Whats doin’ with Marshall McLuhan

Kit LaybourneExtreme Media Studies

9/10/08

A Scary Man

Center for Technology & CultureUniversity of Toronto

circa 1979

• Story of my first encounter with Marshall McLuhan (in Fall of 1971) -- I was 28 years old. Just married and moved to NYC. Had an MA from UCLA. -- traveling with John Culkin - founder of Media Studies Program. -- dinner in his home. Very conservative, reserved guy. Very Canadian. A charming US wife from South. -- next day iI sat in on a graduate seminar. One guy (could be among those pictured above) asked a very erudite question I could hardly follow -- McLu’s white rage. It was ugly. McLuhan was screaming at the student, accusing him of posturing and -- more important -- of wasting everyone’s time. He shouted for the guy to get out of the class. Everyone was shaking in shock and fear. --says McLuhan: “Only thing worth looking at are good questions.”

• I never forgot that moment. And I never forgot the challenge McLuhan made to his graduate students at the University of Toronto.

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Three McLu “Think Bombs”

• McLuhan’s form of inquiry was quite radical in the early 1970’s. And it remains pretty radical today.

• Consists of asking true questions and then forming the conclusions as what I call “think bombs” - catch phrases or slogans - dense word-play that sticks to your brain and encourages ongoing exploration - non-linear and open-ended enquiry. - McLu: “We are looking for media probes, not media truisms.” (from memory)

#1 The Medium is the Message

• Let me introduce my fish friend. He is a mud-skipper.• I am pretty sure Marshall McLuhan would have been quite interested in this little fellow (or whatever creature it was that first lifted its buggy eyes out of the primordial ocean/ooze.) • The fish is hero if there ever was one. The mud-skipper used those front fins to venture onto the Earth's emerging land forms. An odd progenitor to millions of species that followed.• McLuhan was the first to announce clear and loud that the media forms we shape, shape us. In 1961 he wrote: "Media effects are new environments as imperceptible as water to a fish." • Let me add this amplification to McLuhan's seminal insight about fish : • While the mudskipper discoved dry land, his greater achievment was the sudden awareness (dim as it might have been) of the very sea in which he had been living. • A central precept of Media Studies is that communications environments are near invisible. Media shape our world but, because we live in that world 24 x 7, its very difficult to step outside and see media environments per se.• My own mentor, John Culkin, had a nice riff on this same theme. He offered this reason why media studies constituted a new basic skills for education: "people who live on water should know how to swim."end

The Medium is the Massage

• Why is the title of the book cover above "The medium is the massage" and not "The medium is the message"?

* Actually, the title was a mistake....... When the book came back from the typesetter's, it had on the cover "Massage" as it still does. The title was supposed to have read "The Medium is the Message" but the typesetter had made an error. When Marshall McLuhan saw the typo he exclaimed, "Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!" Now there are possible four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: "Message" and "Mess Age," "Massage" and "Mass Age."

#2 Global Village

• Because of Mass Communications media the entire planet is now connected in almost instantaneous network.

• McLuhan’s major thinking came out of a research project about the media consumption patterns of young Canadians of high school and college age. The Ryerson Project.

• He developed his core theses via a grant from The United States Office of Education. In conjunction (not sure how) with the National Association of Educational Broadcasters.

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• This was written, I believe, just before McLu’s first use of “global village” = all of us live globally in a kind of tribal drum”.

• World Wide Web -- which didn’t even exist in McLuhan’s era

• This is prophetic of the internet. Even truer today than when written in 1960 -- only 48 years ago. (KL was a junior in High School)

Teilhard de Chardin

“The Noosphere”

Kevin Kelly“The Swarm”

• McLu’s work is original, but not without forerunners nor significant following work. Here are two.

• The “Noosphere” of Jesuit theologeon Teilhard de Chardin - Sphere of human thought -- “the collective consciousness” of human-beings. - 1881 - 1955 - taught phenomenology. Primary book “The Phenomenon of Man”.(1955 French, 1959 English) - De Chardin was critized by Catholic Church because his ideas undermined doctrine of original sin.

• The “Swarm” of Kevin Kelly - editor of Whole Earth Catalog and executive director of Wired Magazine = major book (1994) ”Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Econpomioc World” - The Hive Mind -- The nework is a swarm. It is the icon of the 21st Century - fave quote: “Nobody is as smart as everybody.”

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#3 Art as Early Warning System

Arts are the Early Warning System of Cultural Change

• Artists are hard wired to pick up on elements of change and upheaval within a culture. If you study the arts you can see what is coming.

• Related think bomb: The Content of a New Medium, is the Medium it replaces (except nothing gets replaced)

More Think Bombs ...The trouble with a cheap, specialized education is that you

never stop paying for it.

News, far more than art, is artifact.

The future of the book is the blurb.

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror (and) we march backwards into the future.

•there are many more. Spot your own think bombs as you read McLuhan.

• McLuhan’s term “feedforward” (from “feed back”) = EMS concern with Forecasting (topic of next week’s lecture and a core compentency we hope to teach).

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McLuhan ResourcesMain Publications

• 1960 Report on Project in Understanding New Media (US Office of Education)

• 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

• 1964 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

• 1967 The Medium is the Massage (with Quentin Fiore

• 1968 War and Peace in the Global Village: An inventory of some of the current spastic situations that could be elimianted by more feedforward

•1970 From Cliche to Archetype

-- many books written after McLu’s death in 1980

• read Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (Ginko Press, 2003) is a volume of choice for rea ding the seminal work and other writings by McLu.

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McLuhan ResourcesMcLuhan’s Ad Man Soul (rich media)

•Marshall McLuhan had the soul of an Adman• worked with graphic designers (Quentin Fiore & Harley Parker•Lots of media artifacts of McLuhan

•- (left to right, top row) appearance in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpIYz8tfGjY•- publicity shot, posing with a RF TV monitor (a cool tool of the eara) - bold graphics (from Medium is the Massage) with designers Quentin Fiore & Harley Parker

• (middle row) The official McLuhan Website. = = http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/• (bottom row) 2 images from a Student Site “The McLuhan Probe” from Nova Scotia College or Art & Design. = http://www.dreamwv.com/probes/

•- ‘The Ballad of Marshall McLuhan” by Canadian group The Vestibules. = http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/downloads/ballad_of_marshall_mcluhan.mp3

•YouTube (2:15) = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7GvQdDQv8g•

McLuhan’s Quest for Collaborators

•McLuhan’s own sense of confusion.

McLuhan’s Quest for Collaborators

from Introduction to Second Edition, Understanding Media.

“Media Studies at once opens the doors of perception. And here it is that the young can do top-level research work. The teacher has only to invite the student to do as complete an inventory

as possible.... An inclusive list of media effects opens many unexpected avenues of awareness and

investigation.”

•Youth do the best research.

• This course is calling on you for top-level research.

Media Probes TV Series

• I will end lecture as I started it, with something personal.

• Later in the 1970’s, I used skills learned at the Center for Understanding Media in writing proposals to get pilot money for a PBS series.

• About the same time I had started reading McLuhan (in 1964 as an undergrad) I started making movies.

• These two early passions came together in Media Probes: A series of 8, half-hour programs for PBS exploring the impact of various media forms or, as we liked to say, “The media we shape, shape us.”

• see this portfolio site’s section on tv series for more about Media Probes.

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