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Marshall McLuhan ‘the medium is the massage’

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Marshall McLuhan ‘the medium is the massage’

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Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian philosopher. His work is one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, McLuhan studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the US and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life.

McLuhan coined the expression " the medium is the message" and the term global village, and predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years after his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. With the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspective.

McLuhan was born on July 21, 1911, in Edmonton, Alberta, to Elsie Naomi ( née Hall) and Herbert Ernest McLuhan, both born in Canada. His brother Maurice was born two years later. "Marshall" was his maternal grandmother's surname. His mother was a Baptist school teacher who later became an actress; his father was a Methodist and had a real estate business in Edmonton. That business failed when World War I broke out, and McLuhan's father enlisted in the Canadian Army. After a year of service, he contracted influenza and remained in Canada, away from the front lines. After his discharge from the army in 1915, the McLuhan family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Marshall grew up and went to school, attending Kelvin Technical School before enrolling in the University of Manitoba in 1928.

At Manitoba, McLuhan explored his conflicted relationship with religion and turned to literature to "gratify his soul's hunger for truth and beauty," later referring to this stage as agnosticism. After studying for one year as an engineering student, he changed majors and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree (1933), winning a University Gold Medal in Arts and Sciences. He took a Master of Arts degree (1934) in English from the University of Manitoba in 1934. He had long desired to pursue graduate studies in England and was accepted to the University of Cambridge, having failed to secure a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford.

He had already earned Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees at Manitoba, but Cambridge required him to enrol as an undergraduate "affiliated" student, with one year's credit towards a three-year bachelor's degree, before entering any doctoral studies. He entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in the autumn of 1934, where he studied under I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis and was influenced by New Criticism. Upon reflection years afterward, he credited the faculty there with influencing the direction of his later work because of their emphasis on the training of perception and such concepts as Richards' notion of feedforward. These studies formed an important precursor to his later ideas on technological forms. He received the required bachelor's degree from Cambridge in 1936 and entered their graduate program. Later, he returned from England to take a job as a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that he held for the 1936-37 academic year, being unable to find a suitable job in Canada.

While studying the trivium at Cambridge, he took the first steps toward his eventual conversion to Catholicism in 1937, founded on his reading of G. K. Chesterton. In 1935, he wrote to his mother: "[H]ad I not encountered Chesterton, I would have remained agnostic for many years at least." At the end of March 1937, McLuhan completed what was a slow but total conversion process, when he was formally received into the Catholic Church. After consulting a minister, his father accepted the decision to convert. His mother, however, felt that his conversion would hurt his career and was inconsolable. McLuhan was devout throughout his life, but his religion remained a private matter. He had a lifelong interest in the number three (e.g., the trivium, the Trinity) and sometimes said that the Virgin Mary provided intellectual guidance for him. For the rest of his career, he taught in Catholic institutions of higher education. From 1937 to 1944, he taught English at Saint Louis University (with an interruption from 1939-40 when he returned to Cambridge). There he taught courses on Shakespeare and tutored and befriended Walter J. Ong, who went on to write his doctoral dissertation on a topic that McLuhan had called to his attention, and who also became a well-known authority on communication and technology.

McLuhan met Corinne Lewis in St. Louis, a teacher and aspiring actress from Fort Worth, Texas, and they were married on August 4, 1939. They spent 1939-40 in Cambridge, where he completed his master's degree (awarded in January 1940) and began to work on his doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts. While the McLuhans were in England, war had broken out in Europe. For this reason, he obtained permission to complete and submit his dissertation from the United States, without having to return to Cambridge for an oral defence. In 1940, the McLuhans returned to Saint Louis University, where he continued teaching and they started a family. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in December 1943. He next taught at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario, from 1944 to 1946, then moved to Toronto in 1946 where he joined the faculty of St. Michael's College, a Catholic college of the University of Toronto. Hugh Kenner was one of his students and Canadian economist and communications scholar Harold Innis was a university colleague who had a strong influence on his work. McLuhan wrote in 1964: "I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing."

In the early 1950s, McLuhan began the Communication and Culture seminars at the University of Toronto, funded by the Ford Foundation. As his reputation grew, he received a growing number of offers from other universities and, to keep him, the university created the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963. He published his first major work during this period: The Mechanical Bride (1951). The work was an examination of the effect of advertising on society and culture. He and Edmund Carpenter also produced an important journal called Explorations throughout the 1950s. McLuhan and Carpenter have been characterized as the Toronto School of communication theory, together with Harold Innis, Eric A. Havelock, and Northrop Frye. During this time, McLuhan supervised the doctoral thesis of modernist writer Sheila Watson on the subject of Wyndham Lewis. He remained at the University of Toronto through 1979, spending much of this time as head of his Centre for Culture and Technology.

McLuhan was named to the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at Fordham University in the Bronx for one year (1967-68). While at Fordham, he was diagnosed with a benign brain tumour, and it was treated successfully. He returned to Toronto where he taught at the University of Toronto for the rest of his life and lived in Wychwood Park, a bucolic enclave on a hill overlooking the downtown where Anatol Rapoport was his neighbour. In 1970, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 1975, the University of Dallas hosted him from April to May, appointing him to the McDermott Chair.

Marshall and Corinne McLuhan had six children: Eric, twins Mary and Teresa, Stephanie, Elizabeth, and Michael. The associated costs of a large family eventually drove him to advertising work and accepting frequent consulting and speaking engagements for large corporations, IBM and AT&T among them. Woody Allen's Oscar-winning motion picture (1977) featured McLuhan in a cameo as himself; a pompous academic arguing with Allen in a cinema queue is silenced by McLuhan suddenly appearing and saying, "You know nothing of my work." This was one of McLuhan's most frequent statements to and about those who disagreed with him.

In September 1979, he suffered a stroke which affected his ability to speak. The University of Toronto's School of Graduate Studies tried to close his research centre shortly thereafter, but was deterred by substantial protests, most notably by Woody Allen. He never fully recovered from the stroke and died in his sleep on December 31, 1980. He is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Thornhill, Ontario, Canada.

During his years at Saint Louis University (1937-1944), McLuhan worked concurrently on two projects: his doctoral dissertation and the manuscript that was eventually published in 1951 as the book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, which included only a representative selection of the materials that McLuhan had prepared for it.

McLuhan's 1942 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation surveys the history of the verbal arts ( grammar, logic, and rhetoric-collectively known as the trivium) from the time of Cicero down to the time of Thomas Nashe. In his later publications, McLuhan at times uses the Latin concept of the trivium to outline an orderly and systematic picture of certain periods in the history of Western culture. McLuhan suggests that the Late Middle Ages, for instance, were characterized by the heavy emphasis on the formal study of logic. The key development that led to the Renaissance was not the rediscovery of ancient texts but a shift in emphasis from the formal study of logic to rhetoric and grammar. Modern life is characterized by the re-emergence of grammar as its most salient feature-a trend McLuhan felt was exemplified by the New Criticism of Richards and Leavis.

In The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan turned his attention to analysing and commenting on numerous examples of persuasion in contemporary popular culture. This followed naturally from his earlier work as both dialectic and rhetoric in the classical trivium aimed at persuasion. At this point his focus shifted dramatically, turning inward to study the influence of communication media independent of their content. His famous aphorism " the medium is the message" (elaborated in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man) calls attention to this intrinsic effect of communications media.

