ABOUT THE EVENT
There is perhaps no person more responsible for the radical transformation of the humanities since the 1960s than the Canadian philosopher and provocateur Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980). McLuhan’s voluminous publications, lectures, interviews, and talks (and in one case, cameo film appearance in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall) have made him one of the most widely recognized names of the twentieth century. McLuhan was more than an individual author; he was what Michel Foucault would call the initiator of a discourse (like Marx or Freud). His intellectual legacy created a climate of opinion, one that the French nicknamed “mcluhanisme.” He was also perhaps the pioneering public intellectual. Although he died before the internet was invented, his talks on (and about) media such as radio, television and in film ushered in public intellectual debate concerning the electronic world. Far beyond academia — and far beyond North America — audiences recognize his slogans such as “the medium is the message” and coinages such as “the global village,” “print culture,” “electronic culture,” and “the Gutenberg era.”
Our conference will address McLuhan’s legacy for the humanities. While he remains one of the best known and most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century, his reputation declined in the later 1970s. Today, everyone knows his slogans but few people actually read his works. (Fewer still attempt to understand the origins and implications of those works in their own time.)
Although he is remembered today chiefly as a media theorist, McLuhan was an English professor by occupation. Above all, he was a voracious reader, and our conference will focus on his reading (and on reading McLuhan). Recently, his personal library of some 6000 books was acquired by the University of Toronto Libraries, and the McLuhan Library and Archive received a UNESCO Memory of the World Designation as an irreplaceable part of the human heritage. We believe that our current moment is a unique one ideally suited to a reconsideration of McLuhan’s exhilarating and complex (yet sometimes troubling) legacy.
R.S.V. P. This event is free and open to the public, but space is limited, and pre-registration is required. Identification will be required for entrance.
SPEAKERS TO INCLUDE:
PATRICK DEER, New York University
MONIKA DOMMANN, University of Zurich
JOHN DURHAM PETERS, Yale University
PAUL EDWARDS, Bath Spa University
ALAN GALEY, University of Toronto
LISA GITELMAN, New York University
JOHN GUILLORY, New York University
ADRIAN JOHNS, University of Chicago
PAULA MCDOWELL, New York University
ANDREW MCLUHAN, McLuhan Institute
PETER NICHOLLS, New York University
SARAH SHARMA, University of Toronto
Date & Time: Thu, Mar 5, 2020, 1:00 PM – Fri, Mar 6, 2020, 7:00 PM EST
Location: NYU Center for the Humanities, 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor, Room 503, New York, NY 10003 United States
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RSVP REQUIRED TO ATTEND – Register at Eventbrite here https://tinyurl.com/sy5l5g2
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Marshall McLuhan at Cambridge University
By Colin Marshall
So many of us use Facebook every day, but how many of us know that its enormous presence in our lives owes, in part, to modern philosophy? “In the course of his studies at Stanford,” writes John Lanchester in a recent London Review of Books piece of Facebook, Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, an early investor in the company, “became interested in the ideas of the US-based French philosopher René Girard, as advocated in his most influential book, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World,“ especially a concept he called “mimetic desire..”
“Human beings are born with a need for food and shelter,” writes Lanchester. “Once these fundamental necessities of life have been acquired, we look around us at what other people are doing, and wanting, and we copy them.” Or as Thiel explained it, “Imitation is at the root of all behavior.” Lanchester reports that “the reason Thiel latched onto Facebook with such alacrity was that he saw in it for the first time a business that was Girardian to its core: built on people’s deep need to copy,” yet few of us, its users, have clearly perceived that essential aspect of Facebook and other social media platforms.
Marshall McLuhan, despite having died decades before their development, would have caught on right away — and he understood why even we savvy denizens of the 21st century haven’t. “For the past 3500 years of the Western world, the effects of media — whether it’s speech, writing, printing, photography, radio or television — have been systematically overlooked by social observers,” said the author of Understanding Media and The Medium is the Message. “Even in today’s revolutionary electronic age, scholars evidence few signs of modifying this traditional stance of ostrichlike disregard.”
Those words come from an in-depth 1969 interview with Playboy magazine that broke the celebrity literature professor McLuhan’s ideas to an even wider audience than they’d had before. In it he diagnosed a “peculiar form of self-hypnosis” he called “Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.”
As McLuhan saw it, “most people, from truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ignorant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the massage — that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio. The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.”
Read the rest of this essay at https://tinyurl.com/ygnvhmbl
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture.
Narcissus Narcosis
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Marshall McLuhan is still the most penetrating Christian humanist to grasp that technology has forced us to rediscover how humans can use it to advance our species and preserve its humanity.
