Communication
Inviting, confronting, and ignoring criticism
Marshall McLuhan (July, 1948, age 37). Everybody’s a critic!
Ted Carpenter is a breath of fresh air. With him at St. Michael’s Toronto is getting less parochial with every passing second. Last night he had my darling wife Corinne in stitches at dinner. He was lecturing he told us at the university on the sexual practices of the natives of Polynesia. Apparently he upset the tender sensibilities of one of the more prudish co-eds in the class, and she walked out in disgust. “No need to hurry,” he shouted after her, “there’s plenty of time to book your ship to the islands.” Between giggles Corinne remarked that perhaps Ted was too hard on the girl. I looked over at him. “See Ted, everybody’s a critic.”
Me (February 2010, age 57): Perhaps not everybody. But there certainly were a lot!
Ted Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan met at Toronto in 1948. They became close friends and worked together closely on the study of media in the 1950s and most of the 1960s. Carpenter was known for his volubility, an ability to rub people the wrong way, and a wicked sense of humour – a teacher at a Catholic college he built up according to Phillip Marchand, “the largest collection of books on the devil and diabolism in Canada.” Not surprisingly, he and McLuhan developed a large number of enemies at the university. Anyone who has taught at a university knows this is not hard to do, but Carpenter and McLuhan seemed to have had a gift for it. One of Carpenter’s favorite gambits, for example, was that when an enemy came in the common room and a chair was open beside him he would catch the man’s eye and at the same time, slowly tip the chair over. McLuhan preferred to ignore his critics. “Come on Ted,” he used to say, “if this is what we’re up against, we’re destined for kudos.”
And, of course, they were. (More on McLuhan’s critics tomorrow.)
How do you deal with your critics? Head on like Carpenter? Or forget about them, like McLuhan?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Phillip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger, 1989, p. 124-125.
Opposites attract
Marshall McLuhan (February 7, 1960, age 50). Watch out for Mr. In Between.
Marshall, Corinne said to me at breakfast, things are not all black and white. I had simply said that telephone calls in this house must be strictly limited to no more than 2 minutes a call. She said that our two oldest girls, Teresa and Mary, were teenagers and that we must expect them to want to talk for far more than 2 minutes a call. I told her that of course she was right. Between black and white there is grey. But not everything is grey. I said that when it comes to intellectual discovery – and what can be more important than that – it is better to ignore grey entirely and see what makes the most sense, black or white? Corinne said what makes the most sense is the preservation of her sanity. I imagine what that means is that telephone calls will not be strictly limited to less than 2 minutes. Thank God – and believe me I do – I’ve got an office to escape to. After all, I’ve work to do.
Me (February 2010, age 57). Figure and ground.
Marshall McLuhan liked to view the world through the tension of opposites. Not black and white, with its suggestion of good and bad, but hot and cold, high definition and low definition, and, later, left brain and right brain, and figure and ground.
What he used to tell his students in the 1970s, I’m told, is that to truly understand a medium you must be able to look at it both as figure and ground at the same time. That is to see it for what it is, the senses it extends and how (figure) and for how the environment around it adapts and adjusts to its presence (ground). Which brings me to a question posed by Julien Smith, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Trust Agents, in a recent blog post: Can you both stand out (make an impression, cut a figure) and fit in (be accepted, blend into the ground) at the same time? The answer is yes. That’s what rhetoric is all about. To persuade you must stand out and fit in.
Do you try only to stand out or only to fit in? Or do you try to do both?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 286-287.
Media extend us
Marshall McLuhan (February 27, 1962, age 50). I thought it up.
Ed Hall says he got the idea that media are extensions of us, our bodies our minds, our spirits, from Bucky Fuller. I didn’t get it from anybody. It just hit me. But now that I’ve got it I see the idea everywhere. Blake put it this way – “If perceptive organs vary, Objects of Perception seem to vary: / If the perceptive organs close, their objects seem to close also.” In other words by extending the senses media vary our perceptions and as our perceptive organs vary and the objects of the world vary. O brave new world!
Me (February, 2010, age 57). What if he’s right?
Marshall McLuhan enjoyed the game of exploring the myriad ways media extend us and in so doing alter the way we see the world. Every part of us he thought was a perceptive organ.
What is Twitter an extension of? Our voice. A yell.
What is the calculator an extension of? Our fingers and toes.
What is PowerPoint an extension of? Our palms and sleeves where we used to make notes to remind us of things we didn’t want to forget.
What is the digital book an extension of?
What is the digital newspaper an extension of?
What is the digit an extension of?
Is this more than a parlor game? Does it really matter?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 286-287.
Look to the media
Marshall McLuhan (February 27, 1962, age 50). TV!
Every family’s got a drop-out, magazine’s like Life are in trouble, the auto industry is veering out of control, the textbook industry and our schools are being completely overhauled. Why do so few people see that these things and a great many more are directly attributable to the impact of TV!
TV is not the first medium to have entirely reshaped society and it will not be the last. But in many ways it is the most obvious. The book escaped me for years. I caught on to TV in seconds.
Me (February, 2010, age 57). What if he’s right?
