Conversation
Marshall McLuhan (September 24, 1976, age 65). The Carter-Ford debate was stupid
Today I was taking with Tom Brokow and Ed Newman on the Today Show. They were asking me about yesterday’s abominable debate between Ford and Carter. I watched the debate on black & white and two kinds of colour, CBS colour and NBC colour. What was abominable about the debate is that it was stupid. It was all wrong for TV. TV is a cool medium and the debate form is hot. On TV audience’s attention spans are limited to 4 to 5 minutes, the debate went on for 90 minutes. The TV couldn’t take it. The medium rebelled against the bloody message. Technically, I think it was an amplifier that blew up putting an end to the fiasco.
Me (January 2010, age 57). Who’s got the “corporate” image?
You can tell that Brokow and Newman aren’t quite sure whether to take McLuhan seriously or not. For example, when McLuhan says he watched the debate on TV in two kinds of colour, CBS and NBC, you can feel their eyebrows go up. Also, like hot and cool the terms McLuhan uses causes him problems. Carter, McLuhan says, has a “corporate” image. Brokow objects, surely not. McLuhan then tries to explain that by corporate he means not “business” or “industry” but “public” as opposed to “private.”
In McLuhan’s thinking corporate works better on TV. Private works better on radio or print media. Tribal man he teaches is “corporate” not private. He isn’t I think entirely successful in his chat with Brokow and Newman in part because his terms raise barriers to their understanding of him.
One observation McLuhan makes that they both dismiss is worth thinking about. Why is it, says McLuhan, that the candidates – Carter and Ford – come off as much less authoritative and personable than the journalists who are questioning them? Brokow and Newman say it’s because questioners typically have the advantage. But is it merely this? Look at the interview. Isn’t it clear Brokow and Newman come off looking much stronger and more authoritative than McLuhan? Why? Perhaps because Brokow and Newman are more corporate than McLuhan.
Do you agree that Carter, Brokow and Newman look more corporate than Ford and McLuhan? What could McLuhan do to come across better on TV?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Tags: Communications, Conversation, Hot and cool media, Medium is the message, Rhetoric, Technology, Understanding media
Marshall McLuhan (Summer 1968, age 57). You can give Mailer a compliment but he hasn’t the wit to accept it
That chat I had with Norman Mailer on the CBC’s TV program, “The Summer Way,” is still on my mind, largely because despite the title of the program, “Meeting of Minds,” there was so little meeting of minds. Here’s how it went. I’d make an observation. (Violence is necessary to the formation of identity.) He’d say he didn’t like it. So I made another observation, (the new electronic environment has abolished nature) and he’d say he didn’t like that and so it went. I don’t have a problem with his liking or not liking my ideas. But I don’t think liking or not liking is productive. In fact I’m convinced it’s counter-productive. Liking and not liking, which is so often masked as truth-seeking interferes as I said yesterday with just observation of the world.
I decided to try a new tactic. Norman, I said, you will be delighted with this – the artist is the only one who is able to face the present and see it for what it is. He alone has the ability to tell us what is happening. Poor Mailer was not delighted.
Me (December 2009, age 57). Marshall McLuhan: Artist or scientist?
At this point, the moderator of the meeting, Ken Lefolii, stepped in and asked McLuhan whether he thought of himself as an artist or a scientist. McLuhan’s answer was no, he didn’t think of himself as an artist or a scientist. He said he rejected these categories as unhelpful, fragmenting, nineteenth century devices, and in particular he implied they were not helpful for thinking about him as an observer of the unfolding electric 20th century world. McLuhan’s answer then in effect was “I refuse to be lumped in a category.”
But of those two boxes, artist and scientist, he seems to fit most easily into the artist category. Scientists he said are in the matching game. Matching ideas about the world with evidence of the world. Artists are in the breakthrough game. Looking for new patterns in the world. McLuhan tries his hand at the matching game in his observations about media. For example, radio is visual, TV is tactile and children who watch TV look at the world from an average distance of 4’6”and therefore are hunters not readers. But this science is not the science you met in High School. The matching is often difficult to separate from assertion.
What category would you place yourself? Artist or scientist? What about the people closest to you? Family, friends, colleagues? Should businesses be in the matching game or the breakthrough game?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Tags: Art, Communications, Conversation, Science
Marshall McLuhan (November 14, 1980, age 69). How much are my papers worth?