By James Poulos – January 3, 2017
It’s time—again—for a resurgence of interest in Marshall McLuhan. After a posthumous revival in the 1970s and ‘80s, McLuhan fans renovated his legacy again in the mid-‘90s, as Muhlenberg professor of media Jefferson Pooley notes in a new appraisal at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Just last year, Pooley observes, Tom Wolfe, who helped make McLuhan famous way back when, gave tribute in a taped appearance to his enduring relevance. “Today thousands of young Internet apostles are familiar with Marshall McLuhan,” the old New Journalist said, “and are convinced that his light shines round about them.”
To be sure, the visionary theorist, famous for buzz phrases like “the global village” and “the medium is the message,” was primed for importance in the Internet era back when the most even he could divine was a coming “electric age.” But were McLuhan merely a cross between David Riesman and Shingy, his voluminous pop prophesies would be plowed under by the very deluge of content and change-ology that he predicted would come to define our immersive media experience.
McLuhan is far more than an egghead or a guru—and, in a subtler way, beautifully less than either. He is, still, the most prolific and penetrating Christian humanist to grasp that technology has forced us to rediscover how humans can use it to advance our species and preserve its humanity. The time has come to care about McLuhan again because the time has come to pull off that rediscovery before it’s too late.
McLuhan Knew Internet Would Change Our Workplaces
But how? The key is found in the gap between the McLuhan of the elite imagination and the real McLuhan, the man of faith whose existence is a muted but open secret. The first McLuhan was already in place when Wolfe first profiled him—the McLuhan who foretold how the future us will act.
“They will work at home, connected to the corporation, the boss, not by roads or railroads, but by television,” Wolfe summed it up. “They will relay information by closed-circuit two-way TV and by computer systems. The great massive American rush-hour flow over all that asphalt surface, going to and from work every day, will be over. The hell with all that driving. Even shopping will be done via TV. All those grinding work-a-daddy cars will disappear. The only cars left will be playthings, sports cars. They’ll be just like horses are today, a sport. Somebody over at General Motors is saying—What if he is right?”
“Whole cities, and especially New York, will end too just like cars, no longer vital to the nation but…just playthings,” Wolfe marveled at the McLuhan whose prognostications captivated the elite mind. “People will come to New York solely to amuse themselves, do things, not marvel at the magnitude of the city or its riches, but just eat in the restaurants, go to the discotheques, browse through the galleries.”
Horrible! Or wonderful? From the age of “Mad Men” to the age of “Sex in the City” and the terminal (?) age of “Girls,” this titillating ambivalence has fueled our content-choked culture of work, play, communications, and commerce. Try as we might to keep up, we’ve felt increasingly uncertain about our command of the technology that lurches us ever faster into a future so heavy on the activity and light on the agency.
A Cry of Anxiety: ‘I Am the World’
Amid such velocity anxiety, it’s small wonder so many seek refuge in the pathos of selfhood and identitarianism. Delinked relationally from our fellow humans and wired into a decentered and disembodied realm of constant motion, we cry out for purchase on what Tocqueville called a “fixed point in the human heart,” and we increasingly surmise that today that point can only be found within the protective, prideful shell of our chosen and unchosen identities…
Read the rest of this essay at https://tinyurl.com/wx3mhlf
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Media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s work best explains how the world changed in the 2010s—and what we can expect in the decade ahead.
By Zach Weissmueller
What did the 2010s add up to?
I spent the decade at Reason creating videos about the democratization of everything and the declining power of society’s gatekeepers.
“Everything that we prize in our Western world, in matters of individualism, separatism, private point of view…all of those things are highly favored by the printed word,” said media theorist Marshall McLuhan in a 1965 BBC interview [by Frank Kermode], (see below).
McLuhan, who coined the axiom “the medium is the message,” argued that history’s prime mover isn’t the Great Leader or the Great Thinker but ever-changing communications technologies.
As societies moved from oral traditions to written ones, McLuhan argued, there was a bottom-up cultural shift. Tribal groups who relied on face-to-face communication and mythology morphed into more complex, less homogeneous societies thanks to the written word. And when the printing press standardized communications, the distribution of literature created the very concept of “a public” bound together by common languages and texts. This set the stage for the rise of modern nation-states and the Enlightenment.
In the 1960s, McLuhan identified our current epoch as the “Electric Age,” in which circuit-based media gave rise to what he termed “the global village.” For the first time in history, the entire world could follow a single event.
McLuhan predicted that this electric “global village” would undo both the national homogeneity and personal individuality engendered by print, reviving our more fractured and tribal past.
