On the 25th anniv of MM's death

Here is an article by Olivia Ward published on the twenty-fifth anniversary
of the death of Marshall McLuhan, who lived in Toronto for many years and
was born in the prairies.

Toronto Star
Pubdate:January 01, 2006
Page: D1
Section:Ideas
URL:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Artic
le_Type1&c=Article&cid35985417041&call_pageid05528093962

WE ARE ALL McLUHANS NOW

By Olivia Ward Toronto Star

When Canadian communications visionary Marshall McLuhan wrote his landmark
works in the 1960s, they were greeted with shock and awe.

The realization that we live in a "global village" without boundaries of
time or space was revolutionary. And the expectation of electronic
communications expanding to invade every aspect of our lives was both
thrilling and devastating. But flash forward 25 years from the day McLuhan
died, on Dec. 31, 1980, and the picture changes dramatically.

The merging of the human and the technological is so entrenched that news
pops out of hand-held receivers round the clock, children without computers
are considered deprived, and urban streetscapes are filled with people
babbling into thin air, their ears pressed to tiny mobile phones.

In the brave new 2000s, cars talk to us, Fluffy and Fido make way for
electronic pets, every day leaves a new data trail, and warfare is conducted
like a video game. McLuhan would have been unsurprised by any of that. In
his own lifetime his message, and the electronic media it described, became
second nature to people worldwide, making him not so much irrelevant as
self-evident. He fell victim to his own quip, "Tomorrow is our permanent
address."

Now, after a slump in popularity during his final years, he is more alive
than ever in the minds of a new generation of cyberthinkers.

"The underlying concept of McLuhan's view of electronic technology is that
it has become an extension of our senses, particularly those of sight and
sound," says British writer Benjamin Symes in his essay Marshall McLuhan's
"Global Village."

"We can now hear and see events that take place thousands of miles away in a
matter of seconds, often quicker than we hear of events in our own villages
or even families, and McLuhan argues that it is the speed of these
electronic media that allow us to act and react to global issues at the same
speed as normal face-to-face verbal communications," Symes says.

McLuhan's place as a godfather of contemporary communications theory is thus
assured. But scholars and techno gurus still debate exactly what his legacy
is.

"Marshall McLuhan's lasting contribution is his vision of the ways in which
history and culture and individuals are modified and, to some extent,
determined by technology," says Victoria-based Jim Andrews, an artist,
critic, and founder of the vispo.com website.

Before McLuhan, Andrews points out in his essay McLuhan Reconsidered,
language, money and the media were seen primarily as tools. But McLuhan's
followers now understand that he issued a wake-up call about the extent to
which people's very identities are determined by the tools that they
themselves invent.

"Tools are not simply things we pick up," Andrews points out. "They become
part of who we are. McLuhan proposed that notion, showing tools as
extensions of humanity. That's one of his really big ideas." Arthur Kroker
of the University of Victoria goes farther. McLuhan, he says, predicted with
deadly accuracy that "we are the first human beings to live completely
within the mediated environment of the technostructure."

That means that the content of what we see and hear around us matters less
than its effect.

"For the first time, the central nervous system has been 'exteriorized,"
says Kroker, U Vic's Canada Research Chair in technology, culture and
theory. "It is our plight to be processed through the technological
simulacrum… in a 'technostructure' which is nothing but a vast simulation
and amplification of the bodily senses." And, says Kroker, "we are all
McLuhans now. We live in the electronic culture that he prophesied. And
since he wrote about it, technology has become more pervasive, but silent.
It's invisible. From iPods to cell phones, to electronic games, it
increasingly occupies the full range of human activity."

McLuhan also hinted at the ultimate convergence of humankind and technology,
adds Kroker. "It might be that we are the first species in the process of
creating our own successors."

For the average computer-clued person of today, the kind of communication
McLuhan predicted means a constant barrage of news, views, ads, and messages
from friends and colleagues.

But, says Donald Theall, professor emeritus of Trent University's cultural
studies program, he also had a significant impact on the arts.

"McLuhan's most important legacy is that he introduced to a large audience
the intrinsic connection between the arts, including the popular arts and
the newer post-electronic media, with the new techno-scientific world of the
20th century," he says.

"This legacy is increasingly important as the digital age unfolds, since it
allows for the convergence of all modes of expression from gesture and
speech to electric and digital communication to be more fully and richly
exploited and understood."

