Education
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.
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.
The practical side of Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan (January 4, 1961 age 49). The President needs me
I don’t know what our President would do without me. Claude Bissell that is, the President of dear old Toronto University, not Ike, the President of the United States, who by the way I do not like. Claude has asked me to give his advisory group of senior academics the benefit of my views on the changes in higher learning necessitated by the electric age. It pains me to think of the changes sweeping through our leather-patched, tweed-ridden, and chalk-dusty world of which this august body is totally oblivious. No matter, it is my duty to tell them what they do not know. In short they are obsolete. I wonder how they will take the news.
Me (January 2010, age 57). I wonder?
Claude Bissell was one of Marshall McLuhan’s great supporters at U. of T. Both were professors of English and had known each other since the late 1940s. Bissell is said to have woken up to the brilliance and rising celebrity of McLuhan shortly after he had become President of the university. He was surprised on a speaking tour of American universities when the first question he was asked after one presentation was not about the university but about McLuhan: Could he explain the new theories of Professor McLuhan? Toronto, he realized, had an asset the value of which he and the school was unaware. How Bissell’s senior academic advisory group reacted to McLuhan’s presentation is not known. However, I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at that meeting. The points McLuhan planned on making are almost certainly ones designed to raise the blood pressure of senior academics – even today – to dangerous levels. For example, he predicted that increases in information in the electric age will result in startling reversals of role for and within the university. For example: The ivory tower will become the city center. Students will become teachers. TV will replace the book in the curriculum.
This news – especially when presented in the opaque language of “changes in centre-margin roles” – McLuhan must have known would be met with considerable rolling of eyes and raising of brows among the assembled professors. And therefore it is understandable that at the same time as he agreed to Bissell’s request McLuhan also asked if he could make “an initial presentation to you” (that is Bissell.) For people who only know about Marshall McLuhan from the pages of Playboy, Wired, or Rolling Stone, this hard-headed, practical strategy will come as quite a shock. And even to those familiar with McLuhan’s books this may come as a shock. Marshall McLuhan the practical rhetorician? The sensible persuader? However easily forgotten, this is a part of McLuhan, too, and one from which we can all learn.
What presentation do you or someone you know have to make that would benefit by being preceded by an initial presentation to one or two key people?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan and George B. Leonard. “The Future of Education: the Class of 1989,” Look, February 21, 1967, pp. 23-25.
More on the Critics!
Marshall McLuhan (June 2, 1960, age 48). There’s no such thing as bad advertizing?
Yesterday I told you what Robert Fulford had to say about me in Maclean’s. I must say the man really does not get me. He is hung up as teenagers say on Euclidian space. It blinds him to the truth of the medium is the message. He says I’m repetitious. But I have to keep repeating myself because he does not get it. That is to say getting it is something he does not get. Get it?
Me (December 2009, age 57). More critiquing of the critics
Let us look now at the criticisms that can be found in the blurbs printed on the covers and dust jackets of the 4 copies of Understanding Media that I have on my McLuhan book shelf. There is more than a hint of criticism to be found there because McLuhan’s publishers knew controversy sells books.
Second printing, October, 1966, Signet Book, new American Library of Canada: “Understanding Media is the book that’s making history and hysteria- with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and the twentieth century. Marshall McLuhan is the new spokesman of the electronic age- the oracle whose revolutionary ideas have blasted an explosion of debate from academy to coffee house. [The publisher] “His critics are infuriated by his ideas ….” Richard Schickel, Harper’s.
Third printing, 1968, McGraw Hill, hard cover: “An infuriating book.” Commonweal.
First MIT Press edition, 1994, soft cover: “McLuhan’s theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate. … There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan’s work in the last few years …. Lewis H. Lapham revaluates McLuhan’s work in the light of the technological as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in the last part of this century.”
Critical edition, Ginko Press, hard cover, 2003: “Infuriating, brilliant and incoherent. “ Commonweal Review. “The medium is not the message.” Umberto Eco.
There is a recurrent idea in the blurbs. People are “infuriated” by the book. Why? Among other things Robert Fulford, whose criticism of McLuhan in Maclean’s set off this series of blogs on the criticism of Marshall McLuhan, presumably would say his arrogance is infuriating. (To be continued)
Is there anything in Understanding Media that you find infuriating? Tell me what it is and why it is infuriating.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for the is post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 300.
Critics!
Marshall McLuhan (June 1, 1960, age 48). There’s no such thing as bad advertizing?
