Coming to Terms with the Future He Foresaw

When first published in 1964, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media created—at least for a time—a bridge between the ivory tower and mainstream popular culture.{1} When the book became available in paperback it sold a hundred thousand copies, making it a bestseller. It turned its English professor author into a pop culture icon, as people from many walks of life marveled at the book’s insights on how media technologies affect human behavior. McLuhan reveled in the attention as perhaps no academic had done before. He published articles not only in respected scholarly journals but also in Family Circle, McCall’s, Saturday Evening Post, Playboy (an interview), and a variety of newspapers. He had his ideas featured in art exhibits. And he made a now-classic cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s 1977 movie Annie Hall.

McLuhan never shed the academic mantle, though, and until his death in 1980 continued to teach at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. It was there that he started the Centre for Culture and Technology—which, though it is now struggling financially, has set groundbreaking precedents in the humanistic study of technology. For those of us who look at electronic media in the ways literary scholars look at books, it is hard to think about the field of academic endeavor known as media studies without a nod to McLuhan. Even those who cannot accept his notion that “the medium is the message” have had to ponder his reasons for making this oft-quoted statement.

Of course, not everyone was equally wowed by McLuhan’s splashy debut. He did—and still does—have his critics. As Lewis Lapham explains, “the guardians of the established literary order in New York read Understanding Media as a portent of their own doom, and they were quick to find fault with what the more scornful among them called McLuhan’s ‘incantation.’”{2} Dwight Macdonald was one such critic. Macdonald always expressed strong reservations about popular culture generally and no doubt was unnerved by McLuhan’s fascination with television. While he did not have outright contempt for McLuhan’s ideas, Macdonald considered him something of a fallen scholar. He saw Understanding Media as having one interesting, if debatable, core insight, but felt the book was excessive and that a journal article would have sufficed. Macdonald was especially critical of the aphoristic prose style McLuhan used in Understanding Media, claiming that the more one read it the more one found it ridden with “contradictions, non-sequiturs, facts that are distorted and facts that are not facts, exaggerations, and chronic rhetorical vagueness.”{3}

Indeed, McLuhan’s writing does seem to target a postmodern reader, one steeped in the disconnected messages of electronic media. As someone schooled in linear prose, perhaps even McLuhan would have had trouble comprehending his own sentences—had he not written them, of course. But his descendants have managed reasonably well. Understanding Media lacks the flow of the realist novel, but it surely packs the sound bite–driven punch of televisual messages. As with television, Understanding Media gives its reader scant opportunity to ponder the provenance of its prophetic revelations. Many of us raised on television have come to appreciate postmodern fiction for these very qualities. I believe Joshua Meyrowitz captures the issue in a less grandiloquent or judgmental way than Macdonald in suggesting that “McLuhan’s ‘findings’ are in an unusual form and they are, therefore, not easily integrated into other theoretical research frames. [His] observations have a direct, declaratory, and conclusive tone that makes them easy to accept fully or reject fully, but difficult to apply or explore.”{4}

It is this quality, unfortunately, that has caused McLuhan’s work to be criticized for pretending to scientific investigation while failing to demonstrate appropriate investigative procedures. Producing scientific knowledge was never McLuhan’s intention, though, and to read Understanding Media in this way is to overlook his background as a literary scholar not trained in empirical methods. Criticizing McLuhan for not demonstrating enough empirical evidence for his theories is akin to criticizing van Gogh for not carrying out proper meteorological research before painting a sky. Although McLuhan expressed a strong interest in human psychology, his work was invariably grounded in a humanistic scholarly tradition. Understanding Media represents something of a synthesis between the New Critical influences reflected in The Mechanical Bride, with its close readings of advertising messages, and the sweeping historical arguments of The Gutenberg Galaxy.{5} McLuhan’s work on media was precedent-setting, for it arrived at a point when literary scholars had only started to take film seriously (and had certainly not yet started to take television seriously), and virtually all previous North American media studies had been carried out by social scientists, typically using empirical methods to demonstrate harmful “media effects.”

