How & Why Did Marshall McLuhan Become the “Patron Saint” of WIRED Magazine

08Apr22

WIRED 1.1 – The first issue (March/April 1993)
By Nick Ripatrazoni

Raised Catholic, Kelly had since drifted from religious faith—until that morning. Fourteen years later, Kelly was the founding executive editor of Wired magazine—and Marshall McLuhan was on the masthead as the magazine’s patron saint. Kelly has said that his Easter conversion resulted in, as he puts it, “a logic, comfort, leverage that I have because of that view.” It’s a formulation that feels much like the structuring element of faith for McLuhan.

McLuhan’s appearance on the masthead might be a quirk or a wink of the technology magazine’s staff were it not for the faith of Kelly—and how that faith has influenced his vision of technology. Kelly has argued that “technology is actually a divine phenomenon that is a reflection of God.” Technology, for Kelly, offers us another way to try to understand the impossible: at our best, we might only apprehend God as metaphor; even with all the “artificial intellects we make,” we might only have “the slightest glimmer of who God is.”

God made his way into media theory through McLuhan, whether it was recognized or not.

Kelly had a clear supporter in the Catholic-raised Louis Rossetto, the cofounder of the magazine and the one who recruited Kelly to the editing position. Rossetto rejected the idea that Wired was a magazine about technology. As he wrote in a short manifesto within the first issue, the magazine “is about the most powerful people on the planet today—the Digital Generation. These are the people who not only foresaw how the merger of computers, telecommunications, and the media is transforming life at the cusp of the new millennium, they are making it happen.”

Wired debuted with volume 1, issue 1 in March/April 1993. On the cover, an unfocused close-up of Bruce Sterling is set against a teal background. McLuhan’s name appears on the cover, advertising a conversation between Camille Paglia and Stewart Brand. On the right side of the cover, “The Medium…” trails off to the edge, parallel with a neon-pink tab that, if you follow the page, leads to a spread that quotes McLuhan from The Medium Is the Message: “The medium, or process, of our time—electric technology—is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and to re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing you.” The lines languidly stretch across the pages, as if McLuhan were lounging in his office sofa at the Centre for Culture and Technology.

Wired Magazine’s Masthead, Issue 1.1 (1993)

The Brand and Paglia conversation is anchored in McLuhan’s identity as a lost prophet. Paglia talks about how she was influenced by McLuhan. His books were assigned to her at Binghamton University in the mid-1960s. “What’s happened to him,” Paglia wonders. “Why are these people reading Lacan or Foucault who have no awareness at all of mass media? Why would anyone go on about the school of Saussure? In none of that French crap is there any reference to media. Our culture is a pop culture”…
Read the rest of this article at: https://tinyurl.com/yckzn8k7

On the right side of the cover, “The Medium…” trails off to the edge, parallel with a neon-pink tab that, if you follow the page, leads to a spread that quotes McLuhan from The Medium Is the Message: “The medium, or process, of our time—electric technology—is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and to re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing you.”

WIRED MAGAZINE 4.01 January 1996 

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