“Involuntarily, we’re getting rid of individualism,” McLuhan said, identifying the shift away from print towards “electric” media like radio and television as the main causal factor. “We’re more concerned with what the group knows, of feeling as it does, of acting ‘with it.'”
And as the electric age evolved into the digital age with its cheap, limitless replicability, this retribalization accelerated in the 2010s. This is why the past decade has both created opportunities and dangers for the libertarian worldview.
Barack Obama epitomized the best and worst of the decade: As a long-shot candidate, he used new modes of communication to route around and eventually co-opt media gatekeepers.
He built a cult of personality through social media, using inspiring rhetoric so vague that people could project anything onto his words.
The Obama White House produced and distributed its own content, undermining the ability of the establishment to define him.
Photojournalists, for example, were denied access to the president’s most intimate moments—but were free to publish the selective imagery of the official White House photographer.
“The White House went to create an identity for the president. And because they [could] distribute directly through all these channels, there really [wasn’t] much downside to it,” photojournalism analyst Michael Shaw of Reading the Pictures told Reason‘s Todd Krainin in 2014.
Read the rest of this essay at https://tinyurl.com/u3zrm55
The 2010s: When the Media Lost Their Gatekeepers
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University of Windsor Symposium on MEDIA & SPACE: A Dialogue between Law & Communication Studies
From left to right: Dr. Michael Darroch, Philip Morais, Andrew McLuhan, & Dr. Elaine Kahn
“The electric light is pure information.” –Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Philip Morais[1]– Windsor Law J.D. Candidate 2021
On October 25, 2019, Windsor Law LTEC Lab and the School of Creative Arts co-hosted Media & Space: The Regulation of Digital Platforms, New Media & Technologies Symposium. It was an interdisciplinary event launched in the multimedia studio of the Alan Wildeman Centre for Creative Arts, whose high ceilings spanned from a control booth in the back to a front wall projection screen, holding speakers and attendees from Canada predominantly, with representation from America and Europe. The conference gathered fourteen speakers to discuss how spatial aspects of media, which Marshall McLuhan thought through,[2] might be a point of departure and/or a point of arrival for informing regulatory structures in the realm of digital platforms, borders and borderless states, as well as what role can Canada play in the “global village”[3] of today. What dialogue, simply put, do legal systems and media ecosystems need to be in to balance each other out in this flux of the digital sublime?
Who was Marshall McLuhan? The quintessential question would be instead, why is this someone who matters to an interdisciplinary investigation of technological regulation? McLuhan was a Canadian professor of English who spent most of his career at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. His contribution to intellectual history in the mid-twentieth century was not as a communication theorist[4] but as a metaphysician[5] and critic-as-artist[6] whose translation of techniques of literary criticism to techno-cultural subject matter was revolutionary, crystallized in “the medium is the message”[7] aphorism. That phrase became a part of popular culture in the 1960s, a decade he was associated with and defined as a figure often on television.[8] Notwithstanding, his private life was shaped in the 1930s when he left Cambridge University to be an academic, Catholic, and husband to Corrine Keller Lewis whom he had six children with and remained married to until he died on December 31, 1980. Some in academia subsequently reasoned he was one of the many scholars of the “Toronto School of Communication”[9] at that time. His distinguishing insights and anticipations[10] went from opaque to obvious in the 1990s, however, when an advent of the World Wide Web retrieved interest in him.