Other criticism surrounding Understanding Media has related to the notion of technological determinism. One version of this criticism comes from media historian Brian Winston, who in 1986 published a book provocatively titled Misunderstanding Media.{6} Then, in a 1995 critique of McLuhan, Winston raised a thought-provoking question: If the medium truly is the message, how does one account (for example) for racial biases in color film (the first forms of which captured the tones of white skin much better than those of black skin)? Winston suggests that, had color film not been developed by white scientists photographing white subjects, the choice of chemicals might not have led to this phenomenon.{7} Though he makes a valid point, Winston’s criticism exemplifies a very literal interpretation of McLuhan’s ideas; McLuhan himself probably would have preferred a more open-ended or metaphorical interpretation.

I agree that the term “technological determinism” itself owes much of its resonance to the concepts introduced by McLuhan—his ways of drawing attention to the shifts of habit that accompany technologies adopted into society. But I see this more as a tribute than a criticism; McLuhan’s work has called our attention to the ways in which we both produce and are produced by our interactions with technology. In the very first paragraph of Understanding Media, when introducing his notion of media as “extensions of man,” he writes: “Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex.” Here McLuhan is establishing grounds for much more than a simple determinist argument. He wishes to argue, rather, that as humans bring new media technologies into our lives, the ways we adapt those technologies to our needs help shape future practices and needs. Indeed, existing technologies do call for future technologies—but without the uses determined by humans, surely not by the technologies themselves, there would be no development whatsoever. McLuhan also makes the strong assertion that “The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium . . . [but] the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern it introduces into human affairs” (UM, pp. 23–24, emphasis mine).

In fact, many of McLuhan’s ideas were connected to a very specific culture, one in which he was deeply invested. Aside from his years of graduate study at Cambridge and a few years teaching and researching in the United States, McLuhan never left his native Canada for any extended period of time—though there was no shortage of offers, including university positions as well as business consulting opportunities. Despite the obvious global thrust of his ideas, especially those expressed in Understanding Media, he remained fascinated with the unique place of his homeland in the international scene. Even though these thoughts did not receive a great deal of attention outside Canada, they were as visionary as any of his others, and were conceptually consistent with the rest of his work.

My own first encounter with Understanding Media was not in a media studies context, though that is the field in which I work now. Rather, it was while pursuing a master’s degree in Canadian studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. It was a seminar on the Canadian culture industries, and we read Understanding Media along with Canadian classics such as George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, Harold Innis’s The Bias of Communication, and Margaret Atwood’s Survival. These are works that discuss the nature of Canada’s colonization, political as well as cultural, over several centuries. They talk about different communication media and how those media can contribute to the overtaking of one culture by another. Thus, years before pursuing doctoral work in media studies in my native United States, I learned to view media technologies as double-edged swords, facilitating cross-cultural awareness (McLuhan’s “global village”) but also opening the floodgates of cultural imperialism.

Of course, as the only American citizen in the classroom I was frequently asked to present “the other side” to Canada’s position vis-à-vis the United States. I always wanted to express my admiration of Canada’s ability to assert a cultural consciousness over and above global homogenization. At the same time, I wanted to lament the fact that my own nation had become synonymous with that homogenization. If I had it to do again, I might call on something McLuhan said in a 1967 lecture: “As the U.S.A. becomes a world environment through its resources, technology, and enterprises, Canada takes on the function of making that world environment perceptible to those who occupy it.”{8} Interestingly, this sentiment is perceptible in the many letters McLuhan sent to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau while he was in office.{9}

Of course my more recent encounters with McLuhan’s work have been in my present role as a professor of media studies. I’ve been giving more attention to the ways his words both reflect and are reflected in today’s media industries. He accurately predicted that those industries would come to realize how malleable and manipulative their information products really are. Lapham paraphrased McLuhan, stating, “[he] knows that, as commodities come to possess ‘more and more the character of information,’ the amassment of wealth will come to depend on the naming of things rather than the making of things.”{10} Or, as McLuhan himself put it: “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception” (UM, p. 33). It is no accident that those working in advertising and public relations tend to be well-schooled in human psychology. And I’ve found that having students in introductory media courses do close readings of advertisements results in one of the most significant perceptual changes I can help bring about.