McLuhan also started the journal Explorations with anthropologist Edmund "Ted" Carpenter. In a letter to Walter Ong dated May 31, 1953, McLuhan reported that he had received a two-year grant of $43,000 from the Ford Foundation to carry out a communication project at the University of Toronto involving faculty from different disciplines, which led to the creation of the journal.

At a Fordham lecture in 1999, Tom Wolfe suggested that a major under-acknowledged influence on McLuhan's work is the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin whose ideas anticipated those of McLuhan, especially the evolution of the human mind into the " noosphere". In fact, McLuhan warns against outright dismissing or whole-heartedly accepting de Chardin's observations early on in his second published book The Gutenberg Galaxy:

This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the "noosphere" or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and super-imposed co-existence.

In his private life, McLuhan wrote to friends saying: "I am not a fan of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The idea that anything is better because it comes later is surely borrowed from pre-electronic technologies." Further, McLuhan noted to a Catholic collaborator: "The idea of a Cosmic thrust in one direction ... is surely one of the lamest semantic fallacies ever bred by the word 'evolution' .... That development should have any direction at all is inconceivable except to the highly literate community."

McLuhan's first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), is a pioneering study in the field now known as popular culture. His interest in the critical study of popular culture was influenced by the 1933 book Culture and Environment by F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, and the title The Mechanical Bride is derived from a piece by the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp.

Like his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, The Mechanical Bride is composed of a number of short essays that may be read in any order-what he styled the "mosaic approach" to writing a book. Each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan's analysis thereof. The analyses bear on aesthetic considerations as well as on the implications behind the imagery and text. McLuhan chose the ads and articles included in his book not only to draw attention to their symbolism and their implications for the corporate entities that created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed.

McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (written in 1961, first published in Canada by University of Toronto Press in 1962) is a pioneering study in the fields of oral culture, print culture, cultural studies, and media ecology.

Throughout the book, McLuhan takes pains to reveal how communication technology ( alphabetic writing, the printing press, and the electronic media) affects cognitive organization, which in turn has profound ramifications for social organization:

... [I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent.

Movable type

His episodic history takes the reader from pre-alphabetic tribal humankind to the electronic age. According to McLuhan, the invention of movable type greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taking place since the invention and implementation of the alphabet, by which McLuhan means phonemic orthography. (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from logographic or logogramic writing systems, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs or ideograms.)

Print culture, ushered in by the advance in printing during the middle of the fifteenth century when the Gutenberg press was invented, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. Quoting with approval an observation on the nature of the printed word from Prints and Visual Communication by William Ivins, McLuhan remarks:

In this passage [Ivins] not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background. ...

The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, "formal" causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook.

The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium Is the Massage) is that new technologies (such as alphabets, printing presses, and even speech) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn, affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn affects social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a ... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, this advance of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism, and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification."

Global village

In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence": when electronic media replaces visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the global village.

The term is sometimes described as having negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy, but McLuhan was interested in exploring effects, not making value judgments:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. ... Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. ...

In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no per se moral bent-it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realization:

Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds? ...

Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But", someone says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality.

The moral valence of technology's effects on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For instance, McLuhan contrasts the considerable alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter seventeenth century with the modern concern for the "end of the book". If there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that "there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies".

Though the World Wide Web was invented almost thirty years after The Gutenberg Galaxy, and ten years after his death, McLuhan prophesied the web technology seen today as early as 1962:

The next medium, whatever it is-it may be the extension of consciousness-will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.

Furthermore, McLuhan coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term to refer to rapid, irregular, and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements such as " Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave." Paul Levinson's 1999 book Digital McLuhan explores the ways that McLuhan's work may be understood better through using the lens of the digital revolution.

McLuhan frequently quoted Walter Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), which evidently had prompted McLuhan to write The Gutenberg Galaxy. Ong wrote a highly favorable review of this new book in America. However, Ong later tempered his praise, by describing McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy as "a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond." McLuhan himself said of the book, "I'm not concerned to get any kudos out of [ The Gutenberg Galaxy]. It seems to me a book that somebody should have written a century ago. I wish somebody else had written it. It will be a useful prelude to the rewrite of Understanding Media [the 1960 NAEB report] that I'm doing now."

McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy won Canada's highest literary award, the Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction, in 1962. The chairman of the selection committee was McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto and oftentime intellectual sparring partner, Northrop Frye.

McLuhan's most widely known work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), is a pioneering study in media theory. Dismayed by the way people approached and used new media such as television, McLuhan famously argued that in the modern world "we live mythically and integrally ... but continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age."

McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study-popularly quoted as "the medium is the message". McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society-in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example-the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.

"Hot" and "cool" media

In the first part of Understanding Media, McLuhan also stated that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Some media, such as the movies, were "hot"-that is, they enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. McLuhan contrasted this with "cool" TV, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of the viewer to determine meaning, and comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be "hot", intensifying one single sense "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book to be "cool" and "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value.

"Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue."

Hot media usually, but not always, provide complete involvement without considerable stimulus. For example, print occupies visual space, uses visual senses, but can immerse its reader. Hot media favour analytical precision, quantitative analysis and sequential ordering, as they are usually sequential, linear and logical. They emphasize one sense (for example, of sight or sound) over the others. For this reason, hot media also include radio, as well as film, the lecture, and photography.

Cool media, on the other hand, are usually, but not always, those that provide little involvement with substantial stimulus. They require more active participation on the part of the user, including the perception of abstract patterning and simultaneous comprehension of all parts. Therefore, according to McLuhan cool media include television, as well as the seminar and cartoons. McLuhan describes the term "cool media" as emerging from jazz and popular music and, in this context, is used to mean "detached." A cool medium incorporates increased involvement but decreased description while a hot medium is the opposite, decreasing involvement and increasing description. In other words, a society that appears to be actively participating in the streaming of content but not considering the effects of the tool is not allowing an "extension of ourselves."

This concept appears to force media into binary categories. However, McLuhan's hot and cool exist on a continuum: they are more correctly measured on a scale than as dichotomous terms.

Critiques of Understanding Media

Some theorists have attacked McLuhan's definition and treatment of the word "medium" for being too simplistic. Umberto Eco, for instance, contends that McLuhan's medium conflates channels, codes, and messages under the overarching term of the medium, confusing the vehicle, internal code, and content of a given message in his framework.

In Media Manifestos, Régis Debray also takes issue with McLuhan's envisioning of the medium. Like Eco, he is ill at ease with this reductionist approach, summarizing its ramifications as follows:

The list of objections could be and has been lengthened indefinitely: confusing technology itself with its use of the media makes of the media an abstract, undifferentiated force and produces its image in an imaginary "public" for mass consumption; the magical naivete of supposed causalities turns the media into a catch-all and contagious "mana"; apocalyptic millenarianism invents the figure of a homo mass-mediaticus without ties to historical and social context, and so on.

Furthermore, when Wired interviewed him in 1995, Debray stated that he views McLuhan "more as a poet than a historian, a master of intellectual collage rather than a systematic analyst ... McLuhan overemphasizes the technology behind cultural change at the expense of the usage that the messages and codes make of that technology."

