McLuhan, Marshall (1911–1980)

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian academic, author, speaker, and consultant whose controversial pronouncements on the connections between media and culture revolutionized media studies and initiated a worldwide conversation on the impacts of media that persists to this day. McLuhan considered as a medium any technology, technique, or artifact that changes the pace, volume, or pattern of human interactions. Thus, clothing, housing, clocks, money, airplanes, and automobiles can be considered media as much as communication media per se.

His most influential work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, landed on the cultural scene in 1964 like a meteorite, exploding across the media landscape and igniting fiery debates. The incendiary nature of this work was deliberate. It was written in an aphoristic, probing style consciously chosen to provoke readers and to jar them out of their complacent acceptance of media as neutral vessels into which content can simply be poured and conveyed directly without our being conditioned by the formal qualities of the medium itself.

He likened the content of a medium to “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind” (1964, 18). A medium exploits or extends one of our faculties or senses and in the process numbs our awareness of it, rearranging our sense ratios and patterns of perception. Thus, alphabetic literacy detribalizes oral cultures by exchanging an eye for an ear. We come to assume [Page 928]that the particular ways of perceiving, thinking, and interacting fostered by a medium are natural and universal. Hence, the principle for which he is best known is “the medium is the message.”

Both historically and contemporaneously, cultures can be placed along a continuum extending from complete orality to alphabetic manuscript literacy, the high literacy produced by the printing press and thence to the postliteracy of the electronic era. The ratio between orality and literacy in a culture betokens not only its patterns of perception but also its attitudes toward production and consumption. Producer-oriented values are more closely associated with the acoustic, nonlinear, sculptural, and nonspecialist qualities of oral, traditional cultures. Consumer-oriented values are more closely associated with the visual, linear, detached, and specialist perspectives fostered by scanning uniform lines of print, leading to the comparatively passive acceptance of completed “packages.” To McLuhan, the mosaic pattern of the television image demands more participation in the completion of the image than does reading and thus retribalizes highly literate, individualistic cultures. The same medium can have a “hot,” detribalizing effect on “cool,” participatory cultures while at the same time cooling down hot cultures that have a high degree of specialization in roles and functions.

For example, McLuhan saw Europe and America exchanging attitudes and values after World War II. Europeans were increasingly stressing visual values in fashion and design, and their economies were embracing a greater quantity of uniform consumer goods whereas Americans were beginning “to rebel against uniform consumer values for the first time” and putting “stress on touch, on participation, involvement, and sculptural values” in both personal styles and products (1964, 120). He saw advertisements moving away from linear, denotative statements of the benefits of products toward dramas founded in depth psychology that engaged and involved observers in dynamic processes. “The corporate image of process includes the consumer in the producer role as well” (227).

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