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.

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.

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

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.