Dwight Macdonald, in turn, reproached McLuhan for his focus on television and for his "aphoristic" style of prose, which he believes left Understanding Media filled with "contradictions, non-sequiturs, facts that are distorted and facts that are not facts, exaggerations, and chronic rhetorical vagueness."

Additionally, Brian Winston's Misunderstanding Media, published in 1986, chides McLuhan for what he sees as his technologically deterministic stances. Raymond Williams and James W. Carey further this point of contention, claiming:

The work of McLuhan was a particular culmination of an aesthetic theory which became, negatively, a social theory ... It is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism ... If the medium - whether print or television - is the cause, of all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history is at once reduced to effects. (Williams 1990, 126/7)[failed verification ]

David Carr states that there has been a long line of "academics who have made a career out of deconstructing McLuhan's effort to define the modern media ecosystem", whether it be due to what they see as McLuhan's ignorance toward sociohistorical context or the style of his argument.

While some critics have taken issue with McLuhan's writing style and mode of argument, McLuhan himself urged readers to think of his work as "probes" or "mosaics" offering a toolkit approach to thinking about the media. His eclectic writing style has also been praised for its postmodern sensibilities and suitability for virtual space.

The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, published in 1967, was McLuhan's best seller, "eventually selling nearly a million copies worldwide." Initiated by Quentin Fiore, McLuhan adopted the term "massage" to denote the effect each medium has on the human sensorium, taking inventory of the "effects" of numerous media in terms of how they "massage" the sensorium.

Fiore, at the time a prominent graphic designer and communications consultant, set about composing the visual illustration of these effects which were compiled by Jerome Agel. Near the beginning of the book, Fiore adopted a pattern in which an image demonstrating a media effect was presented with a textual synopsis on the facing page. The reader experiences a repeated shifting of analytic registers-from "reading" typographic print to "scanning" photographic facsimiles-reinforcing McLuhan's overarching argument in this book: namely, that each medium produces a different "massage" or "effect" on the human sensorium.

In The Medium Is the Massage, McLuhan also rehashed the argument-which first appeared in the Prologue to 1962's The Gutenberg Galaxy -that all media are "extensions" of our human senses, bodies and minds.

Finally, McLuhan described key points of change in how man has viewed the world and how these views were changed by the adoption of new media. "The technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth [century]", brought on by the adoption of fixed points of view and perspective by typography, while "[t]he technique of the suspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century", brought on by the bard abilities of radio, movies and television.

The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backward into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land.

An audio recording version of McLuhan's famous work was made by Columbia Records. The recording consists of a pastiche of statements made by McLuhan interrupted by other speakers, including people speaking in various phonations and falsettos, discordant sounds and 1960s incidental music in what could be considered a deliberate attempt to translate the disconnected images seen on TV into an audio format, resulting in the prevention of a connected stream of conscious thought. Various audio recording techniques and statements are used to illustrate the relationship between spoken, literary speech and the characteristics of electronic audio media. McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand called the recording "the 1967 equivalent of a McLuhan video."

"I wouldn't be seen dead with a living work of art."-'Old man' speaking

"Drop this jiggery-pokery and talk straight turkey."-'Middle aged man' speaking

McLuhan used James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, an inspiration for this study of war throughout history, as an indicator as to how war may be conducted in the future.

Joyce's Wake is claimed to be a gigantic cryptogram which reveals a cyclic pattern for the whole history of man through its Ten Thunders. Each "thunder" below is a 100-character portmanteau of other words to create a statement he likens to an effect that each technology has on the society into which it is introduced. In order to glean the most understanding out of each, the reader must break the portmanteau into separate words (and many of these are themselves portmanteaus of words taken from multiple languages other than English) and speak them aloud for the spoken effect of each word. There is much dispute over what each portmanteau truly denotes.

McLuhan claims that the ten thunders in Wake represent different stages in the history of man:

Thunder 1: Paleolithic to Neolithic. Speech. Split of East/West. From herding to harnessing animals.

Thunder 2: Clothing as weaponry. Enclosure of private parts. First social aggression.

Thunder 3: Specialism. Centralism via wheel, transport, cities: civil life.

Thunder 4: Markets and truck gardens. Patterns of nature submitted to greed and power.

Thunder 5: Printing. Distortion and translation of human patterns and postures and pastors.

Thunder 6: Industrial Revolution. Extreme development of print process and individualism.

Thunder 7: Tribal man again. All choractors end up separate, private man. Return of choric.

Thunder 8: Movies. Pop art, pop Kulch via tribal radio. Wedding of sight and sound.

Thunder 9: Car and Plane. Both centralizing and decentralizing at once create cities in crisis. Speed and death.

Thunder 10: Television. Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. The last thunder is a turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.

In his 1970 book, From Cliché to Archetype, McLuhan, collaborating with Canadian poet Wilfred Watson, approached the various implications of the verbal cliché and of the archetype. One major facet in McLuhan's overall framework introduced in this book that is seldom noticed is the provision of a new term that actually succeeds the global village; the global theater.

In McLuhan's terms, a cliché is a "normal" action, phrase, etc. which becomes so often used that we are "anesthetized" to its effects.

An example of this given by McLuhan is Eugène Ionesco's play The Bald Soprano, whose dialogue consists entirely of phrases Ionesco pulled from an Assimil language book. "Ionesco originally put all these idiomatic English clichés into literary French which presented the English in the most absurd aspect possible."

McLuhan's archetype "is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment." "Environment" would also include the kinds of "awareness" and cognitive shifts brought upon people by it, not totally unlike the psychological context Carl Jung described.

McLuhan also posits that there is a factor of interplay between the cliché and the archetype, or a "doubleness":

Another theme of the Wake [Finnegans Wake] that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is 'past time are pastimes.' The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the 20th century, the number of 'past times' that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of 'doubleness' or 'interplay' because this type of hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.

McLuhan relates the cliché-to-archetype process to the Theater of the Absurd:

Pascal, in the seventeenth century, tells us that the heart has many reasons of which the head knows nothing. The Theater of the Absurd is essentially a communicating to the head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it has tried to forget all about. In the seventeenth century world the languages of the heart were pushed down into the unconscious by the dominant print cliché.

The "languages of the heart", or what McLuhan would otherwise define as oral culture, were thus made archetype by means of the printing press, and turned into cliché.

The satellite medium, McLuhan states, encloses the Earth in a man-made environment, which "ends 'Nature' and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed." All previous environments (book, newspaper, radio, etc.) and their artifacts are retrieved under these conditions ("past times are pastimes"). McLuhan thereby meshes this into the term global theater. It serves as an update to his older concept of the global village, which, in its own definitions, can be said to be subsumed into the overall condition described by that of the global theater.

In his 1989 posthumous book, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, McLuhan, collaborating with Bruce R. Powers, provided a strong conceptual framework for understanding the cultural implications of the technological advances associated with the rise of a worldwide electronic network. This is a major work of McLuhan's because it contains the most extensive elaboration of his concept of Acoustic Space, and it provides a critique of standard 20th century communication models such as the Shannon-Weaver model. McLuhan distinguishes between the existing worldview of Visual Space - a linear, quantitative, classically geometric model - and that of Acoustic Space - a holistic, qualitative order with a complex intricate paradoxical topology. "Acoustic Space has the basic character of a sphere whose focus or center is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere." The transition from Visual to Acoustic Space was not automatic with the advent of the global network, but would have to be a conscious project. The "universal environment of simultaneous electronic flow" inherently favors right-brain Acoustic Space, yet we are held back by habits of adhering to a fixed point of view. There are no boundaries to sound. We hear from all directions at once. Yet Acoustic and Visual Space are, in fact, inseparable. The resonant interval is the invisible borderline between Visual and Acoustic Space. This is like the television camera that the Apollo 8 astronauts focused on the Earth after they had orbited the moon.