The first panel, “McLuhan in Space, Local and Global,” consisting of three keynote speakers, lent historical weight to the conference. “Marshall McLuhan is an organizing principle more than anything else because, after all, he is one of the pioneers of this thing we now call media study,” grandson Andrew McLuhan offered, Director of The McLuhan Institute, adding immediately in his address, which made an argument by analogy to the past precedent of regulation of the natural environment and pharmaceutical industry in the United States, “There is no difference between environmental science and media study …. Why do we thoroughly study and regulate drugs for safety and efficacy but not technologies?”[11] Dr. Michael Darroch, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Culture in the School of Creative Arts quoted James Dean playing Jim Stark in the film Rebel Without A Cause to tease out user experience on social media: “We’re all involved!” His presentation contextualized time Marshall McLuhan had spent on the Windsor-Detroit border as a professor of English at Assumption College from 1944 through to 1946 as a “transformative moment”. As McLuhan himself suggests in “Canada: A Borderline Case” a “border is not a connection but an interval of resonance”,[12] a dialogue, a dynamic of figure and ground shifting constantly nationally. Digital platforms do likewise to the body of the user by being an environment bordered by software executing calculations, an extension of the nervous system according to McLuhan who classified all electricity-based technology to be performing such functions;[13] atmospheric dimensions of their online access further suggests an extension of the respiratory system by the same logic, breathing in and out information, off and on. Dr. Elaine Kahn returned to this “resonance” theme by way of the body politic of the more recent past. The author of Been Hoping We Might Meet Again elaborated upon correspondence between Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and McLuhan from 1968 to 1980. In reply to the question of whether or not the latter is the inspiration for including “other media of communication” among enumerated fundamental freedoms in s 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Kahn opined: “Well, I can’t imagine how he could’ve been.”[14]
Continue reading a description of the second, third and fourth panels, the last of which was about media ecology, as well as the complete endnotes and references, go to this link: https://tinyurl.com/umbhs3v
References
[1] Co-Organizer of the Symposium with Dr. Pascale Chapdelaine, Dr. Michael Darroch, and Dr. Vincent Manzerolle It was an honour to represent Windsor Law by chairing one of the many excellent panels, as well as to work with and learn from my fellow conference organizers, to whom I wish to express gratitude. All errors are mine in the interpretation of the Symposium. The conference sprung from initial communications I had with Andrew McLuhan, which began on August 8, 2018. Thank you, Andrew, for everything your yes made possible!
[2] Edmund Carpenter & Marshall McLuhan, “Acoustic Space” in Edmund Carpenter & Marshall McLuhan, ed, Explorations in Communication: An Anthology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960) at 67: “Auditory space a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing. It is not pictorial space, boxed in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment.” (Dr. Michael Darroch and Dr. Janine Marchessault, in conjunction with students and researchers at U. of Windsor and York U., annotated an anniversary new edition of the eight co-edited editions of Explorations collected in this book that is available at: https://wipfandstock.com/explorations-1-8.html); see generally Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).
[3] Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962) at 31: “The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.”; see especially Eric McLuhan, “The Source of the Term ‘Global Village’ ” (9 July 1998) in Francesco Guardiani & Eric McLuhan, ed, McLuhan Studies 1:2, online: McLuhan Studies <http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_2art2.htm> [perma.cc/6HBF-ACTC]; but see Andrew Chrystall, “After the Global Village” (2011) 9:1 Canadian Journal of Media Studies, online (pdf): <https://cjms.fims.uwo.ca/issues/09-01/Chrystall.pdf> [perma.cc/Q48A-58JA].
[4] Eric McLuhan, “Marshall McLuhan’s Theory of Communication: The Yegg” (2008) 1:1 Global Media Journal at 25: “As he often said, Marshall McLuhan did not have A Theory of Communication …. he didn’t use theories in his work.”; contra Michael Darroch, “The Toronto School: Cross-Border Encounters, Intellectual Entanglements” in Peter Simonson and David Park, eds, The International History of Communication Studies (London: Routledge, 2016) at 278: “The political economist Harold Innis and English scholar Marshall McLuhan are best known for advancing theories about the specificity of media and the function of communications technologies in effecting social change, an approach often criticized as overly deterministic.” (whether or not theory was engaged and whether or not contribution was made as a theorist are separate but related issues, which must be engaged simultaneously for context).
[5] Letter from Marshall McLuhan to Joe Keogh (6 July 1970), Ottawa, National Archives of Canada (H.2065/1434–5): “I am not a “culture critic” because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities.”
[6] See Donald F. Theall, “McLuhan as Modern Satirist” in The Virtual McLuhan (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001) at 187-201.
[7] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York City: McGraw-Hill, 1964) at 7: “In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. 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.” [“Understanding Media”]; see Eric McLuhan, “The Fordham Experiment” (2000) Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, Volume 1, 2000 23; see Herbert Krugman, “Brain Wave Measures of Media Involvement” (1971) 11:1 Journal of Advertising Research 3; see generally Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Harper Collins, 2007); see generally Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: the science and evolution of a human invention (New York: Viking, 2009).
[8] Our World was an initial live international satellite television production broadcast on 25 June 1967. Nineteen nations were represented in separate segments featuring their respective countries. An estimated 400 to 700 million people watched. The Beatles performed “All You Need Is Love” at 8:54 G.M.T. on behalf of the United Kingdom. Marshall McLuhan preceded them at 7:17 G.M.T. on behalf of Canada from CBC studios in Toronto.
[9] See e.g. Derrick de Kerckhove, “McLuhan and the “Toronto School of Communication”” (1989) 14:4 Canadian Journal of Communication 73.
