Is the next Marshall McLuhan among us?
March 13th, 2008 |
I had an interesting Twitter conversation on this topic with Greg Turner. Someone had asked “What are you doing to bring the movement forward?” I thought this was a pompous, fatuous, ridiculous question. Movement. Please.
I said somewhat cynically that social media experts spend their time theorizing and pontificating because it’s easier than quantifying the business benefits of social media. Greg said, “Pontification now helps, three years down the road.”
My response: Is one of us the Marshall McLuhan of 2012?
As a journalism student in the 19X0s (decade deleted, but note previous century implied), I idolized McLuhan. I didn’t have the math skills to be a theoretical physicist, but a theoretical communicator, that worked for me. I remember one day driving on some country back road as my girlfriend read aloud from Understanding Media. We analyzed each sentence carefully, in scholarly fashion, showing due reverence for the man and his insights.
Looking back, McLuhan sounds an awful like the social media pundits of today. In Understanding Media, published in 1964, he wrote:
“Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.”
Sounds a bit like the premise of Friedman’s The World is Flat, published over 40 years later. I’m reluctant, however, to compare anyone writing or blogging today with McLuhan, because no one strikes me the same way McLuhan did. That may be because I am older and more cynical, and less willing to take such theoretical discussions seriously. Or maybe it’s still so early there’s a lot of nonsense being spewed.
Ours is a slow moving “industry,” despite the speed of communications we enjoy. I am sure PowerPoint for Dummies and the AP Stylebook currently each outsell all of McLuhan’s books combined. But I have to allow for the possibility that there are at least a couple of people among us who might be the next McLuhans.
Tags: marshall mcluhan, understanding media, social media pundits
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Pingback by links for 2008-03-14 « media mindshare: news media, technology & public relations — March 13, 2008 @ 7:41 pm
I think the reason anyone buys AP/CP stylebooks is the same as why people buy books by McLuhan. School, baby.
Let’s face it, McLuhan was nuts. That’s not to discredit anything he theorized. He was also brilliant, of course.
No one takes theory very seriously anymore. I wish we could all throw the text books out the window. It’s hard to theorize something modern. I shudder to think how what we’re working with now will be looked at when my kids go to university.
Comment by Rayanne Langdon — March 13, 2008 @ 10:44 pm
i invite you to look at my blog “A Model Media Ecologist” at http://www.robertkblechman.blogspot.com where I discuss McLuhan’s theories, among other topics, within the context of our current mediated environment.
I am currently working on a paper comparing McLuhans “Laws of the Media” with French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’s “Canonical Formula” which I will deliver at the 2008 Media Ecology Association Conference in Santa Clara CA this June. I have been posting bits and pieces of the paper on my blog and I invite comments and criticisms.
-Bob Blechman
Comment by Robert Blechman — March 14, 2008 @ 8:58 am
Joel, allow me to scare the hell out of you for one moment.
There won’t be another McLuhan. But there will be the Analects of McLuhan.
McLuhan operated at a time when you actually could sit down and THINK about this stuff. Ponder, work it over, and then apply it.
We’re too fast, the pace is insane, and most importantly, our standards are lower. Perfect tomorrow won’t beat passable today. And we don’t mind the motion of tinkering with the engine while the plane is in flight.
No — we’re going to have the Analects of McLuhan.
Most translations of the Art of War (Sun Tzu) have Master Sun’s philosophy as a backbone, and commentary from several disciples of his peppered around it. These commentators are leaders and generals that in some cases came eight centuries after General Sun. They applied his framework, and restated the philosophy in ways that met their own contemporary situations.
Now, the Analects of Confucius are similar. But imagine taking “The Art of War” and stripping away Sun Tzu’s part. You’re only left with the margin notes of his students. None of the original framework. (Analects means “fragments”.)
So — we’re going to have the Analects of McLuhan. Whiz-kids and thinkers who steal from his prescience, repackage it to the masses, and make a quick buck on ten units of dime-store philosophy. They’ll never even cite him. And in the future, the Collected Wisdom of (post)Modern Communications will be a haphazard dog’s breakfast of applied nonsense, Faux-Zen message theory, and over-specialized techie nonsense.
And we will have deserved it.
Comment by Ike — March 14, 2008 @ 12:55 pm
@Joel: Oh, they’ll cite him all right. And the Collected Wisdom of Modern Communications has always been a haphazard dog’s breakfast, at any given moment in history. For ideas to be popularized, they have to be packaged in ways that are accessible. Some of the more accessible versions are in fact “applied nonsense” (see my blog, The Connective, for a great example). But many philosophers openly admit to re-packaging, and the best of them openly cite their sources (Zizek to Lacan, Rand to Nietsche, etc.). I often cite McLuhan in my posts, as well as other theorists.
I do agree, however, that given the pace of change, we will not see someone quite like McLuhan. He hated the idea of even writing “serial” books, hence his poetic form. If McLuhan were around today, even he wouldn’t be the same McLuhan.
Comment by Eyal Sivan — September 23, 2008 @ 3:09 pm
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Comment by My Homepage — December 10, 2011 @ 12:32 am