Reading, writing, and hierarchical ordering are associated with the left brain, as are the linear concept of time and phonetic literacy. The left brain is the locus of analysis, classification, and rationality. The right brain is the locus of the spatial, tactile, and musical. "Comprehensive awareness" results when the two sides of the brain are in true balance. Visual Space is associated with the simplified worldview of Euclidean geometry, the intuitive three dimensions useful for the architecture of buildings and the surveying of land. It is too rational and has no grasp of the acoustic. Acoustic Space is multisensory.

McLuhan writes about robotism in the context of Japanese Zen Buddhism and how it can offer us new ways of thinking about technology. The Western way of thinking about technology is too much related to the left hemisphere of our brain, which has a rational and linear focus. What he called robotism might better be called androidism in the wake of Blade Runner and the novels of Philip K. Dick. Robotism-androidism emerges from the further development of the right hemisphere of the brain, creativity and a new relationship to spacetime (most humans are still living in 17th-century classical Newtonian physics spacetime). Robots-androids will have much greater flexibility than humans have had until now, in both mind and body. Robots-androids will teach humanity this new flexibility. And this flexibility of androids (what McLuhan calls robotism) has a strong affinity with Japanese culture and life. McLuhan quotes from Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, an anthropological study of Japanese culture published in 1946: "Occidentals cannot easily credit the ability of the Japanese to swing from one behavior to another without psychic cost. Such extreme possibilities are not included in our experience. Yet in Japanese life the contradictions, as they seem to us, are as deeply based in their view of life as our uniformities are in ours." The ability to live in the present and instantly readjust.

Beyond existing communication models

"All Western scientific models of communication are-like the Shannon-Weaver model-linear, sequential, and logical as a reflection of the late medieval emphasis on the Greek notion of efficient causality." McLuhan and Powers criticize the Shannon-Weaver model of communication as emblematic of left-hemisphere bias and linearity, descended from a print-era perversion of Aristotle's notion of efficient causality.

A third term of The Global Village that McLuhan and Powers develop at length is The Tetrad. McLuhan had begun development on the Tetrad as early as 1974. The tetrad an analogical, simultaneous, four-fold pattern of transformation. "At full maturity the tetrad reveals the metaphoric structure of the artifact as having two figures and two grounds in dynamic and analogical relationship to each other." Like the camera focused on the Earth by the Apollo 8 astronauts, the tetrad reveals figure (Moon) and ground (Earth) simultaneously. The right-brain hemisphere thinking is the capability of being in many places at the same time. Electricity is acoustic. It is simultaneously everywhere. The Tetrad, with its fourfold Möbius topological structure of enhancement, reversal, retrieval and obsolescence, is mobilized by McLuhan and Powers to illuminate the media or technological inventions of cash money, the compass, the computer, the database, the satellite, and the global media network.

In Laws of Media (1988), published posthumously by his son Eric, McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects. The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology (i.e., any medium) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously. McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing his laws as questions with which to consider any medium:

What does the medium enhance?

What does the medium make obsolete?

What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?

What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the "grammar and syntax" of the "language" of media. McLuhan departs from his mentor Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium "overheats", or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme.

Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as four diamonds forming an X, with the name of a medium in the centre. The two diamonds on the left of a tetrad are the Enhancement and Retrieval qualities of the medium, both Figure qualities. The two diamonds on the right of a tetrad are the Obsolescence and Reversal qualities, both Ground qualities.

Using the example of radio:

Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. Radio amplifies news and music via sound.

Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the importance of print and the visual.

Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.

Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.

McLuhan adapted the Gestalt psychology idea of a figure and a ground, which underpins the meaning of "The medium is the message". He used this concept to explain how a form of communications technology, the medium or figure, necessarily operates through its context, or ground.

McLuhan believed that in order to grasp fully the effect of a new technology, one must examine figure (medium) and ground (context) together, since neither is completely intelligible without the other. McLuhan argued that we must study media in their historical context, particularly in relation to the technologies that preceded them. The present environment, itself made up of the effects of previous technologies, gives rise to new technologies, which, in their turn, further affect society and individuals.

All technologies have embedded within them their own assumptions about time and space. The message which the medium conveys can only be understood if the medium and the environment in which the medium is used-and which, simultaneously, it effectively creates-are analysed together. He believed that an examination of the figure-ground relationship can offer a critical commentary on culture and society.

In McLuhan's (and Harley Parker's) work, electric media has an affinity with haptic and hearing perception, while mechanical media have an affinity with visual perception. This opposition between optic and haptic, had been previously formulated by art historians Alois Riegl, in his 1901 Late Roman art industry, and then Erwin Panofsky (in his Perspective as Symbolic Form). However, McLuhan's comments are more aware of the contingent cultural context in which for instance linear perspective arose, while Panofsky's ones are more teleological.

Also Walter Benjamin, in his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), observed how in the scenario of perceptions of modern Western culture, from about the 19th century, has begun a shift from the optic towards the haptic. This shift is one of the main recurring topics in McLuhan work, which McLuhan attributes to the advent of the electronic era.

After the publication of Understanding Media, McLuhan received an astonishing amount of publicity, making him perhaps the most publicized English teacher in the twentieth century and arguably the most controversial. This publicity began with the work of two California advertising executives, Howard Gossage and Gerald Feigen who used personal funds to fund their practice of "genius scouting". Much enamoured with McLuhan's work, Feigen and Gossage arranged for McLuhan to meet with editors of several major New York magazines in May 1965 at the Lombardy Hotel in New York. Philip Marchand reports that, as a direct consequence of these meetings, McLuhan was offered the use of an office in the headquarters of both and , any time he needed it.

In August 1965, Feigen and Gossage held what they called a "McLuhan festival" in the offices of Gossage's advertising agency in San Francisco. During this "festival", McLuhan met with advertising executives, members of the mayor's office, and editors from the San Francisco Chronicle and magazine. More significant was the presence at the festival of Tom Wolfe, who wrote about McLuhan in a subsequent article, "What If He Is Right?", published in magazine and Wolfe's own The Pump House Gang. According to Feigen and Gossage, their work had only a moderate effect on McLuhan's eventual celebrity: they claimed that their work only "probably speeded up the recognition of [McLuhan's] genius by about six months." In any case, McLuhan soon became a fixture of media discourse. Newsweek magazine did a cover story on him; articles appeared in Life, Harper's, Fortune, Esquire, and others. Cartoons about him appeared in The New Yorker. In 1969, magazine published a lengthy interview with him. In a running gag on the popular sketch comedy Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, the "poet" Henry Gibson would randomly say, "Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?"

