McLuhan, Marshall

media theorist, professor at the University of Toronto, author of Understanding Media

(Vidéo) [ENG] Marshall McLuhan - Interview : The Medium is the message

Artesquieu · May 4, 2021 · partial coverage

• Marshall McLuhan
• the medium is the message
• hot and cool media
• television
• advertising
• identity
• rear-view mirror
• nostalgia
• media ecology
• charisma

Coverage note: full (about thirty-three minutes; YouTube auto-generated captions without punctuation; speakers in the audience are unnamed)

Core ideas

The medium is the message. Asked whether that leaves room for criticism of individual programmes, McLuhan says the telephone, radio or print are huge environments that affect everyone, whatever the content: "the effect of the program is incidental". Television "creates another form of awareness", one of involvement and subjectivity, whereas literacy is objective; he declines value judgements, which he finds too personal, and notes that "to read" originally means "to guess", so a good reader is a fast decision-maker. Advertising is "the folk art of the twentieth century" and a trap set for attention, as any art is; no criteria yet exist for popular arts (Shakespeare was vulgar entertainment in his day).

Identity, violence, dialogue. The quest for identity, he says, is always a violent quest of encounters and abrasion ("who am I? how much power can I exert?"), visible in heroes like Don Quixote, Flash Gordon and the bionic woman; with media power and "overkill" weaponry the alternative is dialogue. Sports such as cricket or baseball are controlled dramatisations of a society's typical violence and need an audience.

The rear-view mirror and nostalgia. Contrary to his old jibe, he says that in the rear-view mirror "you do not see what has gone past, you see what is coming": nostalgia (jeans, grandfather's overalls, the clown costume as an "international motley" of grievance) is the shape of things to come when people are stripped of private identities. He recommends teaching the hidden effects of media (electric speed pushes unconscious factors into consciousness) to achieve a "reasonable ecology" among them; he calls Joyce's Finnegans Wake a guide to media effects.

Replay, holograms, charisma, hemispheres. The instant replay and big screens invite awareness of process and "participation in replay"; television's image is an outpouring of resonating particles, "the eye as an ear"; the hologram is to television what rock is to hearing. Meditation boomed after television, an inward turn that Austen and Hawthorne saw in earlier forms; on politics, television does not allow interest in parties or policies and a candidate must have charisma, which means "looking like a lot of other people" (Nixon looked only like Nixon; Carter the all-American southern boy); Nixon's David Frost interviews were "a major actor in history playing himself". He says media get the content they deserve, and ends with the left-hemisphere (visual, linear, Euclidean, Western) versus right-hemisphere (acoustic, simultaneous, Eastern) distinction.

Excerpts