[10] Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “Communication via the Internet” (8 May 1966) at 00h:00m:00s, online (video): Marshall McLuhan Speaks Special Collection <http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/prophecies/1966-communication-via-the-internet/index.html> [perma.cc/DD5B-EAW8] (The Internet was initially run through telephone cables into homes when Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. on July 5, 1994). See especially Eric McLuhan, “On Formal Cause” (2005) 4:3/4 Explorations in Media Ecology 181.
[11] The government of China was first to formally classify Internet addiction as a clinical disorder in 2008; see William M. McDonald et al, “Electroconvulsive Therapy in China” (2012) 28:4 The Journal of ECT 206. In contradistinction, neither by the World Health Organization nor by the American Psychiatric Association has excessive Internet use been recognized as a disorder and Canada has followed suit; see World Health Organization, The World Health Report 2001, Mental Health: New Understanding, New Hope (France: World Health Organization, 2001); see American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (Washington: American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2013); see The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, Out of the shadows at last: transforming mental health, mental illness and addiction services in Canada, (Ottawa: The Committee, 2 May 2006).
[12] Marshall McLuhan, “Canada: The Borderline Case” in David Staines, ed, The Canadian Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977) at 226.
[13] Understanding Media, supra note 6 at 3: “Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.”
[14] See generally Elaine B. Kahn, Interface: The Correspondence of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and H. Marshall McLuhan (1968-1980) (PhD Dissertation, The State University of New Jersey, 2017) [unpublished] (this merits more than passing reference but is not tenable in the confines of the blog post).
https://tinyurl.com/umbhs3v)
University of Windsor School of Creative Arts
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Rossana Deerchild awarded the 2019 Medium and the Light Award by Howard Engel
By Howard R. Engel
The recipient of the eighth Medium and the Light Award, in recognition of the ecumenical dimensions of the life and work of Marshall McLuhan, was presented on Thursday, November 28 in Winnipeg, Manitoba as an integral part of the Symposium, “Winnipigeon Homecoming: Marshall McLuhan in Winnipeg”. For the first time, the Medium in the Light Award, a glass obelisk “tetrad” hand-crafted each time by Matthew McMillan of Prairie Studio Glass is accompanied by a $1,000 prize. The Medium and the Light Award in particular and the entire Nov. 28 Symposium are underwritten by the Engel Family Fund at the Winnipeg Foundation.
Rosanna Deerchild is the recipient of this year’s Award. She is a longtime storyteller, published author, poet, broadcaster and host of CBC Radio’s Unreserved where she brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike the world over by reflecting the rich, diverse and life-supporting experiences of Indigenous peoples back to themselves and to the settler community. It is for this major contribution to bringing the whole people together in truth and reconciliation that she receives the 2019 Medium and the Light Award.
Rosanna Deerchild is a veteran broadcaster, having worked at APTN, CBC, Global and NCI-FM, where she hosted All My Relations. She has also hosted The (204) and the Weekend Morning Show on CBC Radio One and appeared on CBC Radio’s DNTO. She is an award-winning author and poet. Her debut poetry collection this is a small northern town shares her reflections of growing up in a racially divided place. It won the 2009 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. Her second book Calling Down the Sky is her mother’s residential school survivor story. Rosanna is a co-founder and member of the Indigenous Writers Collective of Manitoba and has also contributed to numerous Indigenous newspapers.
A Cree from O-Pipon-Na-Piwan Cree Nation at South Indian Lake in northern Manitoba, Rosanna now lives and works in her found home of the North End of Winnipeg. (About Unreserved, see https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved).
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 inaugural award, in 2011, was presented to the late Fr. Pierre Babin, omi (1925-2012), in Lyons, France. The unique Medium and Light obelisk statuette representing the award was unveiled by Dr. Eric McLuhan during Toronto’s McLuhan Centenary celebrations that summer. Originally conceived by the late Director of the Marshall McLuhan Initiative, Richard J. Osicki (1946-2012), and inspired by the book The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion by Marshall McLuhan and edited by Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (1999) was designed by The Initiative in collaboration with artist Matthew McMillan of Prairie Studio Glass, Winnipeg who uniquely recreates the glass obelisk for each year’s recipient.
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Bust of McLuhan by Madeleine Vrignon based on a 1935 photograph when he was 24
By Todd Lewys
It’s a saying that we’re all familiar with: “the medium is the message.”
And while most Manitobans would recognize Marshall McLuhan as the author of the groundbreaking statement, they might not know he spent his formative years in Winnipeg.