McLuhan was credited with coining the phrase Turn on, tune in, drop out by its popularizer, Timothy Leary, in the 1960s. In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, Leary stated that slogan was "given to him" by McLuhan during a lunch in New York City. Leary said McLuhan "was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, 'Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that's a lot,' to the tune of a Pepsi commercial. Then he started going, 'Tune in, turn on, and drop out.'"

During his lifetime and afterward, McLuhan heavily influenced cultural critics, thinkers, and media theorists such as Neil Postman, Jean Baudrillard, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, William Irwin Thompson, Paul Levinson, Douglas Rushkoff, Jaron Lanier, Hugh Kenner, and John David Ebert, as well as political leaders such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jerry Brown. Andy Warhol was paraphrasing McLuhan with his now famous " 15 minutes of fame" quote. When asked in the 1970s for a way to sedate violences in Angola, he suggested a massive spread of TV devices. Douglas Coupland, argued that McLuhan "was conservative, socially, but he never let politics enter his writing or his teaching".

The character "Brian O'Blivion" in David Cronenberg's 1983 film Videodrome is a "media oracle" based on McLuhan. In 1991, McLuhan was named as the "patron saint" of magazine and a quote of his appeared on the masthead for the first ten years of its publication. He is mentioned by name in a Peter Gabriel-penned lyric in the song "Broadway Melody of 1974". This song appears on the concept album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, from progressive rock band Genesis. The lyric is: "Marshall McLuhan, casual viewin' head buried in the sand." McLuhan is also jokingly referred to during an episode of The Sopranos entitled " House Arrest". Despite his death in 1980, someone claiming to be McLuhan was posting on a Wired mailing list in 1996. The information this individual provided convinced one writer for Wired that "if the poster was not McLuhan himself, it was a bot programmed with an eerie command of McLuhan's life and inimitable perspective."

A new centre known as the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, formed soon after his death in 1980, was the successor to McLuhan's Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. Since 1994, it has been part of the University of Toronto Faculty of Information and in 2008 the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology incorporated in the Coach House Institute. The first director was literacy scholar and OISE Professor David R. Olsen. From 1983 until 2008, the McLuhan Program was under the direction of Derrick de Kerckhove who was McLuhan's student and translator. From 2008 through 2015 Professor Dominique Scheffel-Dunand of York University served Director of the Program. In 2011 at the time of his centenary the Coach House Institute established a Marshall McLuhan Centenary Fellowship program in his honor, and each year appoints up to four fellows for a maximum of two years. In May 2016 the Coach House Institute was renamed the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology; its Interim Director was Seamus Ross (2015-16). Sarah Sharma, an Associate Professor of Media Theory from the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology (ICCIT) and the Faculty of Information (St. George), began a five-year term as director of the Coach House (2017- ). Professor Sharma's research and teaching focuses on feminist approaches to technology, including issues related to temporality and media. Professor Sharma's thematic for the 2017-2018 Monday Night Seminars at the McLuhan Centre is MsUnderstanding Media which extends and introduces feminist approaches to technology to McLuhan's formulations of technology and culture.

In Toronto, Marshall McLuhan Catholic Secondary School is named after him.

This is a partial list of works cited in this article. See Bibliography of Marshall McLuhan for a more comprehensive list of works by and about McLuhan.

1951 The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man; 1st ed.: The Vanguard Press, NY; reissued by Gingko Press, 2002. ISBN 1-58423-050-9.

1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man; 1st ed.: University of Toronto Press; reissued by Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-1818-5.

1964 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man; 1st ed. McGraw Hill, NY; reissued by MIT Press, 1994, with introduction by Lewis H. Lapham; reissued by Gingko Press, 2003. ISBN 1-58423-073-8.

1967 The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects with Quentin Fiore, produced by Jerome Agel; 1st ed.: Random House; reissued by Gingko Press, 2001. ISBN 1-58423-070-3.

1968 War and Peace in the Global Village design/layout by Quentin Fiore, produced by Jerome Agel; 1st ed.: Bantam, NY; reissued by Gingko Press, 2001. ISBN 1-58423-074-6.

1970 From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson; Viking, NY. ISBN 0-670-33093-0.

1988 McLuhan, Marshall and Eric. Laws of Media. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-5782-9.

2016 Marshall McLuhan and Robert K. Logan. "The Future of the Library: From Electronic Media to Digital Media." Peter Lang. ISBN 9781433132643.

1. ^ McLuhan later commented "One advantage we Westerners have is that we're under no illusion we've had an education. That's why I started at the bottom again."

2. ^ Associates speculated about his intellectual connection to the Virgin Mary, one saying, "He had a direct connection with the Blessed Virgin Mary. ... He alluded to it very briefly once, almost fearfully, in a please-don't-laugh-at-me tone. He didn't say, 'I know this because the Blessed Virgin Mary told me,' but it was clear from what he said that one of the reasons he was so sure about certain things was that the Virgin had certified his understanding of them."

3. The phrase "the medium is the message" may be better understood in light of ^ Bernard Lonergan's further articulation of related ideas: at the empirical level of consciousness, the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message. This sentence uses Lonergan's terminology from Insight: A Study of Human Understanding to clarify the meaning of McLuhan's statement that "the medium is the message"; McLuhan read this when it was first published in 1957 and found "much sense" in it-in his letter of September 21, 1957, to his former student and friend, Walter J. Ong, McLuhan says, "Find much sense in Bern. Lonergan's Insight". Lonergan's Insight is an extended guide to "making the inward turn": attending ever more carefully to one's own consciousness, reflecting on it ever more carefully, and monitoring one's articulations ever more carefully. When McLuhan declares that he is more interested in percepts than concepts, he is declaring in effect that he is more interested in what Lonergan refers to as the empirical level of consciousness than in what Lonergan refers to as the intelligent level of consciousness in which concepts are formed, which Lonergan distinguishes from the rational level of consciousness in which the adequacy of concepts and of predications is adjudicated. This inward turn to attending to percepts and to the cultural conditioning of the empirical level of consciousness through the effect of communication media sets him apart from more outward-oriented studies of sociological influences and the outward presentation of self carried out by George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, Berger and Luckmann, Kenneth Burke, Hugh Duncan, and others.

4. Sometimes ^ Wyndham Lewis's America and Cosmic Man (1948) and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake are credited as the source of the phrase, but neither used the words "global village" specifically as such. According to McLuhan's son Eric McLuhan, his father, a Wake scholar and a close friend to Lewis, likely discussed the concept with Lewis during their association, but there is no evidence that he got the idea or the phrasing from either; generally, McLuhan is credited as having coined the term.

5. According to McLuhan biographer W. Terrence Gordon, ^

by the time it appeared in 1967, McLuhan no doubt recognized that his original saying had become a cliché and welcomed the opportunity to throw it back on the compost heap of language to recycle and revitalize it. But the new title is more than McLuhan indulging his insatiable taste for puns, more than a clever fusion of self-mockery and self-rescue-the subtitle is 'An Inventory of Effects,' underscoring the lesson compressed into the original saying.

However, the FAQ section on the website maintained by McLuhan's estate says that this interpretation is incomplete and makes its own leap of logic as to why McLuhan left it as is:

Why is the title of the book The Medium Is the Massage and not The Medium is the Message? Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter's, it had on the cover "Massage" as it still does. The title was supposed to have read The Medium is the Message but the typesetter had made an error. When McLuhan saw the typo he exclaimed, "Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!" Now there are possible four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: Message and Mess Age, Massage and Mass Age.