That’s what they say, but having read what Robert Fulford had to say about me in Maclean’s, I’m beginning to have doubts. At the very least Fulford’s the exception that proves the rule. It’s actually amazing, as I told him myself, that he gets anything at all out of Understanding Media because he obviously doesn’t Understand Me. I have a theme that governs everything I write, namely that for 5,000 years western man thought in the way print taught him to. Splitting things up. Fragmenting the world. Analyzing. Putting things in order. Being logical and rational. Now, with the advent of the electric age, all this has changed. Welcome to the re-tribalized, acoustic, global village.
Me (December 2009, age 57). Critiquing the critics
Robert Fulford wrote that Understanding Media was “arrogant, sloppy, repetitious and brilliant.” A view which is both right and wrong headed. This perception of Understanding Media as a large dollop of error and held together by a drop of brilliance was a common response to McLuhan in the 1960s. (Around the same time, Richard Schickel wrote in Harper’s “his critics are infuriated by his ideas … but some think he has one of this continent’s most brilliant minds and that his theories foretell our real future.”) But it is not Fulford or Schickel’s 45-year old responses I want to talk about.
Let us consider some of the current critics of McLuhan, beginning with the writer of a recent blog, who I will not name. This critic wrote – I paraphrase to protect their anonymity- that 99 percent of what McLuhan wrote is bullshit, and the remaining 1 percent is pure genius. And that is all. They do not give an example of anything in McLuhan’s cannon they think is bullshit and explain why it is bullshit. Nor do they give an example of an idea of McLuhan’s that they think is brilliant and explain why it is brilliant. Remarkably, or perhaps unremarkably, this type of criticism of McLuhan is not unusual. In fact this is a fairly typical response to McLuhan on the internet: gossipy, intellectually lazy, and insulting.
(To be continued)
Can you give me an example of something you think is bullshit in Understanding Media and explain why it is bullshit. Also, and more challengingly, can you give me an example of one thing in the book besides “the medium is the message” or the world is becoming a “global village” you think is brilliant and explain why it is brilliant.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 300.
More on education at high speed
Marshall McLuhan (February 1960, age 48). The adolescent has been replaced by the teenager
Teachers are failing to teach because they insist on treating teenagers as if they were adolescents. (See Edgar Friedenberg’s fine book The Vanishing Adolescent.) Adolescent means the stage between childhood and adulthood. That stage no longer exists. Electronic media have abolished the adolescent. What we are left with is the teenager. An adult aged 13 to 19. I should know, several of them are underfoot at home. To paraphrase the familiar anecdote, take my teenager, please.
Me (December 2009, age 57). McLuhan underestimated the size of the problem
In The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman argued that the electronic age has not only abolished adolescence it has robbed children of a great deal of their childhood. In the middle ages children were treated as adults as soon as they could speak with fluency, say, age 6 to 8. The print revolution caused childhood to be extended and adolescence added on because of the extra demands learning to read placed on young people in addition to learning to speak. Today, Postman argues electric media have undone the work the print revolution did.
What does this mean for the understanding of schooling? Basically, the problems of the teenager – disaffection and disengagement with traditional class room teaching, dropping out, illiteracy - will be found increasingly among older children.
Why do people keep on insisting that children and teenagers be book-learned in the age of digital and social media? You can try to keep twitter out the classroom but can you keep the classroom out of twitter?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Neil Postman. The End of Education: Redefining the value of school. New York: Vintage Books, 1995; 1996.
Education at high speed
Marshall McLuhan (May 1959, age 47). Consumers are now producers
As I was saying yesterday my efforts to enlighten the Winnipeg Ad and Sales Club about the new business rules in our electronic age were not entirely successful. If the only constant today is change, I told them, you will remember, it’s obvious that at the high speeds we are living at everyone is switching roles to keep up. This is not a prediction it is an observation. Just as producers are becoming consumers, the corollary is that consumers are becoming producers. They gave me a puzzled look. So I gave them something else to be puzzled about. What I asked do Alexander the Great and Winnie the Pooh have in common? Give up? They both have the same middle name.
Me (December 2009, age 57). What about in education?
“A lot of education,” says the writer of a letter to the editor of the Montreal Gazette, “takes place outside of school, and much it is self directed.” (Wednesday, December 16, 2009.) Marshall McLuhan would have agreed that most education takes place outside school, but I believe he would have disagreed with the idea that it is self-directed. In fact it is media-directed. The difference is profound and if true disturbing. (We continue the examination of education tomorrow. Hang on to your mortar boards.)
If most education today takes place outside the classroom, what is the content of the current curriculum? Who or what sets the curriculum? What do you think is the greatest difference between the education that goes on today inside and outside the class room?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 252-255.
A Fitting Memorial?
Marshall McLuhan (March, 1970, age 58). The Coach House!