Marshall McLuhan’s observation about TV suggests the connection between the rise of the internet and the decay of newspapers.
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! In Atlanta where I was early last month for a conference, the 5 star hotel I stayed in (thanks to the special deal the American Economic Association was able to arrange for its members) did not supply newspapers for its guests, as the big hotels do in Toronto. Their thinking being, I imagine that their guests would rather be on-line or in front of the TV. In Montreal the English language newspaper The Gazette is given away outside metro stations to commuters in the mornings and in the afternoons, but few appear to want to take a paper. Increasingly, the front page of the Gazette has become a showcase for advertisements, colour pictures and teasers about blogs and on-line stories. Some days, like last Monday, the lead story no longer leads on the front page.
The French seem to be lagging in the abandonment of the newspaper. The leading intellectual newspaper here is called Le Devoir. What English language daily would call itself Homework?
Are you more likely to get your news from TV, on-line, or from a newspaper? When the newspaper disappears, where will the radio morning shows get their stories?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
The Montreal Gazette, February 1, 2010.
Trying to sell Snow to sell the Galaxy
Marshall McLuhan (February 1, 1962, age 50). C.P. Snow’s the bloke!
My editor at U of Toronto press, a canny Scot, came up with a great idea for the dust jacket testimonial for The Gutenberg Galaxy of which I hope to see the page proofs in the coming weeks. We will get C.P. Snow – Sir Charles now – to write something complimentary. Turns out he, and Lady Snow, met Walter Ong – my former student – at Wesleyan University and they had a meeting of minds. How delightfully serendipitous are the ways of fate. As you may know we are both Cambridge men and individually represent the opposite divides of the Two Cultures he has banged on about to great effect and acclaim. The Gutenberg Galaxy is at heart about the making of the two cultures; two being one more than there was before the advent of printing. I hope he agrees. It will certainly make a world of difference to the sales of good old Galaxy if we can get the author of the Two Cultures to go to bat for me. Must go, I have a letter to write.
Me (January 2010, age 57). I don’t think Snow had a hard time saying no.
C.P. Snow did not write a phrase for the dust jacket of the Galaxy. As far as I have been able to learn he did not reply to McLuhan’s letter. In that letter McLuhan writes, somewhat obsequiously, “The Gutenberg Galaxy … undertakes, almost as a sequel to your Two Cultures, to explain the historical divergence of these two cultures, both before and since Gutenberg. I dreamed, therefore, of seeing a phrase of yours on the jacket.”
If Sir Charles bothered to read the page proofs of The Gutenberg Galaxy – assuming that McLuhan actually went to the trouble and expense of sending them to him as he promised in his letter - it is difficult to believe that Snow would have seen himself as a natural dust jacket testimonial writer for the book. The first two opening sentences alone I suspect would have had this plain speaking Yorkshire man shaking his head: “The present volume is in many respects complementary to The Singer of Tales by Albert B. Lord. Professor Lord has continued the work of Milman Parry, whose Homeric studies led him to consider how oral and written poetry naturally followed diverse patterns and functions.”
McLuhan might have found it crystal clear that Snow’s Two Cultures correspond to Lord and Parry’s “oral” and “written” “patterns and functions,” but I don’t think Snow would have found it either obvious or enlightening.
What was McLuhan thinking? That, of course, C. P. Snow would want to be a part of the Marshall McLuhan fan club? What should he have done differently? (I can think of quite a few things. For example I imagine the last thing Snow would have wanted was to see the page proofs to the Galaxy.) Perhaps the real lesson of this story is that McLuhan was at this time totally consumed with the ideas he was creating. What do you think?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 282-284.
Things change but we do not know it (continued)
Marshall McLuhan (November 18, 1961, age 50). The medium is invisible.
As I was saying no one sees the medium at work. It is invisible. It does its work on us and we go on differently, but do not see that everything has changed.
Me (January 2010, age 57). Another example?
PowerPoint has not only changed the world of work it has also dramatically changed the world of education. Consider this. Most lectures at universities – even in graduate school – are given using PowerPoint. Lecturers (or should I say PowerPointers) like it because they feel more in control of the lecture process. It gives them more confidence to have the slides at their command when they stand up to speak, say, for 1 to 2 hours in a large lecture hall. Students (the PowerPointed), however, also like it because it gives them more control over what they have to learn. How? PowerPoint typically reduces what students have to know for “the exam.” More and more, by tacit agreement between professor and student, what students are required to know is what is on the slides. And the slides reduce what students need to know. Conservatively, the maximum information you can reasonably get on a slide is 125 words. (Half the number of words you can fit on a single type-written, double-spaced 8½-by-11 inch page. But this is far in excess of the ideal of educational PowerPoint. The ideal is 5 to 7 bullet points each with no more than 5 to 7 words (The 5X5 rule or the 7X7 rule). The ideal reduces 125 words to 25 to 49 words a saving to students of 60.8 to 80 percent.
The medium of PowerPoint may be one of the more powerful and unseen forces that has driven the much-discussed decline in university education over the last generation. In education, unlike architecture or design, less may not be more.
Do you agree? Is PowerPoint enabling students to get by knowing less?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 280-281.