IDEAS

Marshall McLuhan Is Back From the Dustbin of History

Until relatively recently, the media guru Marshall McLuhan, with his gnomic
pronouncements about "acoustic space" and "cool" media and "square" people,
appeared to be a dated artifact of 1960's culture destined to go the way of
tie-dyed shirts, Peter Max posters and Timothy Leary. "Once exalted as
oracular, Marshall McLuhan's theories now seem laughably inadequate as an
intellectual guide to our times," one critic wrote in 1987, seven years
after his death.

But in the last several years McLuhan has emerged from the dustbin of
history to become a pop icon of the Internet age. Wired magazine lists him
as its patron saint, a flurry of books with titles like "Digital McLuhan"
present him in a new light, and a generation grappling with the
transforming effects of cyberspace, cell phones and virtual reality has
begun to see him not as out of date but ahead of his time.

"Everyone thought that McLuhan was talking about TV, but what he was really
talking about was the Internet — two decades before it appeared," Kevin
Kelly, the executive editor of Wired, is quoted as saying on the jacket of
"Digital McLuhan," a recent book by Paul Levinson, a professor of
communications at Fordham University.

"When I first came on the scene, in 1990, no one talked about McLuhan — it
was as if he had never existed, and when I spoke about him there was no
traction," Camille Paglia, professor of English at the University of the
Arts in Philadelphia, said in an interview. "Now his name is mentioned
everywhere. Now that all these young people are spending time on the
Internet, there is a real ferment of interest in him."

But McLuhan's legacy is complex and controversial, just as it was in his
own lifetime. Many of his supporters readily admit that much of his
scholarship has not aged well, even though they say the ideas underlying
his work have acquired new relevance. "For a discipline like media studies,
he makes for a weak founding father because he was wrong so much of the
time," said Mitchell Stephens, a professor of journalism at New York
University and the author of a McLuhan-inspired book called "The Rise of
the Word and the Fall of the Image," which came out last year. "He said a
lot of wild and silly things, and a quite high proportion of truly
brilliant things."

McLuhan's meteoric rise rests principally on two early works, "The
Gutenberg Galaxy," which appeared in 1962, and "Understanding Media," which
came out two years later. In the first book, McLuhan examined writing as a
technology and mapped the ways in which literacy and printed books had
changed not just the external world but also people's behavior and modes of
thought. Written as television was emerging as the principal source of
information, McLuhan insisted that it had become possible to define and
describe print culture because it was coming to an end and was destined to
be replaced by the electronic age. "Understanding Media" took things
further. The book, which introduced the phrase "The medium is the message,"
described how technology — from the wheel and the alphabet to the
telegraph, airplane, typewriter and television — changed social relations
and mental attitudes.

He also predicted the coming of "the global village" and insisted that
electronic technology would decentralize power and information, allowing
people to live in smaller clusters far from major urban centers while
having the same access to information. "My main theme is the extension of
the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with
5,000 years of mechanical technology," he wrote in 1964.

His idea that new media would break the tyranny of print culture — with its
emphasis on rational, linear thinking and restore a richer, sensory balance
— appealed to the Woodstock generation and was welcomed by counterculture
figures like John Lennon and Abbie Hoffman. McLuhan rapidly became an
international celebrity: he was the subject of cartoons in The New Yorker
and a long interview in Playboy magazine, and his name was often bandied
about on the hit television show "Laugh-In." In 1965 Tom Wolfe wrote a
famous profile of McLuhan called "What if He Is Right?" in which he raised
the possibility that McLuhan might be "the most important thinker since
Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov."

"He was like this intellectual rocket in the sky," said Mr. Wolfe, who now
shies away from making such a grand claim for McLuhan. "It's not hard to
see why he attracted so much attention. The ideas were new and television
was young when he started. People hadn't really thought about what
difference it would make." Others insisted he was a fraud and coined the
term "McLuhnacy" to describe his enigmatic pronouncements.