McLuhan accurately observed dramatic changes in advertising and public relations practices during the later part of the twentieth century. For no longer are commercial messages about providing detailed product information, as they once were. In a “cool” media environment such as the one brought by television, the perceiver is left to fill in gaps of information—ranging from the low-resolution picture to the logical connections among the programs and commercials—that get in the way of a seamless and all-absorbing viewing experience. Ideological conditioning and repeat exposure to commercial messages allow us to do this without really noticing. The sensibility it has instilled in us allows commercial messages to work by merely conveying the essence of a product—evoking its mythology, in other words.

Increasingly, the cool style of televisual messages pervades other media, as advertising professionals grow ever more adept at coordinating the media mix. Nike’s classic multimedia “Just do it” campaign has epitomized McLuhan’s cool, with the same non-product-specific message crossing from television to magazines and even into the popular vernacular. As McLuhan wrote: “Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness. When all production and all consumption are brought into a preestablished harmony with all desire and all effort, then advertising will have liquidated itself by its own success” (UM, p. 202). Product placement now seems far more effective than traditional spot advertising.

Moreover, it is clear throughout Understanding Media that McLuhan not only anticipated the synergistic modern media corporation, he in effect wrote the manual for its development (even if this was not his direct intention). He explained that “Money, like writing, has the power to specialize and to rechannel human energies and to separate functions, just as it translates and reduces one kind of work to another” (UM, p. 125). Media “creation” is no longer just about shooting and editing film or video footage. Terms like “windowing” and “repurposing” are increasingly used to describe the ways in which a media product or concept, once produced, can be recycled indefinitely. The modern media corporation is as much in the business of channeling information through various creative and financial experts as it is in the business of creating that information in the first place.

Surprisingly much has remained the same since Understanding Media was published. I like to ponder how McLuhan would change the book if he were alive to revise it in 2006. Recent technologies have affected the media “biases” that he wrote about, and, in addition to what I’ve already mentioned, I’ve thought about the following:

• Videocassettes, DVDs, and various internet video formats have made movies less ephemeral and also enabled direct access to specific parts of them—a boon to scholars as well as postmodern media producers (in their constant efforts to evoke nostalgia through clips of old songs, movies, and TV shows). Now the concept of “ephemeral” has more to do with the internet. There is no guarantee that the information we access on a given day will ever be seen again (or that we will even know how it came to exist in the first place).
• Video copies of TV programs are available as packaged volumes and via fan-club trading, though often without the commercials that completed the original broadcast/cablecast viewing experience. Multiple distribution windows have led to different types of viewing experiences.
• The growth and diversification of private delivery services such as UPS and FedEx have been accelerated dramatically by the rise of online sales. Not only have these companies opened up more shipping outlets (notably in suburban strip malls), they have redefined delivery-related services. The shipping companies offer an eclectic range of business services, from laptop computer repair to holding tanks for lobsters in transit. Clearly, the content of one medium is another medium.

Still, none of these things has altered the media environment writ large in ways that would render McLuhan’s core theories invalid. It may well be that, as Meyrowitz said, McLuhan’s pronouncements leave little opportunity for debate—and yet it is telling that I think of Understanding Media every time I observe one of these sorts of shifts in media.

I also wonder if McLuhan would choose to revise Understanding Media using the same linear prose style. Perhaps he would opt for the format he and Quentin Fiore chose for The Medium Is the Massage, a montage style of text, with a mixture of photographs, news clippings, and political cartoons.{11} Obviously, this short volume reflects the ways that McLuhan had absorbed the various responses to Understanding Media, the many constituencies who found the book applicable to their roles in life. That McLuhan chose to coauthor the book with a graphic designer shows that he recognized how much Understanding Media had influenced the advertising and public relations industries. That McLuhan and Fiore chose the style they did indicates their awareness that many people had read and understood Understanding Media not as linear text, to be absorbed sequentially, but as a series of aphorisms, to be sampled more or less at random.{12}