To some media mavens, McLuhan is a kind of patron saint - including the
staff of Wired magazine, which once featured him on its masthead.

But, says the magazine's contributing editor Gary Wolf, in his essay The
Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool, he is also a "martyr," because of
his perhaps naive "hope for a human engagement with media that goes beyond
technological idiocy and numb submission. McLuhan's jokes and satirical
put-ons were challenges to understand where our media were leading us, and
there is no clear evidence that we have been able to respond to his
challenge."

Not all of McLuhan's admirers are uncritical. "Though 99 per cent of what he
wrote was horse manure, the remaining one per cent was dead on," says Cecil
Adams, the pseudonym of an American media critic, author and founder of The
Straight Dope website. And, he adds, "McLuhan was the opposite of most
academics, who can minutely describe each tree but haven't a clue about the
forest. He was dreadful on matters of detail, but presciently grasped where
the world was headed. What John the Baptist was to Christianity, McLuhan was
to the information age."

Religious metaphors are often used to describe McLuhan. And he was, in fact,
a convinced Catholic who attended mass regularly and was alarmed by the
dehumanization of the globalized society he could see approaching all too
rapidly - a dichotomy between religion and science that would also be a
vital part of 21st-century life.

There is a link between the popularization of fundamentalist religion and
McLuhan's theories, says Jim Andrews.

"The prospect of the U.S. being dominated by fundamentalist Christianity is
a good example of the relevance of his thought," he says. "McLuhan's
predictions of possible returns to tribalistic mentalities are coming true
in the form of the renewed power of fundamentalism more or less globally."

At first, McLuhan saw the idea of a global village as benign. "The
aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a
natural adjunct of electric technology," he wrote in the introduction to his
1964 book Understanding Media. "There is a deep faith to be found in this
attitude - a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being."

The optimism wasn't to last. By the time McLuhan co-wrote (with Quentin
Fiore) The Medium is the Massage, one of his best known works, three years
later, he was not only disenchanted but worried, says Wired magazine's Wolf.

"When he used his most oracular tone, McLuhan's description of man's
servitude to media was chilling," he said. "McLuhan believed that the
message of electronic media brought dangerous news for humanity: It brought
news of the end of humanity as it has known itself in the 3,000 years since
the invention of the phonetic alphabet."

But although McLuhan's insights are serious, and occasionally profound,
serious students of his work also have to contend with his other side - that
of a pop media guru whose less-than-15 minutes of on-screen fame came in the
Woody Allen film Annie Hall, in which an arrogant intellectual bore who is
"explaining" McLuhan's theories is deflated by the man himself.

"That's the way many people know him," says Wolf, who admits that even the
techno devotees of Wired have scarcely looked at his writings. Theall, who
was acquainted with McLuhan and has written on him extensively, agrees that
he is "in some ways overrated in that many of his most basic insights were
popular, poetic rephrasings of the traditions and the contemporary artistic
community which he studied so deeply." Although he had a broad and sweeping
vision, Theall says, McLuhan made the mistake of not defending the depth and
complexity of his thinking, instead "seeking support and approval from the
corporate community, the media and even populists who did not respect the
intellectual world that he represented."

McLuhan may have done himself few favours in academia by catering to the
public instead of the pundits. But he himself was amused by the
popularization of his ideas, even those that were spinoffs and loose
interpretations.

"He was a personality who could be simultaneously charming and exasperating,
but never boring or dull," says Theall, who recalls that McLuhan gave
university bureaucracy short shrift but threw himself enthusiastically into
entertaining his guests at home.

McLuhan's populist side may also have foreshadowed the trend to making
academia accessible through the media stardom of its professors, who now
host TV specials and series for ordinary viewers. In the final analysis,
says Wolf, what were seen as weaknesses in McLuhan during his lifetime were
his strengths for the future.

"He wasn't uptight enough for some people. Great intellectuals can become
dated because they make a very rigorous and self-conscious effort to
maintain their identities. Then time moves on and they're left behind.

"McLuhan's ambiguity, his comedy, and even his parody were his strengths.
Those are something more than a single work of art, because they won't date.

"Everyone knows McLuhan's name, but nobody really knows who he was. He was
really a sceptic about human identity, which is very contemporary. He really
did dissolve his identity in the medium. Now we consume him every day, but
we just don't put his name on it."