1. ^ Wolf, Gary (January 1996). "The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool". Wired. Vol. 4 no. 1.

2. ^ Boxer, Sarah (April 3, 2003). "McLuhan's Messages, Echoing on Iraq". Critic's Notebook. The New York Times. p. 1.

3. ^ Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan Archived 2017-10-19 at the Wayback Machine, a virtual museum exhibition at Library and Archives Canada

4. ^ Fitterman, Lisa (April 19, 2008). "She Was Marshall McLuhan's Great Love Ardent Defender, Supporter and Critic". The Globe and Mail. Toronto. Archived from the original on December 5, 2008.

5. McLuhan, Marshall. (2005) ^ Marshall McLuhan Unbound. Corte Madera, CA : Gingko Press v. 8, p. 8. This is a reprint of McLuhan's introduction to the 1964 edition of Innis's book The Bias of Communication first published in 1951.

6. ^ University of Toronto Bulletin, 1979; Martin Friedland, The University of Toronto: A History, University of Toronto Press, 2002

7. ^ Whitman, Alden (January 1, 1981). "Marshall McLuhan, Author, Dies; Declared 'Medium Is the Message'". The New York Times.

8. Marchand, pp. 183.

9. ^ "Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan". Playboy. March 1969. pp. 26-27, 45, 55-56, 61, 63.

10. ^ Daniele Luttazzi, interview at RAI Radio1 show Stereonotte Archived 2007-06-29 at the Wayback Machine, July 01 2007 2:00 am. Quote: "McLuhan era uno che al premier canadese che si interrogava su un modo per sedare dei disordini in Angola, McLuhan disse, negli anni 70, 'riempite la nazione di apparecchi televisivi'; ed è quello che venne fatto; e la rivoluzione in Angola cessò." (in Italian)

11. Wolf, Gary (January 1996). "Channeling McLuhan". Wired. Vol. 4 no. 1.

12. ^ "Prof. Sarah Sharma Appointed Director of McLuhan Centre". McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology. Toronto: University of Toronto. December 13, 2016. Archived from the original on November 14, 2017.

Chrystall, Andrew Brian (2007). The New American Vortex: Explorations of McLuhan (PhD thesis). Palmerston North, New Zealand: Massey University. hdl:.

Coupland, Douglas (2009). Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan. Penguin Canada.

Debray, Régis (1996). Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms (PDF). Translated by Rauth, Eric. London: Verso. ISBN 978-1-85984-972-9.

Edan, Tina (2003). St Marshall, Mass and the Media: Catholicism, Media Theory and Marshall McLuhan (MA thesis). Montreal: Concordia University.

Gordon, W. Terrence (1997). Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding: A Biography. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00549-9.

Grosswiler, Paul (1998). The Method Is the Message: Rethinking McLuhan Through Critical Theory. Montreal: Black Rose.

Kroker, Arthur (1984). Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant. Montreal: New World Perspectives. hdl:. ISBN 978-0-920393-14-7.

Lamberti, Elena (2012). Marshall McLuhan's Mosaic: Probing the Literary Origins of Media Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Lapham, Lewis H. (1994). Introduction. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. By McLuhan, Marshall. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Levinson, Paul (1999). Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-19251-4.

Logan, Robert K. (2013). McLuhan Misunderstood: Setting the Record Straight. Toronto: Key Publishing House.

Marchand, Philip (1998). Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (rev. ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-63186-0.

McLuhan, Eric (1998). Electric Language: Understanding the Present. Stoddart. ISBN 978-0-7737-5972-5.

McLuhan, Marshall (1944). "Poetic and Rhetorical Exegesis: The Case for Leavis Against Richards and Empson" in the Sewanee Review". The Sewanee Review. 52 (2): 266-276. ISSN 1934-421X. JSTOR 27537508.

--- (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-6041-9.

--- (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

--- (1987). Molinaro, Matie; McLuhan, Corinne; Toye, William (eds.). Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-540594-1.

McLuhan, Marshall; Fiore, Quentin (1967). The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.

--- ​ (2008) [1967]. The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. London: Penguin.

McLuhan, Marshall; Watson, Wilfred (1970). From Cliché to Archetype. New York: Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-33093-5.

Mullen, Megan (2006). "Coming to Terms with the Future He Foresaw: Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media". Technology and Culture. 47 (2): 373-380. doi:10.1353/tech.2006.0143. ISSN 1097-3729. JSTOR 40061070. Archived from the original on November 5, 2011.

Prins, Harald E. L.; Bishop, John (2002). "Edmund Carpenter: Explorations in Media & Anthropology" (PDF). Visual Anthropology Review. 17 (2): 110-140. doi:10.1525/var.2001.17.2.110. ISSN 1548-7458.

Rothenberg, Randall (1994). Where the Suckers Moon: The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign. New York: Vintage Books.

Strate, Lance (2012). "Educational Reform and the Formalization of the Field of Media Ecology". International Journal of McLuhan Studies. 2. ISBN 978-84-939995-9-9.

Strauss, Neil (2011). Everybody Loves You When You're Dead: Journeys into Fame and Madness. New York: HarperCollins.

Theall, Donald F. (2001). The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 978-0-7735-6882-2.

--- (2002). "McLuhan's Canadian Sense of Space, Time and Tactility". Journal of Canadian Studies. 37 (3): 251-257. doi:10.3138/jcs.37.3.251. ISSN 1911-0251.

Benedetti, Paul; DeHart, Nancy (1997). Forward Through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan. Boston: MIT Press.

Bobbitt, David (2011). "Teaching McLuhan: Understanding Understanding Media". Enculturation.

Cavell, Richard (2002). McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Daniel, Jeff (August 10, 1997). "McLuhan's Two Messengers: Maurice McNamee and Walter Ong; World-Class Interpreters of His Ideas". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. p. 4C.

Federman, Mark (2003). McLuhan for Managers: New Tools for New Thinking. Viking Canada.

Finkelstein, Sidney (1968). Sense and Nonsense of McLuhan. New York: International Publishers.

Flahiff, F. T. (2005). Always Someone to Kill the Doves: A Life of Sheila Watson. Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest Press.

Gasher, Mike; Skinner, David; Lorimer, Rowland (2016). Mass Communication in Canada (8th ed.). Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press.

Havers, Grant N. (2014). "Marshall McLuhan and the Machiavellian Use of Religious Violence". In Ricci, Gabriel R. (ed.). Faith, War, and Violence. Religion and Public Life. 39. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. pp. 179-203. ISBN 978-1-4128-5499-3. ISSN 1083-2270.

Logan, Robert K. (2016). Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan (2nd ed.). New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

McCutcheon, Mark A. (2018). The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein and the Discourse of Technology (PDF). AU Press. ISBN 978-1-771-99224-4.

Ong, Walter J. (1970). "Review of The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962, Edited by Eugene McNamara". Criticism. 12 (3): 244-251. ISSN 1536-0342. JSTOR 23098558.

(1981). "McLuhan as Teacher: The Future Is a Thing of the Past". Journal of Communication. 31 (3): 129-135. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.1981.tb00436.x. ISSN 1460-2466.

Prins, Harald E. L.; Bishop, John (2007). "Edmund Carpenter: A Trickster's Explorations of Culture & Media". In Engelbrecht, Beate (ed.). Memories of the Origins of Ethnographic Film. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. pp. 207-245.