I’ve had a lot of time to think about my life lately. This damn stroke has taken my voice away. Can’t read, can’t write, can’t speak. Things can get pretty bleak. I had a thought the other day. Unfortunately I can’t tell anybody about it. Well, I can tell you. I wonder how much money Corinne will be able to get for my books and papers. I have a lot of stuff here. Why the letters from Pierre Elliot Trudeau alone should be worth a fortune. And I have letters from everyone – Hubert Humphrey, Bucky Fuller, Duke Ellington, Peter Drucker – you name’em.
Me (December 2009, age 57). A cool million
In July I spoke with Nicholas Olsberg about his experience valuing McLuhan’s papers (books, letters, photographs, documents, articles) for Corinne McLuhan and the McLuhan family after Marshall McLuhan’s death in December 1980. He wrote me to explain that “The US offer I brought in for McLuhan in I think late 1982 was close to 1 million in Canadian dollars. The prime minister’s office – exercising its legal right to match the offer in cash and tax allowances – did so. I regret that it did not go to Buffalo, the US bidder, where it could have anchored a real program of continuing discourse and research that the national archives [in Ottawa] has no mandate or resources to pursue – and with no investment in the papers no moral compulsion to do so [although] I like what they have on the website.”
Much to think about. (We are not done with this conversation)
How does McLuhan stack up against the papers of Canadian-born idea people like Northrop Frye, John Kenneth Galbraith, or Hugh MacLennan? Where do you think McLuhan’s papers should have gone? Ottawa, Buffalo? Elsewhere?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Nicholas Olsberg, “Memoirs of a Man I Never Met. “ Art and Architecture, issue number 3, 2002? pp 108-111.
Tags: Communications, Conversation, Education, Hot and cool media
Marshall (November 15, 1968, age 57). Playing at creativity
Eugene Schwartz is in charge of selling DEW-LINE newsletter. Here’s a game I had him make up for you to try. DEW-LINE of course refers to the Distant Early Warning system, Canada’s contribution to the heating up of the cold war. When the Russians fly their bombers over Falconbridge headed for Washington, Canada is to use its electronic eyes and ears to locate the Russian force and shout out to Uncle Sam that the nuclear payload’s on the way. That’s my job, metaphorically speaking, in the electric age with respect to the new electric media.
The game is played with a special deck of playing cards: the DEW-LINE Deck. Each card has written on it one of my probes or a favorite quotation. For example: 7 of clubs, “The silicon bosom is the thin edge of the trial balloon;” 5 of spades, “Propaganda is any culture in action (Jacques Ellul);” 3 of spades, “Fulton’s steamboat anticipated the miniskirt: we don’t have to wait for the wind any more.”
Here’s how you play. Step (1) Think of some personal or business problem. Step (2) Draw three cards from the deck. Step (3) Read what’s written on each card and see what ideas pop into your head. Top DEW-LINERS get their breakthroughs in thirty-seconds or less.”
Me (December 2009, age 57). Okay, Let’s play
Last Thursday night I paid a visit to Montreal’s Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA). The occasion was a party to celebrate the opening of a new show, Intermission, which is about speed and technology in the 1960s – Sputnik, NASA, the skateboard. Many interesting short films. Yet I could not then resist examining and now resist talking about McLuhan’s playing cards which were not part of the show but happened to be on display in a case near the entry to the show.
One of the cards displayed was the 9 of spades with the line about the silicon bosom. This remark was stimulated by a topless fashion show McLuhan saw in San Francisco in 1965. The show took place at the “Off-Broadway” in North Beach [Marshall McLuhan's sexual adventure]. He watched the show with Tom Wolfe, who was writing a profile article on him, Herb Caen, a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle, and two PR men Howard Gossage, and Dr. Gerald Feigen, who were determined to make McLuhan famous, which they did in part with this outing. According to Tom Wolfe, after the show was over, McLuhan called out to the mistress of ceremonies, who was fully clothed, that he had a line she could use in her spiel, the restaurant having just won a test court case in an obscenity suit. “You can say, [McLuhan said] … The topless waitress is the opening wedge of the trial balloon.” According to Caen what McLuhan said was “To mix a metaphor, it [the trial] was the thin edge of the trial balloons.” And Caen went on to comment “I’m sorry to report this, but it’s a fact that he [McLuhan] tittered at his own remark.”