It’s only fitting, then, that the University of Manitoba graduate — who said technology would turn the world into a global village and who foresaw the formation of the world-wide-web — would be inducted into the WinnipegREALTORS® Citizens Hall of Fame in Marshall McLuhan Hall at the University of Manitoba on November 27.
As it turned out, the U of M was the launching point for McLuhan, who earned his [BA and] Masters in English Literature at the institution in 1934.
Shortly after, he left for England to continue his studies at the University of Cambridge.
After that, he taught English at universities in the U.S. and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto, where he taught media studies courses and wrote his seminal work, Understanding Media, in 1964.
“Marshall McLuhan was one of the most influential thinkers of the Twentieth Century,” said Andrew Smith, Conservative MLA for Lagimodiere, who spoke on behalf of the Premier of Manitoba, Brian Pallister. “His ideas had a global reach and inspired so many people.”
WinnipegREALTORS® president Kenneth Clark said that McLuhan — the 46th inductee to the Citizens Hall of Fame — was shaped by his time in Winnipeg.
“Stories have it that he would walk from his home on Gertrude Street through Osborne Village to the U of M campus, which in those days was on Broadway,” he said. “His induction takes on a special impact here at the U of M in the room that was named after him.”
Not only is the stately function room quietly spectacular with its glass and Tyndall stone walls, but so is the bust of McLuhan that was designed by Winnipeg-based sculpture specialist Madeleine Vrignon.
Taken from 1935 photo — she only had one image to work with — it perfectly captures the likeness of McLuhan, who was then in his early-to-mid-twenties.
“I think it’s a magnificent job. I love the work and am proud to have this part of Marshall’s life commemorated – it was just before he went to Cambridge,” said McLuhan’s son Michael, who flew in from Toronto to accept the 2019 Citizens Hall of Fame Award on his father’s behalf. “It’s also my first time in Marshall McLuhan Hall — it’s very impressive.”
McLuhan said his father would have appreciated the finely crafted sculpture and the 2019 Citizens Hall of Fame induction.
“He loved Winnipeg, and I know he would have been tickled pink to accept the award. It’s too bad it took over 30 years to get here,” he said with a laugh. “But better late than never. Thank you for this truly magnificent work, and the award.”
Founded in 1986 by REALTOR® Harry De Leeuw in collaboration with former Winnipeg mayor Bill Norrie, the Citizens Hall of Fame recognizes Manitobans who contributed to Winnipeg’s quality of life with exceptional achievements in leadership and community service. A link to all inductees, is available at winnipegrealtors.ca/community/citizens-hall-of-fame. (Source: https://tinyurl.com/rg63bcb)
Marshall McLuhan’s son, Michael, talks about his father at the unveiling/induction ceremony held on Nov. 27/2019 in Marshall McLuhan Hall, at the University of Manitoba
WinnipegRealtors, in a news release, says McLuhan never forgot his roots in Winnipeg. He affectionately called Winnipeggers Winnipigeons. He wrote of the Western skies and horizons as one of the most beautiful things about the West. He spoke of how Winnipeg had a real human scale where the individual still has a significant dimension.
As McLuhan’s biographer Philip Marchand said in the text for the Marshall McLuhan Hall plaque, McLuhan was the foremost commentator on media and communications of the twentieth century.
“Building on a solid foundation and fertile ground, which Winnipeg provided McLuhan up until he left to pursue higher education and his field of expertise, it should not come as a surprise to Winnipeggers how their city has been an incubator for truly amazing citizens who are exceptional in their body of work,” says King. “Technology may be an enabler but McLuhan showed what the human mind is capable of producing and observing.” Source: https://tinyurl.com/uhsp8vb
Michael McLuhan’s Talk at the Symposium that Accompanied the Induction: “Some Things My Father Told Me”
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NOVEMBER 26, 2019 — A bronze bust of U of M alumnus Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) will be unveiled at a special symposium and reception at U of M Archives & Special Collections on Thursday, Nov. 28 from 1 to 4 p.m. The WinnipegREALTORS selected the communications giant as the 2019 Citizens Hall of Fame Inductee.
Michael McLuhan, youngest son of Marshall McLuhan, will give an illustrated talk at the symposium about his father’s Winnipeg roots.
Visitors are welcome to drop in and view the bust at the archives, where it will remain in the Archives until next year when Assiniboine Park will reconstitute the Walk of Fame, currently suspended by the construction of Canada’s Diversity Gardens.
McLuhan’s influence on ideas about communication and information is widely acknowledged; his concept of a “global village” created by technology predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. His work heavily influenced many cultural thinkers and media theorists such as Neil Postman and Timothy Leary, as well as politicians such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau and artist Andy Warhol.