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Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian philosopher. His work is one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, McLuhan studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge.

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Check out book ‘Gramophone, Film, Typewriter’ (1986)

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The eclectic German post-structuralist philosopher and media theorist Friedrich Kittler, who has died aged 68, once wrote: "We are the subjects of gadgets and instruments of mechanical data processing." He was entirely serious. In his extraordinary book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) he argued that "those early and seemingly harmless machines capable of storing and therefore separating sounds, sights and writing ushered in a technologising of information".

Later technologies - the internet in particular - further extended technology's domination over us. He told one interviewer in 2006 that the internet hardly promotes human communication: "The development of the internet has more to do with human beings becoming a reflection of their technologies ... after all, it is we who adapt to the machine. The machine does not adapt to us."

Kittler, sometimes dubbed the "Derrida of the digital age", thus tapped into humanity's fear of being neutralised by its own tools. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter was written in the wake of such science-fiction fantasies as William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) and the first Terminator movie in which übercyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger travelled back in time to destroy humanity. Kittler's point was not that machines will exterminate us; rather that we are deluded to consider ourselves masters of our technological domain.

Hegel had suggested that the march of history culminated with absolute human knowledge and freedom. Kittler turned that philosophy on its head. His biographer Geoffrey Winthrop-Young argued that Kittler's project was to trace "not the triumphal emergence of humanity into freedom, but our exit from the fulsome enjoyment of our taste for ourselves that assigns humanity a place to which it has no right".

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter began bracingly: "Media determine our situation." Later Kittler added: "What remains of people is what media can store and communicate." Kittler took issue with the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who saw media machines as human prostheses that extended our domination of space and time. He countered: "Media are not pseudopods for extending the human body. They follow the logic of escalation that leaves us and written history behind it."

That logic of escalation was best understood, for Kittler, by considering military innovation. He was struck, for instance, by how Nazi military experiments spurred Alan Turing's second world war code-breaking work at Bletchley Park and thus hastened the development of the computer. Kittler argued that technology changed the nature of war: "It has become clear that real wars are fought not for people or fatherlands, but take place between different media, information technologies, data flows."

Kittler's focus on military innovation was probably in part prompted by the fact that he had been a war baby, born in the aftermath of the Nazis' defeat at Stalingrad. He was born in Rochlitz, Saxony, and one of his earliest memories was seeing from a distance Dresden ablaze, bombed in February 1945 by the allies. He also recalled being frequently taken by his mother to a Baltic island to visit the site where Hitler's V2 rockets had been developed. "What fascinated me about these sites and rockets," he once said, "was that no one said a word about them. And yet the traces of this particular aspect of the German military industrial complex, which were located on a very romantic and idyllic island so as not to be seen, were everywhere."

His parents left East Germany in 1958 to enable Kittler to get the best German university education possible. "This experience probably explains why I was such a keen student at university and why this separated me to some extent from my many friends." From 1963 to 1972 he studied German literature, Romance philology and philosophy at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. The aura of Martin Heidegger, the Nazi-supporting philosopher and the university's former rector, hung over the town. Kittler, who wrote his PhD on the poet Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, was not beyond Heidegger's shadow. He took from Heidegger the idea that we are at risk of being eclipsed by technology.

At Freiburg, he also became one of the first German intellectuals to appreciate the French post-structuralist thinkers Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Like Foucault, Kittler diagnosed the present through what he called discourse analysis - the excavation of the underlying structure of human practices. But in Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1985), Kittler went beyond Foucault. For him, Foucault had focused on the production of discourses, not the channels through which discourses were received. Kittler sought to remedy this.

But what is a discourse network? Kittler defined it thus: "The network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data." A discourse network was therefore a discourse of institutional power and of selection. The original German term for this, Aufschreibesysteme, was coined by the German judge Daniel Schreber, whose 1903 memoirs of his psychotic illness led to a book-length case study by Freud and influenced Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972). Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Kittler's thesis for his "habilitation", conferring the right to lecture in German universities, was inspired by the notion that "the madman [ie Schreber] sought to imply that everything he did and said within the asylum was written down or recorded immediately and that there was nothing anyone could do to avoid it being written down, sometimes by good angels and occasionally by bad angels". Kittler joked that it was unusual for a German intellectual to get tenure by being inspired by a madman's text.

Unlike Foucault, or indeed other leading media theorists such as Jean Baudrillard or Paul Virilio, Kittler steeped himself in physics, engineering, optics, the science of fibre-optic cables, and even wrote computer code - arguably gaining a more profound insight into media than his contemporaries.

Kittler presented himself in interviews as a shy and socially awkward man - one who kept his personal life private, revealing only what impinged on his work. We know that he was married, for instance, because he reported that his interest in Lacan caused arguments with his wife "as she wished to remain professionally faithful to Freud". That was his first wife, Erika Kittler, with whom he remained on good terms after their divorce.

Winthrop-Young records that while others among Germany's Achtundsechziger (the students of 1968) were marching in the streets, Kittler stayed at home listening to Beatles and Pink Floyd LPs out of, as he said, "50% laziness and 50% conservatism".

On one occasion, he saw a laughing Foucault surrounded by admirers during an interval at the legendary Boulez-Chéreau 1976 Bayreuth production of Wagner's Ring but, although Kittler said he used to await the publication of the French thinker's books as impatiently as "rock LPs or the approaching steps of a lover", he remained frozen, unable to approach his idol.

But doubtless Kittler attended Bayreuth for opera rather than celebrity worship. Indeed, his lifelong obsession with music was such that the most important event of his undergraduate years was attending a lecture by György Ligeti. Later, he wrote several essays for Bayreuth festival productions of Wagner. By the time of his death, one volume of a projected monumental tetralogy on music and mathematics had been published.

Arguably, Pink Floyd meant more to him than Foucault. In his 1993 book Dracula's Legacy, he meticulously analysed the band's song Brain Damage from the 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon, arguing that its three verses move from mono to stereo to "maddening" surround sound - the hi-tech version of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk. According to admirers, he would have liked to have played in the band.

An appealingly perverse, cross-disciplinary and radical thinker who taught widely in Germany and the US, Kittler was appointed professor of media aesthetics at Humboldt University, Berlin, in 1993. After an academic career lasting more than 30 years, during which he wrote and edited more than two dozen books, he retired in 2008, remaining Humboldt's guest professor in media philosophy. He is survived by his second wife, Susanne Holl, and his brother Wolf.

* Friedrich Adolf Kittler, literary scholar and media theorist, born 12 June 1943; died 18 October 2011

* Interview by Andreas Rosenfelder

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The eclectic German post-structuralist philosopher and media theorist Friedrich Kittler, who has died aged 68, once wrote: "We are the subjects of gadgets and instruments of mechanical data processing." He was entirely serious. In his extraordinary book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) he argued that "those early and seemingly harmless machines capable of storing and therefore separating sounds, sights and writing ushered in a technologising of information".

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An Oak Tree is a conceptual work of art created by Michael Craig-Martin in 1973. The piece, described as being an oak tree, is installed in two units - a pristine installation of a glass of water on a glass shelf on metal brackets 253 centimetres above the ground, and a text mounted on the wall. When first exhibited, the text was given as a handout.