Although McLuhan’s name is no longer a buzzword in the popular vernacular—or even in the communication classroom—we are living in an era when the predictions of Understanding Media are in evidence all around us. His variety of technological determinism is instructive. Even those who do not agree, for instance, with the analogy he makes between media content and “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind” (UM, p. 32) must nonetheless stop and think about what the phrase means and what might have provoked him to write it. That the dog can be distracted better by a juicy piece of meat than by, say, a juicy carrot, is significant. It might be said, then, that the most successful media messages are those whose content is best suited to a specific medium. This is something that was understood about television at least a decade before Understanding Media was written, when critics began to realize that it was not ideal for either stage plays or movies. I do think McLuhan might have done more to address the ways in which the capabilities and the content of media technologies become intertwined. Yet as Daniel Czitrom remarks, “If nothing else, McLuhan’s efforts instilled an urgent awareness of the media environment as a basic force shaping the modern sensibility.”{13}

For someone whose place in the scholarly canon has been questioned by so many individuals for so many different reasons, McLuhan’s ideas have been remarkably enduring. In a 2005 edited collection titled The Legacy of McLuhan, writers ranging from his contemporaries to some who likely were children at the time of his death continue to ponder the many facets of the mediated world he envisioned.{14}

Like the latter, I feel a deep personal connection with Understanding Media because the book was published the same year I was born. We have both entered middle age now. For me, this means being frustrated with people older than I am for feeling ill at ease with technologies that both fascinate me and facilitate my everyday tasks. It also means being equally frustrated with those younger than I am (particularly my students), who seem to have lost touch with narrative-driven technologies such as books and old-style movies. I also feel a certain sense of paranoia, suspecting that younger people now place me in the category of those discomfited by newer technologies.

For Understanding Media, I suspect middle age means sitting on the fine line between classic and anachronism. We are living in the future that the book foretold. We cannot but acknowledge the truth in many of its pithy aphorisms. In fact they seem self-evident, even if we can still appreciate McLuhan’s gift for metaphor in stating them. Perhaps we repeat his legendary phrases too glibly. Perhaps we’re not repeating them all that frequently anymore. Much has happened since Understanding Media appeared in 1964—to the book’s place in society and to society itself. To me, it is a classic and just as worthwhile a read for the “millennial” generation as for the baby boomers.

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{1}Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York, 1964), hereafter cited as UM.

{2}Lewis Lapham, “Prime-Time McLuhan,” Saturday Night 109 (summer 1994), 51.

{3}Dwight Macdonald, “Running It Up the Totem Pole,” in McLuhan: Pro and Con, ed. R. Rosenthal (Baltimore, 1969), 29–37, quote on 32.

{4}Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York, 1985), 21.

{5}Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York, 1951), and The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto, 1962).

{6}Brian Winston, Misunderstanding Media (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). It should be mentioned that the revised edition, Media Technology and Society: A History—from the Telegraph to the Internet (London, 1998), not only removes the McLuhan reference from the title but also removes all discussion of McLuhan from the book.

{7}Winston, “How Are Media Born and Developed?” in Questioning the Media: A Critical Introduction, ed. John Downing, Ali Mohammadi, and Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1995), 54–74, esp. 72–73.

{8}McLuhan, Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, ed. Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 106.

{9}Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye, eds., Letters of Marshall McLuhan (New York, 1987).

{10}Lapham, “Prime-Time McLuhan,” 53.

{11}Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York, 1967; reprint, San Francisco, 1996).

{12}More and more I find myself explaining to my students that it is alright to read their course texts in this way, provided they hold themselves accountable for a complete understanding of the concepts. Perhaps McLuhan had accounted for this postmodern sensibility when writing Understanding Media, though he probably would not have seen much evidence of it in his classroom during the early 1960s. He himself was known to be an avid reader in what we might call the “old style.”

{13}Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), 165.

{14}Lance Strate and Edward Wachtel, eds., The Legacy of McLuhan (Cresskill, N.J., 2005).