1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 |
|
1990
"MacLuhan [ sic ] himself, the spectacle's first apologist, who had seemed to be the most convinced imbecile of the century, changed his mind when he finally discovered in 1976 that 'the pressure of the mass media leads to irrationality,' and that it was becoming urgent to modify their usage. The sage of Toronto had formerly spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a 'global village' instantly and effortlessly accessible to all.. However, MacLuhan's ungrateful modern disciples are now trying to make people forget him, hoping to establish their own careers in media celebration of all these new freedoms to 'choose' at random from ephemera. And no doubt they will retract their claims even faster than the man who inspired them." (33-4, section XII)
"Even [ sic ] McLuhan saw the significance of time-space compression and the confusions it generated in ways that the left could not see, precisely because it was so deeply embroiled in creating the confusion." (353)
"McLuhan's specific insights into mass media may well prove too ephemeral to be of much use for working historians. Like the maverick economist Thorstein Veblen, he often reads better as satire than social science. Nonetheless, as Elizabeth Eisenstein's Printing Press as Agent of Change (1979) has abundantly demonstrated, McLuhan's insights can furnish a starting point for an empirical inquiry of the most fruitful kind. There are even signs that the almost visceral distaste for his iconoclastic prose might be waning. In the two decades since the publication of Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media , and especially since cultural history has taken its 'linguistic turn,' historians have become accustomed to gleaning insights from theorists whose premises differ radically from their own. Now that Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault have found their way into the footnotes, can Marshall McLuhan be far behind?" (423)
"One searches for a theme or thread that unifies and thus helps clarify this work - although such themes are at least as much a creation of the searcher as they are inherent in the work. I propose that McLuhan's work can be understood as a series of more or less successful attempts to explain a reality that had only partially come into existence even at the time of his death in 1980 and that therefore eluded a clear description even by a wordsmith with McLuhan's talents. McLuhan most frequently referred to this reality as 'acoustic space.' Today, we call it 'cyberspace' - the 'place' we enter when we talk on the phone, listen to the radio, watch television, or communicate in immediate and lasting ways via computer networks. It is a place that violates our sense of common physical space - for example, unlike our physical bodies, our electronic surrogates can be in an infinity of places simultaneously - and thus seems metaphoric and even illusory. Metaphoric it may be (for everything radiates with metaphor), but unreal it is not, if we define reality in the valuable Deweyesque way as anything that affects us. By this criterion, cyberspace is at least as real as 'regular' space. And it is the elusive 'effect' McLuhan sought to elucidate in all his important work." (170)
"Just around the time he was becoming famous, Marshall McLuhan was known to haunt used bookstores looking for copies of his first book, The Mechanical Bride , which was then out of print. It was not vanity that sent McLuhan on this hunt, but something quite different. The author was embarrassed by the book and wished to prevent anyone from reading it. The cause of his embarrassment related to what were, perhaps, the most notorious words ever uttered in communication studies: "The medium is the message," which was, of course, the main message of McLuhan's third book, Understanding Media . Of the many ideas McLuhan sought to get across with this remark, the most important was the dominance of form over content. That is, the effects of a medium will have more to do with the properties of the medium itself than with the content it carries. "McLuhan had staked his career on this idea--and his career was going quite well-so he repudiated The Mechanical Bride because it was basically a content study. The book reprints about 50 advertisements from newspapers and magazines. On the facing pages McLuhan remarks on what the ads indicate about industrial culture just as it was about to become what we now call "post-industrial." Published in 1951, The Mechanical Bride was one of the first books to consider advertising as a serious clue to cultural realities and values. I am reminded of McLuhan's approach whenever students warn me--as they frequently do--that I am "reading too much" into a single ad or image or slogan. "Yes," I say, "that's the whole idea." As McLuhan put it in The Mechanical Bride , "What is needed is not attacks on obvious imbecility but a sharp eye for what supports . . . it." In other words, the ads themselves are not that important, but the values they represent are. Today, this approach is routine in the study of popular culture, but McLuhan deserves credit for realizing its possibilities quite early in the game." (45-6)
"Where McLuhan saw unity, Innis saw control. Innis believed that the electronic media - he died in 1952, just as television was exploding onto the scene - were easier for the powerful to manipulate. He feared that the taste for complicated and expensive technology would result in a thirst for a constant flow of instantaneous and novel factoids, and that serving this taste was intherently hostile to art and history, which are slower to change. Most of today's observers of the media's effect on our culture and politics would surely tend to agree with Innis and find McLuhan's optimism excessive." (56-7)
|