edition (2004)
Dr. Eric McLuhan receiving an Honorary Doctorate in Sacred Letters from St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, 2011
About the Author
McLuhan Galaxy 
Whatcha doing, Marshall McLuhan? McLuhan’s Wit & Humour
So let’s think of the media scholar as the Greatest Canadian Wit. To really understand Marshall McLuhan, you had to be Marshall McLuhan. And even then, it was probably a bit foggy.
McLuhan began his 1958 keynote address to the National Association of Educational Broadcasters with a string of solid one-liners, including:
He leaned hard on jokey transitions, like “if I told you all media, which are based on the medium of language, have effects on the human psyche quite distinct from the information they seemingly provide, would you call me an ambulance? All right, I’m an ambulance.”
The speech, as recounted in Judith Fitzgerald’s 2001 biography, ended with “the medium is the message,” leaving his audience to scrape their brains off the back wall of the auditorium and launching McLuhan’s stellar career as a media theorist.
That blend of rapid-fire wit and enigmatic wisdom was McLuhan’s trademark, and it reflects his simultaneous bird’s eye and worm’s eye view of the world. At the macro level, he studied the information age like the literature professor he was, and in doing so was able to spot movements that were undetectable to the naked eye. Everyone else was looking at the trees from within the forest while he was grokking biomass from space. In his words, “we don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.”
And at the micro level, he was an incorrigible punster, always coining phrases and linking ideas just to see what would happen. He perfectly executed Wildean flips like “Invention is the mother of necessities” and “Money is the poor man’s credit card.” And like Hitchens, he was certainly a better talker than writer. Some of it was funny, some of it was nonsense, and most of it was greeted as gnomic wisdom you had to pretend to understand. This was the man who saw his book cover misprinted as The Medium is the Massage and decided that was an even better title.
McLuhan saw a lot of things coming, but was he right like a stopped clock or a spooky prophet? In 1971, he predicted surveillance capitalism: “Espionage at the speed of light will become the biggest business in the world,” he told Peter C. Newman in Maclean’s. Oh, and in that same interview: “People tend to acquire multiple jobs. And with the computer at home, the cottage economy returns via the computer terminal at home. The idea of going out to work becomes obsolete.” There was a McLuhannissance in the 1990s as the internet came online, and maybe we’re due for another.
Though he also said jukeboxes control our panic over the passage of time “by shredding it into ragtime.” I know nothing of his work, but I’m happy to celebrate the wordplay.
Source: https://tinyurl.com/2p9yr3t9
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