Marshall McLuhan

Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar, professor of English literature, literary critic, and communications theorist, who is one of the founders of the study of media ecology and is today an honorary guru among technophiles.

Works in perspective

Introduction

During his years at Saint Louis University (1937-1944), McLuhan evidently worked concurrently on two ambitious projects: his doctoral dissertation and the manuscript that was eventually published in 1951 as the book The Mechanical Bride, which included only a representative selection of the materials that McLuhan had prepared for it.

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McLuhan's 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation is a formidable piece of scholarship, surveying the history of the verbal arts (grammar, dialectic and logic, and rhetoric -- aka the trivium) from the time of Cicero down to the time of Thomas Nashe. In his later publications McLuhan at times uses the Latin concept of the trivium to outline an orderly and systematic picture of certain periods in the history of Western culture. McLuhan suggests that the Middle Ages, for instance, was characterized by the heavy emphasis on the formal study of logic. The key turn that led to the Renaissance was not the rediscovery of ancient texts but a reemphasis on the importance of rhetoric and language over the formal study of logic. This shift signalled in Renaissance humanism was largely a shift in emphasis, not a shift to totally eliminate one verbal art. Modern life is characterized by the reemergence of grammar as its most salient feature--an approach McLuhan felt was exemplified at times by the New Criticism of Richards and Leavis. (For a nuanced account of McLuhan's thought regarding Richards and Leavis, see McLuhan's "Poetic and Rhetorical Exegesis: The Case for Leavis against Richards and Empson" in the Sewanee Review, volume 52, number 2 (1944): 266-76.)

Related Topics:
Trivium - History - Logic - Renaissance - Rhetoric - Grammar - New Criticism

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McLuhan's doctoral dissertation is scheduled to be published by Gingko Press in the near future. It is a key work for understanding where McLuhan is coming from in all of his subsequent works. For example, when we consider that rhetoric has long been characterized as the art of persuasion, we will more readily understand how he came to study the various items displayed in The Mechanical Bride -- the common denominator is that all of these items in one way or another aim to persuade us. Gingko Press also plans to publish the complete manuscript of items and essays that McLuhan prepared, only a selection of which were published in his 1951 book. When these two announced books have been published, then we will be in a better position to assess McLuhan's work overall.

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Because both dialectic and rhetoric in the classical trivium aimed at persuasion, it is not surprising that McLuhan turned his attention to analyzing and commenting on numerous contemporary examples of persuasion in popular culture -- in The Mechanical Bride (1951). From centering his attention on persuasion in his 1943 doctoral dissertation and in his 1951 book, he made a dramatic inward turn, as it may be styled, in attending to the inwardness of persuasion carried out by communication media as such, as distinct from their content. His famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) slogan "the medium is the message" uses hyperbole to call attention to the inward impact of communication media.

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Because many people have not followed McLuhan's inward turn, it should be noted here that he read Insight: A Study of Human Understanding by Bernard Lonergan, S.J., when it was first published in 1957. In his letter of September 21, 1957, to his former student and friend, Walter J. Ong, S.J., McLuhan says, "Find much sense in Bern. Lonergan's Insight" (Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987: 251). Lonergan's Insight is an extended guidebook on making the inward turn to attending ever more carefully to one's own consciousness and reflecting on it ever more carefully and monitoring one's articulations ever more carefully.

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We can use Lonergan's terminology to clarify the meaning of McLuhan's statement that "the medium is the message": At the empirical level of consciousness, the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message.

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When McLuhan declares that he is more interested in percepts than concepts, he is declaring in effect that he is more interested in what Lonergan refers to as the empirical level of consciousness than in what Lonergan refers to as the intelligent level of consciousness in which concepts are formed, which Lonergan distinguishes from the rational level of consciousness in which the adequacy of concepts and of predications is adjudicated. McLuhan's inward turn to attending to percepts and to the cultural conditioning of the empirical level of consciousness through the impact of communication media sets him apart from more outward oriented studies of sociological influences and the outward presentation of self carried out by George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, Berger and Luckmann, Kenneth Burke, Hugh Duncan, and others.

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The Mechanical Bride (1951)

McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951) is a pioneering

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study in the field known today as popular culture. This book is the work of a deeply original thinker. It is sui generis, as is his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which McLuhan carries forward his use of short essays that can be read in any order -- an approach that he styles a mosaic approach to writing a book.

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McLuhan's interest in the critical study of popular culture was influenced by the short book Culture and Environment by F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson (1933). Even so, it is impossible to imagine Leavis or any of McLuhan's other teachers at Cambridge University undertaking such a detailed critique of popular culture. McLuhan's former student and friend

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Walter J. Ong wrote a highly laudatory review essay about McLuhan's 1951 book: "The Mechanical

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Bride: Christen the Folklore of Industrial Man," Social Order 2 (Feb. 1952):

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79-85. In a letter to Ong dated Jan. 23, 1953, McLuhan says, "Your review of

Related Topics:
Jan. 23 - 1953

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Bride literally the only review that made sense. You were generous, but

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you saw what was up. The absence of serious study of these matters is

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total. i.e. universal emotional and intellectual illiteracy. And so unnecessary"

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(Letters of Marshall McLuhan 1987, p. 234).

