Profile: Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan was an academic intellectual before he was an accessible one, but by the end of his career he was considered by some to be too radical for the academic world, while he maintained a great deal of influence over the “masses.” His famous phrase, “the medium is the message” is still well-known today, more than 40 years after his book The Medium is the Massage first brought the phrase into the public consciousness.

McLuhan was a student of English at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge; he earned a bachelor’s degree and participated in graduate work at both schools before teaching at various universities in the United States and finally settling in at the University of Toronto, where he taught for 33 years. During this time, McLuhan wrote seven books (The Gutenberg Galaxy, The Mechanical Bride, Understanding Media, The Medium is the Message, and War and Peace in the Global Village are among the most popular), began the interdisciplinary journal Explorations and a monthly, multi-disciplinary newsletter called the McLuhan Dew-Line, and served as head of the Centre for Culture and Technology.

But he also became a popular phenomenon. His style was perfectly suited to mass media; his eccentric personality and love of wordplay and one-liners made him pop icon-worthy. McLuhan was featured in a New York Magazine story by Tom Wolfe, a cover story in Newsweek, articles in Life Magazine, New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Fortune and Esquire, a cartoon in the New Yorker, and an Interview in Playboy. He was guest of honor at a “McLuhan Festival” in San Francisco and spoke to corporations such as AT&T, General Motors and IBM. He was friendly with Andy Warhol, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He was interviewed on nearly every major radio and television station in America and Canada. He was a sensation among the masses.

His popularity with the public is somewhat ironic because he was proposing that everything around them, the new electronic age of television and radio and vacuum cleaners, was fundamentally misunderstood.

McLuhan contended that media, especially electronic media, were not an addition to our lives but an extension of our own senses. This extension gives dominance to one or he other sense, an effect with throws off the natural balance of our senses and has serious effects on human society. Thus, the invention of the phonetic alphabet and, later, the printing press, serve as extensions of our own eyes. And the implications for society are great: with the transition from an oral society to a literary society comes the transition from a collective society to a highly individualistic one. But McLuhan’s focus was on the re-tribalizing of society that began with the electronic age. He asserted that the radio and television serve as extensions of our auditory sense and are pushing us back toward an oral society. Thus, he told the public they were unconsciously devolving toward a “global village.”

But he approached the people on a level that was very much their own. He appeared in television interviews many times, including this clip from the Today show in which he talks about the Carter-Ford presidential debate in 1976 (a subject particularly relevant as we are in the middle of debate season in this year’s presidential race). And he illustrated his points using the mediums about which he was speaking. For example, in 1967 he produced The Medium is the Massage audio recording, a medley of discordant sounds and music and the speech of McLuhan himself. The nonsense of this recording was meant to show McLuhan’s point of the difficulties in translating between the spoken word and electronic media.

Some believe that McLuhan stepped too far out of the box to retain the title of intellectual. But in fact, he kept an intellectual attitude in his arguments throughout his lifetime. He maintained an attitude of curiosity and inquisitiveness. He said, “I've never presented such explorations as revealed truth. As an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory -- my own or anyone else's. As a matter of fact, I'm completely ready to junk any statement I've ever made about any subject if events don't bear me out, or if I discover it isn't contributing to an understanding of the problem. The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safe-cracker's. I don't know what's inside; maybe it's nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences -- until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.”

This flexibility on the issue is partly what gained him a reputation as such an erratic individual, but it’s also what allowed him to push forward and make such gigantic leaps in the study of electronic media.

Today, more than a quarter century since his death, McLuhan is still regarded a founding father of media theory. In fact, his work is even being reconsidered for its advice on the internet and new media (though he did not actually live to witness the internet or speak directly on it). McLuhan is considered the “patron saint” of Wired Magazine, and is paid homage to in an article every three or four years. And huge amounts of new scholarship on “revisiting” the theories of McLuhan are being written. The willingness with which people are returning to his age-old theories proves his lasting importance in the public discourse.

Thus, McLuhan established himself as an accessible intellectual by being just that – accessible AND intellectual.