The text takes the form of a Q&A about the artwork, in which Craig-Martin describes changing "a glass of water into a full-grown oak tree without altering the accidents of the glass of water," and explains that "the actual oak tree is physically present but in the form of the glass of water." Craig-Martin considered "the work of art in such a way as to reveal its single basic and essential element, belief that is the confident faith of the artist in his capacity to speak and the willing faith of the viewer in accepting what he has to say".

The Catholic Herald compared the work to the Roman Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation and the Real Presence.

The original is in the National Gallery of Australia, and an artist's copy is on loan to the Tate gallery.

An Oak Tree is a work of art created by Michael Craig-Martin in 1973, and is now exhibited with the accompanying text, originally issued as a leaflet. The text is in red print on white; the object is a French Duralex glass, which contains water to a level stipulated by the artist and which is located on a glass shelf, whose ideal height is 253 centimetres with matte grey-painted brackets screwed to the wall. The text is behind glass and is fixed to the wall with four bolts. Craig-Martin has stressed that the components should maintain a pristine appearance and in the event of deterioration, the brackets should be resprayed and the glass and shelf even replaced.

The text contains a semiotic argument in the form of questions and answers, which explain that it is not a glass of water, but "a full-grown oak tree," created "without altering the accidents of the glass of water." The text defines accidents as "The colour, feel, weight, size...". The text includes the statement "It's not a symbol. I have changed the physical substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree. I didn't change its appearance. The actual oak tree is physically present, but in the form of a glass of water." and "It would no longer be accurate to call it a glass of water. One could call it anything one wished but that would not alter the fact that it is an oak tree."

The impossible is deliberately asserted and the text examines the impossibility of the assertion, which uses the idea of transubstantiation in the same way as the Catholic religious belief that bread and wine, while maintaining an unchanged appearance, are changed into Christ's body and blood. Craig-Martin has a Catholic background and was an altar boy. He sees belief of both artist and viewer as having a key place in art, and that in An Oak Tree he had "deconstructed the work of art in such a way as to reveal its single basic and essential element", namely this belief.

An Oak Tree was a turning point in his artistic development: prior to it his concern had been deconstruction, and afterwards he was "trying to put the pieces together again." Subsequently, using the rationale of Marcel Duchamp's , he worked with drawings of utilitarian objects and flat areas of colour, with the goal of discarding meaning, which is "both persistent and unstable", although he states that people's need to create associations and meanings makes this goal unachievable.

An Oak Tree was first shown in an exhibition of Craig-Martin's work at the Rowan Gallery, off Bond Street, London, in 1974. Many visitors assumed that Craig-Martin was playing the ultimate con trick, as there seemed no evidence of work on display in the white-walled gallery. However, high up on a wall was the glass of water and the glass shelf of the work An Oak Tree. At this time the accompanying text was available as a leaflet.

The original was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra in 1977; an artist's copy is on loan to the Tate gallery in London from a private collection.

Craig-Martin said, " An Oak Tree has had a great life as an artwork. It is nearly always on view somewhere, and has been shown all over the world-the text has been translated into at least 20 languages. The only place it has never been shown is in the US."

It was once barred by Australian officials from entering the country as "vegetation". Craig-Martin was forced to inform them that it was really a glass of water. He said, "It was of course a wonderfully funny incident, particularly because it extended into 'real life' the discussion about belief and doubt, and fact and fiction I was addressing in the work."

An Oak Tree is a celebrated artwork, which the Irish Museum of Modern Art says is now recognised as a turning point in the development of conceptual art, although initially it was met with surprise, if not scorn. It has been described as "questioning the nature of reality."

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that "to fail to consider it a great work of art because it fails to give rise to a distinctively aesthetic kind of pleasure does not actually undermine the project at all. Conceptual art, as we now know, is about conveying meaning through a vehicular medium, and not to provide its audience with experiences of, say, beauty. Any attack on this fundamental feature of conceptual art targets not so much an individual work of art but rather finds fault with the artistic tradition itself."

In his Richard Dimbleby Lecture on 23 November 2000, Sir Nicholas Serota said, "We may not 'like' Craig-Martin's work, but it certainly reminds us that the appreciation of all art involves an act of faith comparable to the belief that, through transubstantiation, the bread and wine of Holy Communion become the body and blood of Christ."

Damien Hirst said, "That piece is, I think, the greatest piece of conceptual sculpture, I still can't get it out of my head." Richard Cork called its original display in 1974 "one of the most challenging moments" of contemporary art.

Anthony Caro said, "Some of the stuff that's called art is just damned stupid. I mean, 'That glass of water's an oak tree' kind of thing." Art critic David Lee and the founders of the Stuckism art movement, Billy Childish and Charles Thomson also oppose it.

In response to Nigel Gosling's praise of the work, Giles Auty said, "How would the self-same critic react if, on ordering oak planks for an outhouse, he were sent instead a bucketful of water? Would he gently muse on 'the subtle and obscure waters of identity'-or make immediate reflections on the mental wellbeing of his timber suppliers?" Brian Sewell asked why "the miracle" was "a work of art fit only for a gallery, and not some thaumaturgical object venerated in a church?"

Michael Daley wrote that the work was "not a hard-won, skilful depiction of a glass and a shelf" and that for twenty years "instead of ridiculing the self-deluding, pretentious offerings of Craig-Martin and his like, critics fawned and eulogised."

Tim Crouch has written and performed an eponymous play to critical acclaim in New York and London. The Little Artists (John Cake and Darren Neave) feature a Lego version in "Art Craziest Nation". An Oak Tree is quoted as an important influence in Ramsey Dukes' article Four Glasses of Water first published in The Journal for the Academic Study of Magic Issue 2, 2004.

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An Oak Tree is a conceptual work of art created by Michael Craig-Martin in 1973. The piece, described as being an oak tree, is installed in two units - a pristine installation of a glass of water on a glass shelf on metal brackets 253 centimetres above the ground, and a text mounted on the wall.

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Video, repetition of phrases and actions

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This website is for personal and/or educational use only. No texts or images of any artwork may be reproduced or downloaded without the express written permission of the Ed Ruscha Catalogue Raisonné. All artworks by Ed Ruscha are copyright protected under © Edward J. Ruscha IV.

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This website is for personal and/or educational use only. No texts or images of any artwork may be reproduced or downloaded without the express written permission of the Ed Ruscha Catalogue Raisonné. All artworks by Ed Ruscha are copyright protected under © Edward J. Ruscha IV.

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"Lissitzky believed that art and design could communicate in a nation where much of the population was illiterate. He aimed to establish a visual language using shape and color instead of letterforms; in his famous political poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, geometric shapes tell the story of the revolutionaries shattering the establishment."

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A link to a previous Padlet of resources that Annabel has made in relation to 'uncreative writing'

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Annabel Frearson's website (needs updating!)

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Annabel Frearson's website (needs updating!)

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Also, the artist talk I gave last year at RSA can be watched here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/6587223/video/516253584

pw: Re@ding

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Mel Bochner - 57th Edition of the Carnegie International, October 2018 - March 2019 

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Mel Bochner - 57th Edition of the Carnegie International, October 2018 - March 2019 

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Barbara Kruger - Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground), 1989

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Barbara Kruger - Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground), 1989