Now that I have The Coach House I don’t think I will ever be happy anywhere else. Unfortunately it seems I’m booked to be everywhere else this year. Thanks to my assistant Margaret Stewart’s help here is the full list of destinations: “the Bahamas [no, it will not better there], Washington, New York [no, I do not love NY), Montreal, Greece, St. Louis, Ottawa, and San Francisco [no, I will not leave my heart there].” On top of this more brain problems. The Dr Barnett has given me these blood thinners to take. Well I’ll take them, if I remember to. Don’t want a stroke. But no more operations. Look what happened last time. I’ve got to keep going, even if I have to go away to do it. Today, I don’t mind telling you, the medium is a mess. Can’t seem to find anything. Never mind I’ll make do with what’s at hand. Let’s see what errors I can find today in Culture is Our Business. Somehow the damn thing got published without being proof read. Got to run, now, I’ve got work to do.
Me (December 2009, age 57). An insult to Marshall McLuhan
Just a little more than two years earlier McLuhan’s year of triumph, academic 1967/1968, (which he had spent at Fordham University in New York City, where he had held a $100,000 Schweitzer chair in the Humanities) was interrupted in November 1967 by a tortuous ordeal. He had undergone brain surgery to remove a tumor. The surgery had been long and trying. And his recovery had been long and trying. He had suffered loss of memory and even now years later he was far from his old self. The photographic memory was gone, the energy for which he was famous was damped down, and his quirks were exaggerated. On a good day you could almost see the old McLuhan, but there were few good days.
McLuhan loved The Coach House. The question is did he deserve the Coach House? The Coach House in the 1970s was a small “seedy” building set back from the street. In the Spring of this year on a trip to Toronto I went to visit it. It was a pilgrimage of sorts I wanted to see for myself where McLuhan worked and where the famous Monday night seminars took place. What I found was a small, locked, run-down, garbage-strewn, windows-papered-over, lightless shack with a plaque on it proclaiming it the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. In a comment on a previous post, Michael Edmunds, wrote that the University of Toronto and St Michael’s College had “little respect for McLuhan.” It would seem they wanted neither his papers nor his program. It is understandable that neither Toronto nor St Mike’s had the money to bid for McLuhan’s papers. It is less understandable that they would insult his memory by making a run-down 19th century garage his most visible memorial.
Is this right? Why is the University of Toronto intent on insulting the memory of one Canada’s most extraordinary thinkers this way?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
www.mcluhan.program@utoronto.ca
Home Sweet Home
Marshall McLuhan (May, 1969, age 57). A Coach House of my own!
I never thought I’d say this, but I’m glad to be back in Toronto. Of course, after my nightmare year in New York in academic 1967/68 what with the brain surgery and ‘the recovery’ it’s hardly a surprise that I’m reveling in the quiet and still delights of dear old Hog Town. While I was away Toronto University gave me a new office and my own building to house it and my Center for Culture and Technology in, the Coach House. It’s tucked in back of the Pontifical Center of Medieval studies, and close to all my favourite haunts: my old office at 96 St. Joseph, the coffee shop in the basement of the ROM and the bar on top of the Sutton Place Hotel. Yesterday was the official opening. No expense was spared for the party. My secretary Margaret Stewart told me the final damage was $382.58. The Toronto Star reported the event today with the head line, ‘Guru’ McLuhan boy at heart. And so I am. Which reminds me I promised to meet Tom Easterbrook at the Sutton Place bar at 5 pm for whiskey and cigars – don’t tell Corinne, my Doctors say no scotch, no cigars, but I’m tired of Doctors orders. I’m back, and at long last I’ve got something to celebrate, and at the present moment I feel like celebrating. Got to run, Tom’s awaiting.
Me (December 2009, age 57). At least it made him happy
McLuhan loved The Coach House at 39A Queen’s Park Crescent. It was his place. And he filled it with the things he loved, his books, piled everywhere, his rowing oar from Cambridge, his files. And it contained things he loved: a wonderfully-1960s floor-to-ceiling mural by McLuhan’s friend, who worked as a designer at Eaton’s, René Cera, The Pied Piper, and of course the Monday night Seminars, which were the high point in his week in the 1970s. Here he brought and spoke with the wise and wonderful – Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Buckminster Fuller, Eric Havelock, and Peter Drucker to name a few. The question is couldn’t the University of Toronto given him something better than the Coach House? Even in the Spring of 1969 the Coach House, which was built in 1828, was small, rundown, “seedy,” and, well, as Bette Davis would have said, “a dump.” (More on this tomorrow.)
Do you have a place of your own to work? Is such a place necessary to be creative and productive? What is the minimum necessary?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Virginia Wolfe, A Room of One’s Own, 1929.
Money, again!
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.