What role Marshall McLuhan actually played in the development of the DEW-LINE deck and game is not clear. Philip Marchand, says that McLuhan wrote “the text” printed on each card. But whether McLuhan selected each text or simply okayed the end result, as he did for example in the making of the Medium is the Massage, is unclear.
No matter. Let’s play the game. My problem. How to end this post. My solution: Move to the questions, one for each card noted above.
What is the propaganda in action in cultures with topless lunches?Was McLuhan a legman or a breast man? If the topless waitress is the opening wedge in the trial balloon, where to further mix the metaphor does, and has, the slippery slope led to?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: the medium and the messenger, 1989, p. 227.
Tom Wolfe, “What If He’s Right,” reprinted in The Pump House Gang. 1968, pp. 163-166.
Tags: Advertising, American mind, Communications, Conversation, Creating, Culture, Hot and cool media, Technology
Marshall McLuhan (November 20, 1967, age 56). What I would do
There is a parlor game Corinne likes to play called “Second time around.” Everyone has to answer the question, “If you could live your life over again what would you do differently?” Prizes go to the person who answers the question most honestly and most entertainingly. I did not win. My marks for honesty were credible but my marks for entertainment were as Mr. Jed Clampett would say on The Beverly Hillbillies “pitiful.”
I said I would do everything I did the first time around plus I’d do more, much more. My biggest regret, you see, is that I have so many projects now in various stages of incompletion. And I’m afraid with this operation coming up that I’ll never complete them. Corinne said I was being a downer that I was being too hard on myself, but I think not.
Me (November 2009, age 57). The dangerous thrill of discovering new things
Marshall McLuhan toyed with many ideas and started many projects he never completed. For example, he spent a great deal of time making notes and assembling files for the rewrite of his Ph.D. thesis for publication as a book, and his study The Laws of Media, which was to be his magnum opus on media. Both projects were eventually completed. But not until many years after his death, in 1980, and of course by other people, the thesis by his biographer Terry Gordon in 2006, 16 years later, and the Laws of Media by his son, Eric McLuhan in 1988, 8 years later.
I believe Marshall McLuhan left so much undone because he could not resist the lure, the thrill of discovering new things. The constant pursuit of the new stopped him from getting things done. This is a temptation I know that I also am suffering from myself. Right now I have 12 projects on the go, five of which have to do with McLuhan, this blog being one of them. I don’t have time to do anything more over the next year, yet new ideas come to me and I’m tempted to run after them. Marshall McLuhan is a great teacher. The fool it is said learns from his own mistakes, the wise man learns from the mistakes of others. Thank you Marshall.
If you could live your life over again what would you do differently? (Remember marks go for honesty and entertainment.)
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger, 1989. P. 223-247.
Tags: Conversation, Education, Genius, History, Learning, Listening, Regrets, Thinking
Marshall McLuhan (1960, age 48). The telephone blinds us to its power
The other day Everett Munro, a businessman here in Toronto, and one of my leading fans in the Hogtown business community, spoke to me about a problem he was having. Normally he said, “speaking to my boss is not a problem. But whenever we speak on the phone I’m gripped by fear. My voice shakes and I have difficulty breathing. I don’t understand it. It seems so irrational. I actually like my boss. We get along. Sure he’s demanding. Wants things right and wants them right now. But I’m the same way with the guys who work for me. Is there anything I can do to stop this? It’s driving me crazy.”
I was able to set him right. “Your problem, I said, “Is that you do not realize the power of the telephone. The telephone is such an intense auditory experience that it blacks out the visual. It blinds our power to see. You’ve got to work to involve the other senses, to counteract the power it’s having on the balance of your senses. Here’s the bottom line. Try to visualize to picture your boss when you’re speaking to him.”
Me (November 2009, age 57). What if he’s right?
This story is told by Philip Marchand in his 1989 biography of McLuhan. It is difficult to tell what Marchand himself thinks of the advice McLuhan gave to the nervous businessman. He writes matter-of-factly that Marshall McLuhan’s advice “doubtless would have sounded farfetched to many people, but the businessman tried it and it worked.” But we are left wondering whether McLuhan’s advice is really all that useful or is it actually something of a scam. Something that appeared to help but in actual fact was just a coincidence, or a placebo.
