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
Future Shock Barcelona 2016
Antenna Head Havana 2016
Beyond the conventional explanations of fascism and white supremacy, many have begun to point to the medium rather than any particular message. One headline claimed that “the internet is a crime scene,” while another asked “can Twitter exist in a democracy?”
Conspicuously missing, however, in this collective agonizing over social media is the guidance of media theorist Marshall McLuhan. After all, McLuhan was a seminal figure in pioneering the whole field of media studies. He defined media broadly as any technology, from the wheel to the woodcut and the washing machine, that might serve as a virtual “extension of ourselves.” He sought to map out or “probe” the totalizing psychological, cultural, and social environments created by any medium.
Alongside the more famous “hot versus cool media” dichotomy, he proposed a division between the “Western” or literate and the “tribal” or non-literate modes of awareness. McLuhan believed that the West was due for a period of “re-tribalization,” but by “tribal” he meant much more than the commonly understood definition.
Yes, there would be polarization: people would by and large become less civil, less rational, touchier, and more defensive about the smallest things. This much, we already know and see every day. But McLuhan went even further in his use of the term, arguing that electronic media—more so than any political ideology—shifts the sensorial basis of Western society away from the visual, the literate, and the abstract and toward the oral, the tactile, and the tribal.
In other words, he saw re-tribalization as a process that will eventually return modern man to the mental and epistemic world of his pre-literate tribal ancestors: the “global village.” Over the long run, this can be quite benign, even sublime: in 1969, McLuhan imagined its endpoint as a society of “mythic integration” where “magic will live again.” Speaking in lofty millenarian terms, he predicted technology would merge humanity “into an inclusive consciousness…a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ…the ultimate extension of man.”
Such a moment of transcendence, however, is reserved for a distant day. For the time being, there is a more immediate challenge: as the growing oral-tribal segments of society brushes up against the old literate structures that govern them, there will be no end of tension, trauma, and misunderstanding. This is because the electronic tribalism McLuhan described, whatever its positive traits when taken on its own, poses a mortal threat to the values and assumptions of the still-dominant literate, liberal civilization.
It is worth revisiting McLuhan’s insights so as to help ensure that society’s road to any future settlement is as peaceful and orderly as possible. Otherwise, given the risk of violence involved in getting it wrong, there may not be much of a society left standing by retribalization’s end. In place of McLuhan’s prophesied universal consciousness, we could instead find epistemic incoherence, stagnation, and terminal de-civilization.
The Post-Literate Generation
The Return of the Oral World
Citing J.C. Carothers, McLuhan observes in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) that the literate mind and the typographic print world it inhabited were “surrounded by an abstract explicit visual technology of uniform time and…continuous space in which ‘cause’ is efficient and sequential.” This was the long historical era of the written word in the West: of philosophy and theology; the printing press; the Enlightenment; the individual and the private realm; mechanical segmentation and specialism. This was when the novel, the essay or the treatise were the currencies of public discourse; when concepts of modernity, progress, rationality, and objectivity became the norm.
By contrast, the life of pre-literate tribal man was set in “the implicit, magical world of the resonant oral word.” This was the realm of myth and legend; it was organic and communal as well as simultaneous and holistic; it prized the visceral and immediate over the detached and contemplative. In this world, “thought and behavior depend upon the magic resonance of words and their power to impose their assumptions relentlessly.” McLuhan quotes Carothers’s description of the folkways of the Kikuyu of Kenya, for whom “the correct use of magical words and their proper intonations…uttering these words in their ritual order” was of supreme importance.
Speaking at the height of the TV age, McLuhan believed that the oral world was returning via the electronic media’s influence on the young as it rendered them post-literate: “what is happening to our children is we’re watching them become Third World.”
A society becomes post-literate when electronic media compresses its experience of literacy to such an extreme degree that the simultaneity of the oral replaces the sequentalism of the typographic as the dominant pattern of thought and sense-making…
Read the rest of this essay at https://tinyurl.com/2rybadys
Michael Cuenco is a writer and policy researcher. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
A primary medium of post-literacy – the TV set – which has subsumed print media & culture
Nora Young is the 2021 Recipient of the Medium & the Light Award
The Medium and the Light Award for 2021
The recipient of the tenth Medium and the Light Award, in recognition of the ecumenical dimensions of the life and work of Marshall McLuhan, was presented on Sunday, July 11 online as an integral part of the 22nd Media Ecology Association (MEA) Convention hosted by Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro with the overall theme “Dystopic Futures: Media Ecology in an Algorithm Society”. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, this is the second MEA Convention to be offered completely online.
Nora Young is the recipient of this year’s Award for inviting listeners to join her in probing the many effects of our mediated world on human beings through her broadcast journalism, specifically as the host and creator of CBC Radio’s “Spark” and as author of “The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives are Altering the World Around Us” (2012). Both endeavours recall McLuhan’s own explorations to understand technologies (especially communication media) so that we can still shape them, even as they shape us. Although such technologies may appear ready to swallow us up in a vortex, this is not an inevitability, particularly when we take the time to step back from the media morass to think about its effects. Through her written and broadcast work, Nora Young is among those leading others precisely to think about the effects of these technologies on our lives to determine what is and what is not worth keeping.
The Award is usually given annually by The Marshall McLuhan Initiative that was affiliated for its first decade (2007-2017) with St Paul’s College, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. The University of Manitoba is Marshall McLuhan’s first post-secondary alma mater, where he earned the Gold Medal in Arts for 1933 and an M.A. in English literature (1934).
The award consists of:
• a crystal clear soda glass obelisk (measuring about 2 x 2 x 8 inches and 3 pounds in weight);
• embedding a piece of opalescent dichroic glass;
• on which the logo of the Marshall McLuhan Initiative has been etched.
• This dichroic glass has a very thin multi-metal coating that refracts light in man different colours.
• Both the award and recipients’ names are etched horizontally on the obelisk’s surface.
The inaugural award, in 2011, was presented to the late Fr. Pierre Babin, omi (1925-2012), in Lyons, France;
The 2012 award was presented to Dr. Thomas W. Cooper, the distinguished professor of communications at Emerson College in Boston;
The 2013 award was presented to none other than Dr. Eric McLuhan (1942-2018), world renowned author, lecturer and prober into all things media ecology;
The 2014 award was presented to Fr. John J. Pungente, S.J. and The Jesuit Communication Project (JCP) which he directs, based at Regis College, in the University of Toronto;
The 2015 award was presented posthumously to the late Richard J. Osicki (1946-2012), journalist, broadcaster, media educator and Founder and first Director of the Marshall McLuhan Initiative in Winnipeg;
The 2016 award was presented to Sr. Angela Ann Zukowski, MHSH, D. Min., Director of the Institute for Pastoral Initiatives, Associate Professor in the Dept. of Religious Studies at the University of Dayton;
The 2017 award was presented to Fr. Paul Soukup SJ, Professor in, and head of, the Dept. of Communications and Theology at Santa Clara University, media ecologist, scholar, educator, and practitioner;
There was no Medium and the Light Award in 2018, just in time for a well-deserved sabbatical;
This break allowed us to build up for the special 2019 presentation of this award to Rosanna Deerchild, storyteller, author, poet, broadcaster and host of CBC Radio’s “Unreserved”;
The 2020 award was presented to Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove, a former Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto after McLuhan’s passing, McLuhan studies scholar and researcher.
The Medium & Light Award
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