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In a letter to Ong dated May 31, 1953 (p. 236), McLuhan reports that he has

Related Topics:
May 31 - 1953

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received a two-year grant of $43,000 from the Ford Foundation to carry out a

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communication project at the University of Toronto involving faculty from

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different disciplines. In connection with this project, McLuhan and Ted

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Carpenter started the journal Explorations in Communication.

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According to McLuhan, a student at the University of Toronto told him that

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Harold Innis had put The Mechanical Bride on the reading list for one of

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his courses there, which led McLuhan to discover Innis's later work.

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The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (written in 1961, first published in Canada by University of Toronto Press in 1962) is a pioneering study of print culture, a pioneering study in

Related Topics:
Gutenberg - 1961 - University of Toronto Press - 1962

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cultural studies, and a pioneering study in media ecology.

Related Topics:
Cultural studies - Media ecology

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Throughout the book, McLuhan is at pains to reveal how communication technology (alphabetic writing, the printing press, and the electronic media) affects cognitive organization, which in turn has profound ramifications for social organization:

Related Topics:
Printing press - Electronic media - Cognitive

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:...f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent. (Gutenberg Galaxy 1962, p. 41)

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His episodic and often rambling history takes the reader from pre-alphabetic tribal humankind to the electronic age. According to McLuhan, the invention of movable type greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taking place since the invention and implementation of the alphabet, by which McLuhan means phonemic orthography. (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from logographic/logogramic writing systems, like hieroglyphics or ideograms.)

Related Topics:
Electronic age - Movable type - Phonemic orthography - Alphabet - Logographic - Hieroglyphics - Ideograms

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Print culture, ushered in by the Gutenberg press in the middle of the fifteenth century, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. Quoting with approval an observation on the nature of the printed word from Prints and Visual Communication by William Ivins, McLuhan remarks:

Related Topics:
Gutenberg press - Fifteenth century - William Ivins

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:In this passage not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background. The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, "formal" causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook. (Galaxy pp. 124-26)

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We find the gist of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated in The Medium is the Massage) that new technologies (like alphabets and printing presses, and, for that matter, speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: Print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn impacts social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the West: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification" (Galaxy p. 154).

Related Topics:
The Medium is the Massage - Modern - The West - Individualism - Democracy - Protestantism - Capitalism - Nationalism

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Visual, individualistic print culture will soon — McLuhan is writing in the early 1960s — be brought to an end by what McLuhan calls "electronic interdependence," when electronic media replace visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the global village, a term which has predominantly negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy (a fact lost on its later popularizers):

Related Topics:
Electronic media - Visual culture - Global village

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:Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture. (Galaxy p. 32)

Related Topics:
Alexandrian library - Computer - Brain - Science fiction - Big Brother - Western world

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Note again McLuhan's stress on the importance of awareness of a medium's cognitive effects: If we are not vigilant to the effects of media's impact, the global village has the potential to become a place where totalitarianism and terror rule.

Related Topics:
Totalitarianism - Terror

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Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no per se moral bent — it is a tool that shapes profoundly an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realization:

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:Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds? Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But," someone says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality. (Galaxy p. 158)

Related Topics:
Alphabet - Manuscript - Individualism - Morality

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Technology affects cognition, and the moral valence of these changes is, for McLuhan, good or bad, depending on one's perspective. In the later seventeenth century, for instance, McLuhan identifies a considerable amount of alarm and revulsion towards the growing quantity of printed books. A few hundred years later, though, many thinkers express alarm at the "end of the book." If there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that "there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies."

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Though the World Wide Web did not yet exist when McLuhan wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan is, if not the coiner then a popularizer, of the term "surfing" when used to refer to rapid, irregular and multidirectional movement through a heterogenous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements like "Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave."

Related Topics:
World Wide Web - Surfing - Heidegger - Descartes

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McLuhan frequently quotes Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), which evidently had

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prompted McLuhan to write this book. Once again, Ong wrote a highly favorable

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review of this new book in America 107 (Sept. 15, 1962): 743, 747. However, in the 1967 New Catholic Encyclopedia, Ong subsequently qualified his earlier praise by characterizing McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy as "a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond" (8: 838). In short, certain parts should be read with a grain of salt, but it is definitely worth reading to this day.

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McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy won the 1962 Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction,

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Canada's highest literary award.

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Understanding Media (1964)

McLuhan's most widely known work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), is also a pioneering study in media ecology. In it McLuhan proposes that

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media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study

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