Marshall McLuhan (1911-80) did not teach us how to read. He taught us instead how to read ourselves reading. His was the best-known analysis of the consequences of the switch from oral/scribal to written/print to electronic culture in the West. At least two of his seminal writings, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) gained a readership extending well beyond academic circles. As a kind of media guru, this Toronto professor of English’s image appeared in newspapers and magazines, and even in a Woody Allen movie (Annie Hall 1977) during the Sixties and Seventies. What conferred such popularity upon his often recondite, aphoristic and even enigmatic commentary?
We can best answer this by first examining the contours of the cultural paradigm he employed as the basis for his theories of cultural evolution. Oral cultures are characterized by immediacy and personal involvement in the transmission of information. Epic poetry and proverb alike, and the matter of religious ritual transmit a culture’s weltanschauung to its users over time and space. The culture lives through its bearers’ collective memory.
The scribal presents McLuhan with his next stage of communications development, where the appearance of written record diminishes memory’s centrality among the tiny literate elite. In a scribal culture, such people can—through the establishment of clerisies, secular and religious—exert a control over space and time that is less subject to corruption and mutation than that of the predecessor oral culture. The Platonic dialogues, with their encasement of oral discourse within a written framework represent the highest attainment of scribal culture, as do the Christian Gospels. Both accounts combine the endurance of the written with the immediacy of the oral, producing a mode of discourse marked by concreteness and subtlety within the interplay of the oral and the written.
Print culture—the next stage in McLuhan’s cultural progress/regress—codifies and solidifies information. At the same time, print culture inculcates a greater degree of individuation within its audience, who begin to assemble their own cultural machinery out of the plentitude of enduring printed sources now encompassing their culture. A devout convert to Roman Catholicism, McLuhan viewed the rise of print culture as central to Protestantism, whose habits of mind engendered systems of behaviour valuing impersonality, objectivity and individualism over hierarchy and collective liturgies of social cohesion. In short, the post-Protestant culture of North America that McLuhan had so brilliantly examined in his first book-length publication, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), a culture with which he maintained an ambivalent and critical relationship, reached its zenith in the print culture into which he had been born.
Yet in his own time—and here begins McLuhan’s elevation to media fame and attention—a new cultural expression was fast acquiring a hegemonic status: the electronic media. McLuhan never lived to witness the full-blown appearance of the internet and the personal inter-connectedness devices so prevalent in our present culture. Yet his investigations of the role played by film, recorded music, radio and television in his time convinced him that an era marked by the immediacy and personalization of orality had restored his culture’s discourse to a condition greatly resembling that of the seemingly vanished oral culture from which ours had long ago originated. McLuhan’s imagination (and his classroom practices) reflected a lifelong engagement with Joyce and the other high Modernists in literature. These writers and artists he viewed as the prophets of the coming electronic totality whose emergence he discerned and at once celebrated and feared.
Practitioners and controllers of the new media welcomed what they viewed as his endorsement of the cultural styles they were in the process of fabricating. His characteristically aphoristic mode of discourse—“The medium is the message”—rendered him all the more endearing, quotable and authoritative in their eyes. It is safe to say that no academic during the twentieth century’s Sixties and Seventies garnered the degree of attention that Marshall McLuhan commanded. In popular understanding down to this day, no other thinker is more closely associated with the attempt to foster a critical self-consciousness about our consumption of media-based imagery and the consequences of that practice to our understanding of experience.
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