This is the story, however, that stimulated my own fascination with McLuhan. For like the nervous businessman I often found myself feeling nervous speaking to people on business calls. Curious, I tried McLuhan’s suggestion, and I found that it worked.
Does McLuhan’s advice sound far-fetched to you? Do you ever find yourself feeling nervous speaking on the telephone? Why don’t you try McLuhan’s suggestion too and let me know what happens? What have you got to lose?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger, 1989. P. 150.
Tags: Acoustic, Communications, Conversation, Listening, Relationship, Technology
Marshall McLuhan (April, 1980, age 79). Listen to what I’m saying
Ah. Yes. Err. April is the cruelest month.
Me (October 2009, age 57). Here is what I hear
On September 26, 1979 Marshall McLuhan had a stroke. The stroke took away his power to speak, read, and write. All he could say were forced short words like ah, yes, no, and oh boy. Seven months later he’s in his house with his friend Patrick Watson and out comes this bit of poetry. It’s from The Wasteland, by T. S. Eliot, “April is the cruellest month.” (…breeding/ Lilacs out of the deadland, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain.”)
What was he trying to say? Simply that it was April, and wet, and oh boy here’s a bit of poetry for you, Patrick? Perhaps but there is a deeper, darker message McLuhan might have been trying to send. He must have been extremely sad and frustrated by his inability to speak. Speaking was when he was most creative and when he was happiest. And remember McLuhan must have taught this poem in his modern’s course many times in the 50-odd years he’d taught at universities. He must have talked to his students many times about the dark epigraph to the Wasteland which ushers in the first line. The epigraph to the poem, is in Latin and Greek, and is from Petronius, The Satyricon. Fortunately my copy of the poem includes a translation of the passage. Briefly: The Sybil, a prophetess, is locked in an iron cage in the public square of the ancient Roman town of Cumae from where she delivers her prophecies. Young boys are throwing stones at her and taunting her. “Sybil, Sybil, what do you want?’ And she says “I want to die?” Did McLuhan cry? Was he emotional? We don’t know. When I interviewed Patrick Watson about this, he told me that he didn’t remember.
Do you know anyone who suffered a stroke like Marshall McLuhan did? How did they communicate with other people? What do you think McLuhan was trying to say?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Selected and edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 546-547.
T.S. Eliot. The Wasteland
Tags: Communications, Conversation
Marshall McLuhan (1967, age 55). Read to learn (continued)
Today my students did their oral exam on books I asked them to select from my reading list. (Here are a reminder of the books on that list: Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, 1965; E.T. Hall, The Silent Language, 1959, and A.P. Usher. The History of Mechanical Inventions, 1929; 1954.)
Yesterday, recall, when they asked me what to expect I told them: (1) we’d start at A and go from there; and (2) Don’t tell me what’s in the book, I’ve read it. Tell me what you think now that you’ve read it. Then we can talk about new things instead of old things. Most of them succeeded in telling me something that they learned. As a result, joy springs eternal, we spent most of the class talking about new things rather than old things. And they found out what I meant by we’ll start at A and go from there. The first student who volunteered to be examined was given a grade of A. Enthusiasm and courage deserve to be rewarded.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). Learn to read (continued)
Here is another example of reading by Marshall’s Rules. The book I will have a go at here is Abbot Payson Usher’s A History of Mechanical Inventions. Step 1 summarize the idea. Step 2 talk about what you’ve learned from it.
Step 1. In Chapter IV, The Emergence of Novelty in Thought and Action, Usher asks the question “Where do new ideas come from? He argues that what needs to be explained is not the final eureka of the long chain of thinking in the creation of a new idea (gold displaces a volume of water precisely equal to its mass), but the first weak groping for the new (gold is very heavy). What accounts for this initial weak groping is explained by previous writers as a result of (1) some external event that stimulates the thought (Newton’s apple), or (2) the mysteries of the sub-conscious. This, he says, is not a good explanation. But as yet he doesn’t have a better idea. Except he does underline this idea: If the world was a closed system says eventually all the new ideas possible to create by playing around with things – that is by experimentation, would eventually get created. And then invention would cease.
Step 2. New ideas appear every day. Therefore either the closed system we live in (city, nation, culture) is very large, rich in variety, and complex, or we do not live in a closed system. Every new idea has the potential to break open a closed system.