McLuhan's fans and detractors were often reacting to the same thing: his
penchant for bold, striking statements delivered in short bursts of
aphoristic prose with only suggestive hints of historical evidence to
support them. "I don't explain, I explore," he often said. For example, in
"Understanding Media," he wrote: "Since TV, the assembly line has
disappeared from industry. Staff and line structures have dissolved in
management. Gone are the stag line, the party line, the receiving line and
the pencil line from the backs of nylons."

When McLuhan wrote, assembly lines had hardly disappeared and the link
between industrial production and television appeared tenuous. But he was
prescient in seeing that highly flexible electronic technology would change
both factories and management hierarchies. The part about "stag line" and
the nylon stockings appears to be more of a Dada-esque joke — something he
enjoyed — than a serious statement.

"I would say McLuhan was a great thinker, but I wouldn't say he was a great
scholar, because I don't think he really had the patience to work out some
of the implications of what he was saying," said Neil Postman, head of the
media studies program at New York University, whose books like "Technopoly"
and "Amusing Ourselves to Death," acknowledge a heavy debt to McLuhan.
"McLuhan's questions were generally more interesting than his answers."

Others are more critical. "McLuhan did armchair philosophy, not empirical
science," said Gweneth Jackaway, a media professor at Fordham.

McLuhan reveled in his sudden fame, and it affected both the nature of his
work and its reception.

After the publication of "Understanding Media," McLuhan gave up any attempt
to develop his ideas systematically and preferred appearing on talk shows
to writing books. He seemed almost to relish becoming a parody of himself.
In 1967 he published a Pop Art book of aphorisms called "The Medium Is the
Massage" and invented other half-serious variations of his famous dictum,
like "The medium is the mess-age" and "The tedium is the mass-age."

McLuhan was both a household name and a popular synonym for obscure
nonsense, appearing as himself in a cameo in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" in
1977. But the psychedelic swirl of text and images in "The Medium Is the
Massage," created with the designer Quentin Fiore, was an inspiration for
recent magazines like Wired and Details.

Most attribute his revival to the way that McLuhan's work offers a means of
understanding the implications of digitization. Writing when the personal
computer was nearly 20 years in the future, McLuhan showed an uncanny
understanding of what would become the information age. "Electric light is
pure information," he wrote. "The General Electric Company makes a
considerable portion of its profits from electric light bulbs and lighting
systems. It has not yet discovered that, quite as much as AT&T, it is in
the business of moving information." Written more than 30 years before
e-commerce, this was hardly a common insight in 1964.

McLuhan's defenders say his work was ahead of its time in other ways. The
idea of the global village appears to be more apt metaphor for the age of
the Internet and satellite television than for an era when the electronic
media consisted mainly of one- way radio and television broadcasting. "The
evolution of media has sharply increased the match of his metaphors to the
reality of our communication," Mr. Levinson writes in "Digital McLuhan."

McLuhan hypothesized that borderless electronic media would undermine the
nation-state, a notion that seemed unlikely at the height of the cold war
but that seems more relevant in an age in which people use fax machines,
VCR's, satellite dishes, cell phones and computers to receive information
their governments don't want them to have. "When McLuhan spoke about the
renewal of tribalism, it seemed to be about the hippie movement of the
1960's, which was just a passing fad, but today you can see a different
kind of tribalism on the Internet, where people are affiliating online in
various interest or discussion groups," said Lance Strate, chairman of
Fordham's communications and media department. He and about 150 professors
of communications recently formed an association of McLuhan- influenced
scholars.

But precisely as McLuhan and his ideas are regaining favor, the reaction
against them are also growing. The Fordham communications and media
department had a major battle over the appointment of Mr. Levinson as a
tenured professor, as a result of which some people in the department no
longer speak to one another.

"What I find particularly disturbing is the idea of technological
determinism, the notion that machines run the show," said Ms. Jackaway, a
member of the defeated anti- McLuhan group. "I am a firm believer that
human beings invent machines, that from the beginning there is intention,
that the way we use them is mostly the result of human and political
decisions. But I guess you could say McLuhan has influenced my work: I have
been spending the last 15 years trying to prove him wrong."


By ALEXANDER STILLE
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/14/technology/14MCLU.html

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