His phrase “the medium is the message” likewise revealed the intertwined relationship between technology and informational content. It was introduced in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). A later book, entitled The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, was published in 1967; the changed title, said to be a printer’s error, was embraced by McLuhan as a playful and generative extension of the original idea.
“The medium is the message. 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”. – Marshall McLuhan
THE ‘WINNIPIGEON’ COMES HOME
Born in Edmonton, McLuhan grew up in Winnipeg after his family moved here in 1915. Upon graduating with a Masters of Arts degree in English at the University of Manitoba in 1934, he went on to the University of Cambridge (U.K.) to obtain a doctorate in 1943. He began teaching at the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his career.
Some have argued that McLuhan’s formative years in Winnipeg had a permanent effect on his thinking and writing. McLuhan converted to Roman Catholicism in 1937, and much has also been written about the influence of his faith on his views.
He always considered himself a Winnipegger. In a 1970 interview with CBC’s Danny Finkleman, he said, “Let’s remember some of our happy days out west! Now [that] they’re having their centenary, why, we think happily of returning with rest of the Winnipigeons, flocking back to the old spot.” The interview was published in the 1974 collection of interviews Speaking of Winnipeg.
McLuhan’s roots in Winnipeg will be explored at the symposium this Thursday. All are welcome.
Exhibit of Winnipeg-related McLuhan archives and artifacts curated by Howard R. Engel and Shelley Sweeney.
MCLUHAN SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM
University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections
1-1:30 PM Michael McLuhan, featured speaker, “Things My Father Told Me”
1:30-2:00 PM McLuhan Bust unveiling
Howard R. Engel & Esther G. Juce: Presentation of McLuhan nomination for Winnipeg Citizen’s Hall of Fame
2-2:30 PM Jarrett Cole’s documentary video on McLuhan’s Winnipeg roots, Marshall McLuhan Lived Here.
2:30-3:00 PM Presentation of the Medium and the Light Award
3-3:30 PM Soft launch of McLuhan Faith and Works Conference Proceedings book, Of a Certain Winnipigeon and Religion: McLuhan’s Faith & Works Conference Proceedings
3:30-4:00 PM Richard Altman’s new abridged version of his avant-garde video McLuhan Unclaimed: I Am a Winnipigeon
4—5:30 PM Reception
Source: https://tinyurl.com/s34jwr5
The Winnipeg Realtors announcement of Marshall McLuhan’s selection is here: https://tinyurl.com/wb4ybrw
University of Manitoba Graduate B.A. (1952), M.A. (1934)
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Tags: biography, communication, conferences, culture, education, university, Winnipeg
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Marshall McLuhan was born at Edmonton, Alberta on 21 July 1911, he moved with his parents to Winnipeg in 1915. He attended Gladstone School, Earl Grey School and Kelvin Technical High School before enrolling in the University of Manitoba in 1928. He received a BA Honours in 1933 and an MA in 1934 before going on to study at the University of Cambridge.
The Winnipigeon Symposium Schedule
Date: Thursday, November 28, 2019
Time: 1:00pm – 5:30pm
Location: Archives & Special Collections, Elizabeth Dafoe Library, Fort Garry Campus Archives
FREE: EVERYONE WELCOME
FEATURED SPEAKER: Michael McLuhan, son of Marshall McLuhan “Some Things My Father Told Me”
The unveiling of Bust of Marshall McLuhan, 2019 Winnipeg Citizen’s Hall of Fame Inductee
Documentary: Jarrett Cole’s: Marshall McLuhan Lived Here.
Award Presentation: The Medium and the Light Award
New Book announcement: Of Religion and a Winnipegeon: Proceedings of the McLuhan Faith & Works Conference at St.Paul’s College, U of M, Oct. 2015
Movie Screening: Richard Altman’s: McLuhan Unclaimed: I am a Winnipigeon
Reception to follow until 5:30
University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections
330 Elizabeth Dafoe Library
MORE INFO: archives@umanitoba.ca (204) 474 – 9986
Along with the program above, there will also be the unveiling of the Bust of Marshall McLuhan, and an announcement of his induction as the 2019 Winnipeg Citizen’s Hall of Fame Inductee joining other notable Winnipegers like Terry Fox, John Hirsch, Nellie McClung, Gabrielle Roy, Carol Shields, and Sir William Stephenson. See https://tinyurl.com/vbp8rxg
University of Manitoba
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The Etymology of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Message.’
