Climateer Investing: "The Oracle of Mass Media: Remembering Marshall McLuhan"

Friday, October 28, 2022

"The Oracle of Mass Media: Remembering Marshall McLuhan"

Sometimes I think McLuhan could see the future:

“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no

division between military and civilian participation.”

– Marshall McLuhan (1970), Culture is Our Business, p. 66 (HT: AZ Quotes)

From Chronicles Magazine, October 1:

It is impossible to undertake the study of mass media without considering the indelible influence of Marshall McLuhan (1911-80). McLuhan, who practically invented this discipline, had an uncanny gift for coining a catchy term (“global village”) or phrase (“the medium is the message”) that is well-known even to those who have never bothered to read his still-relevant works. Without his relentless determination to understand the subtle effects of the media on human consciousness and society, our understanding of these omnipresent technologies would be severely limited.

Despite his enormous influence on the field of mass communication, McLuhan opposed the technological changes that swept the 20^th century, as he remarked in a 1966 interview:

I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening. Because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I’m resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons.

Although McLuhan’s opposition to technological innovation emanates from a discernible conservative tradition, the relation between his studies of mass media and his political biases has not always been well understood. When he became a media celebrity in the 1960s, his dispensation of advice to various corporations—including IBM, General Motors, and AT&T—convinced most observers on the left that he was a lackey for corporate capitalism. In the same decade, his apocalyptic predictions of social upheaval induced by electronic media persuaded many on the right that he was a fan of the counterculture. And in the 1970s, when McLuhan was active in the pro-life movement and a critic of Vatican II, those stances were rarely connected to his study of media at all. Famous admirers such as Pierre Trudeau and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. concluded that there was nothing essentially political about McLuhan’s ideas. Given this wide disagreement, is it possible to see any substantial cohesion between McLuhan’s conservative politics and his study of the media?

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta on July 21, 1911, the son of an actress and a real-estate and insurance salesman. Having spent his formative years in western Canada, young McLuhan was exposed to a growing movement of agrarian protest against the eastern railroad barons and bankers who sought to control the destinies of yeoman farmers scattered across the prairie hinterland. Later in life, in a Maclean’s article, he reflected on how the centralization of economic and political power in eastern Canada at the expense of other regions had not changed one whit:....
.... Amidst these revolutionary changes, is there anything that has remained the same? According to McLuhan, human beings throughout history have consistently failed to understand the effects of technological change until it was too late, a phenomenon that he called “rearview mirror” thinking. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), McLuhan’s main thesis—that media extended the sense organs (e.g., the telephone extended the ear)—is simple enough to understand. But he also insisted that the various effects of new media were not usually intelligible, even to their creators. Far too often, the users of media ignore the relation between “figure” and “ground.” Although the medium may be the figure (the object of attention), the ground (the sociohistorical environment) that the medium shapes is often invisible.....