Where do you get new ideas? Where in your view are new ideas needed most? Who are the greatest new idea creators today?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Abbot Payson Usher. A History of Mechanical Inventions. New York: Dover, [1929; 1954] 1988.
Tags: American mind, Books, Communications, Conversation, Education, Exam, Learning, Listening, Management education, Medium is the message, Reading, Relationship, Thinking
Marshall McLuhan (1967, age 55). Read to learn
Tomorrow I will give my students their oral exam on books I asked them to select from my reading list. Here are a few of the books on that list: Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, 1965; E.T. Hall, The Silent Language, 1959, and A.P. Usher. The History of Mechanical Inventions, 1929; 1954.
Today they asked me what to expect I told them: (1) we’d start at A and go from there; and (2) Don’t tell me what’s in the book, I’ve read it. Tell me what you think now that you’ve read it. Then we can talk about new things instead of old things.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). Learn to read
Marshall McLuhan was a master reader. He knew how to get to the heart of anything he read quickly and learn from it. And this power he tried to teach his students.
Can you and I learn to read like Marshall McLuhan? McLuhan, of course was a genius, so this may seem like a difficult thing to do. However, I do not think it is impossible. Here is my take on a book McLuhan refers to indirectly on his reading list: The Meaning of Meaning, by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards.
The trick is to follow the spirit of McLuhan’s advice. Don’t only summarize the book or piece of the book: “The relationship between words and ideas and ideas and things in the world is direct. But the relationship between words and things in the world is indirect. That is you can always find words to express your ideas and ideas to match the things we see in the world, but you cannot reach for words to describe things. This is impossible. The only thing you can do is reach for words to express your ideas about the description of things.”
The summary is necessary but it is not thinking, it is repeating. It is step 1. Go to step 2: Ask yourself what new thing you’ve learned from it. For example, I’ve learned that to reduce misunderstanding I need to take the shortest possible indirect route between my words and the real world I’m trying to talk about. The shortest possible indirect routes are through pictures (look at this), pointing at something (there it is), putting my finger on the thing (see) or describing the picture or thing in plain English (it’s a house).
The next time someone starts telling you word for word, image for image, about a book, movie, or magazine article do you think you could ask them not to repeat it to you but rather to tell you what they learned from it?
Having read this blog post will you ask yourself what you learned from it? If so, what did you learn from it?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan? Toronto: Stoddart, 1994, pp. 13 and Appendix A.
C.K. Ogden and I.A Richards, The Meaning of Meaning. Sixth edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and co. 1943.
Tags: American mind, Books, Communications, Conversation, Education, Exam, Learning, Listening, Management education, Medium is the message, Reading, Relationship, Thinking
Marshall McLuhan (July 1952, age 41). I go to coffee shops to talk
The coffee shop in the basement of the Royal Ontario Museum is conveniently located close to the English department and the department of Political Economy. This is my destination most week days at 4p.m. There I’m sure to find congenial company, economists Harold Innis and Tom Easterbrook, and anthropologist Ed Carpenter and one or two others. We go to talk.
Yesterday the subject of conversation was study, where it’s done and how and with what end in sight. In the ancient world and in the Middle Ages study was an oral and a social activity. Texts were read aloud and outdoors. With the advent of print study became a solitary indoor activity, a communion with books. And where better place to commune with books than in a library, surrounded by them.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). Today people go to coffee shops to study
What remains of the basement coffee shop in the Royal Ontario Museum – a gathering place for bus loads of public and high school students visiting the museum – that McLuhan talks about can still be visited by anyone who wants to have a look at the place where McLuhan talked his way into his first insights about the Gutenberg Era and Understanding Media.
Walk into any coffee shop today, Second Cup, Starbucks, what have you, and what do you see? Students. Studying. Heads down, tapping away on their computers, communing with the digital world. Study which was a solitary book-mediated activity has increasingly become a social electric-mediated activity. What they are studying is less interesting than the fact that they are studying and doing it outside the boundaries of their school, college, or university.
Parents: Where do your children study? What does it matter whether they study alone or together? Are there subjects that are better studied alone than together?
Students: Do you study in coffee shops? If so, why? Are there subjects you cannot study in a coffee shop?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
McLuhan, Marshall. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 231-232.
Tags: American mind, Books, Communications, Conversation, Culture, Education, Gutenberg Galaxy, Medium is the message, Reading, Rhetoric, Technology