By Andrew McLuhan
I like to focus on what’s practical today from McLuhan’s work, but that said, history is important and it can be instructive and useful to know where things come from. It can also be interesting, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Some years ago, when I undertook the inventory and evaluation of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘working library’ of some six thousand items, I made a discovery which, at the time, made me a bit giddy with excitement. I found a note, written by Marshall, showing where and when and why he first said ‘the medium is the message.’
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Chapter 1 from ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ (1964 MIT Press) ‘The Medium is the Message’ reprinted in ‘From Source to Statement’ by James M. McCrimmon (1968, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company) where ‘The Medium is the Message’ (chapter 1 of “Understanding Media) is reprinted. This copy is now at the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.
The penciled note reads: “1st used this phrase in June (?) 1958 at Radio broadcasters conference in Vancouver. Was reassuring them that TV could not end radio.”
Finding that note in 2011 was a pretty cool moment. It wasn’t a lot of information, and the question mark raised questions, but still… pretty cool. I made a post about it on the blog I was keeping at the time chronicling my inventory adventures, ‘inscriptorium.’
I did a bit of research to try to find out a date of the ‘radio broadcaster’s conference’ mentioned, but no luck. Given my more recent discovery, I may try again to find out.
The recent discovery happened in a folder marked ‘1975′ in the metal filing cabinet containing our McLuhan archives. Started by my father Eric, we try to have a copy of everything written by Marshall McLuhan to match the bibliography-in-progress making note of same. I refer to the bibliography a lot, and hope to someday make it shareable but much work needs to be done first to make it completely accurate and presentable.
I was looking for something else (to do with ‘Laws of Media: The New Science’) when I noticed another mention of where ‘the medium is the message’ came from. This gave the date as 1957, not 1958, but more importantly, it gave more detail to illustrate the reference:
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‘Professor Marshall McLuhan’s talk at Georgia State Univ. on Feb. 20, 1975. To be published in Franklin Foundation Lecture Series publication.’ Cover page / page 1.
I will spare you the customary (and quite dated) opening jokes and skip ahead to the reference in question.
It’s an 11pp. transcript, purportedly to be published but I have only the transcript, and there’s no mention elsewhere in the bibliography of publication. I did a light internet search without further results.
Here are the goods:
p5./11 of McLuhan’s 1975 speech at Georgia State University
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p6./11 of McLuhan’s 1975 speech at Georgia State University
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(5)… “My phrase ‘the medium is the message’ popped up at a radio conference in 1957 when radio broadcasters were concerned about their future as TV entered the home. I had merely wished to reassure the radio people that the unique qualities of their medium would survive any kind of revolution, since the medium is a transforming service which rearranges experiences in unique ways. It is easier to understand this process of interplay between a technology and its effects from the example of the motor car which has a special but ever changing place in our lives. My friend, Joe Foyle of Dublin, is find of explaining to executives that the great enemy of reading ability is car driving. Driving requires a perceptual but peripheral alertness which displaces the tunnel vision necessary for effective coping with the printed page. Many people have pointed out the advantages of reading in a room that is otherwise dark. However, the special place of the motor car in our lives related to a hidden ground, namely our North American need to go outside to be alone. Unlike other communities around the world who go outside to be social, we prefer to find our social lives at home. To North Americans, the motor (6) car is the ultimate form of privacy, and our cars are designed accordingly. The figure of the car creates a ground of services that are the message, or the social effects. The car requires a surround of highways, factories and oil companies which are, in effect, both the medium and the message of the car. If TV has begun to bring the outside inside the home, then it could well become a factor in the overthrow of the motor car. When a new service goes around an old one, the old one becomes as it were, an art form. When TV went around the movie, the movie was recognized as a serious art form. When our electronic environment goes around the old hardware of the motor car, it too tend to become an art form.”
And there you have it. What more is there to say, really?
Of course, there’s a lot more to say. It’s McLuhan 101. Those five little words sure pack a lot into them. Fortunately, in the just over twenty more years Marshall lived, he repeated those words many times, and went to great lengths to help us understand what they mean. The first, and largest, effort to elaborate on ‘the medium is the message’ was in that first chapter of ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964), but he repeated it in speeches and interviews over the years. Someday I will gather them all together in one place.
Of course, what ‘the medium is the message’ meant in 1957, with television taking over from radio, is vastly different from what it means today, with 5g and quantum computing drifting from the horizon to our hot little hands. And it will change again and again and again — which is why the statement is as true and powerful now as it was and ever will be.
“I don’t explain, I explore” Marshall said in a 1965 interview. Let’s follow his lead.
Source: https://tinyurl.com/v2f7xl2
Andrew McLuhan
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