Learning
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.
Tags: American mind, Communications, Education, Exam, Learning, Management education, Reading, Technology
Marshall McLuhan (May 1959, age 47). Producers are now consumers
I just got back from Winnipeg. Didn’t have time to visit my first alma mater, The University of Manitoba, as I was too busy informing the Winnipeg Ad and Sales Club about the new business rules in our electronic age. Here’s the short version, everything is moving so fast in our electric age that the only way to get ahead is to speed up. The alternative is obliteration. Winnipeg was shaking its head in collective dumbfoundment. Can’t really blame them. Looking around on the corner of Portage and Main, I’d be tempted to draw the conclusion that the world is slowing down not speeding up! Sometimes not seeing is believing.
Me (December 2009, age 57). Marshall McLuhan on how to speed up
The great speed the business world is moving at is an idea that everyone in business today agrees with and without hesitation. Even, I would hazard a guess in Winnipeg. Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about speed are still worth thinking about today not because McLuhan offers a brilliant solution as to how to live at hyper speed. His solution is to trade places with your complement. Whatever role you perform there is a complement. For example the complement of teacher is student. The complement of producer is consumer. The complement of writer is reader. By switching roles you are in effect moving at very high speed. For example, by becoming consumers, producers are able to anticipate shifts in demand.
How fast does your life move relative to your parents and grandparents? What do you do to deal with the speed of change at which you live? What is your complement? Can you put yourself in the position of your complement?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 252-255.
Speed Limits, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 20 May to 8 November 2009
Tags: Advertising, Business, Communications, Culture, Learning, Speed, Technology
Marshall McLuhan (November 15, 1967, age 65). Don’t fence me in
I remember the excitement I felt when I first realized I didn’t have to restrict my studies to literature. Innis taught me that I could roam through all history and all subjects in search of the true meaning of the medium is the message. My friend Tom Easterbrook who teaches economics at Toronto University tells me that F. von Hayek (Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, 1967) says, “Nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist – and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger.” Likewise, no student of media studies can afford to be only a student of media studies. A man who only reads about TV is as good for a man as a steady diet of coke and chips.
If pressed to state my specialty it is the pursuit of all meaning, all understanding of the significance of the medium is the message. Once the fence of content analysis is smashed through what vistas open up.
Me (December 2009, age 57). McLuhan the specialist-generalist
Marshall McLuhan’s specialization was in his approach to all literature, all subjects, rather than in the choice of any one particular field of discourse. To everything he read, to everything he observed, he always asked himself how does this reveal the ways media work on us, the messages they send us by their being what they are and doing what they do. Thus he found clues to the way media work on us in the writings of Adam Smith and Harold Innis (economics and economic history), William Blake and W. B. Yeats (poetry), and Edgar Allan Poe and Sigfried Giedeon (prose and architecture).
One of the questions I always ask myself is “How does this thought, event, phrase, or circumstance relate to the life and thought of Marshall McLuhan?” I call it the Marshall McLuhan game. For example, take the word “Economics.” How does Economics relate to the life and thought of Marshall McLuhan? Answer: when Marshall McLuhan graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1933, he won the gold medal in English and the silver medal in Economics. That same year his friend, Tom Easterbrook, won the Gold medal in Economics and the Silver medal in English. I have only been stumped once since I started playing the game in August: One morning Mrs Hinton says to me at breakfast, “We have to watch Dog Bounty Hunter on TV tonight, Baby Lyssa’s pregnant and Dog’s going to talk to her boyfriend.”
What is your speciality? Do you have a question or group of questions you are pursuing ruthlessly? If you did imagine what power this concentration of focus would bring to your ability to understand the world.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962, p.265-279.
Tags: American mind, Communications, Education, Learning, Reading, Thinking
Marshall (November 17, 1976, age 65). This will show them
Sir Karl Popper says that Science is what can be disproved but is not. Took me two years of looking, reading, asking people the question, what is science? to get this gem. Finally I found the answer in Popper’s Objective Knowledge.
Now, Eric and I were talking and we came up with three laws of media pretty fast – things all media do – laws that put to the test cannot be disproved, and then after much thinking a fourth. Here they are: (1) all media are extensions of us, enhancing, extending or amplifying our minds, bodies, or spirits in some way; (2) in coming into being all media displace or make obsolescent some old condition, situation or thing; (3) at the same time as they displace they also retrieve some previously displaced condition, situation, or thing; (4) at the same time all media when pushed to the limit reverse, shifting 180 degrees in their defining characters or qualities. (For some reason the third law was the hardest to discover. Took me three weeks. The other three took half a day.) Here’s the kicker, I bet you can’t disprove even one of them. In fact I challenge anyone to disprove any of them.
Me (December 2009, age 57). Whatever they are McLuhan’s laws aren’t science
The problem with Marshall McLuhan’s Laws of Media is that they cannot be disproved because they’re not disprovable. They’re definitions pretending to be laws.
Newton’s laws of motion can be tested. McLuhan’s laws of media cannot be tested. The laws of media are descriptive. To be testable a law must be written in such a way that you can imagine a situation in which it does not hold. For example, water boiling at 99 degrees centigrade at sea level, or apples falling at 33 feet per second squared in a vacuum. But McLuhan’s laws cannot be imagined failing in the sense that if you observed “this” then you could say “that” did not happen.
The laws of media are like Monty Python’s theory of dinosaurs – small at one end, big in the middle, and small at the other end.
With the laws of media you cannot test their truth, they are true by definition. No extension? No medium. But you can ask are they useful.
Are McLuhan’s laws useful? If so what are they useful for? What part of Mcluhan’s thinking is testable?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Forward Through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections On and By Marshall McLuhan. Ed. Paul Benedetti and Nancy DeHart. Scarborough Ontario: Prentice-Hall, 1996, p. 188.
Tags: American mind, Communications, Education, Genius, Learning, Medium is the message, Thinking, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (November 19, 1952, age 41). Writing in books
I have more fun writing in books than I do writing books. The End of the Gutenberg Era book is taking longer than I thought. Not surprising, as Corinne tells me I seem to be reading all literature for it. Here’s how I attack a book. First I dip into it and grab the big message then I go back and talk with the writer, that is I write to him in the margins. Take this new book that just came out, by William H. Whyte, Jr., and the editors of Fortune magazine, Is Anybody listening? Here’s the heart: PR types at G.M., G.E. and I.B.M. are spending a fortune selling capitalism and democracy to the world. And Whyte delivers the shocking news that despite the all expenses paid field trips to New York, London, Paris, and L.A. nobody’s listening!
Here’s one of the conversations I had with Whyte in the margins of his book. “Of course they aren’t. Nobody expects people are going to read advertizing copy before they actually buy it. You should talk with David Ogilvie he’ll give you the low down. It’s a well understood fact on Madison Avenue that people only read ad copy after they buy the product.” That’s what Corinne did when I went out and bought her that new vacuum cleaner she’s been asking for. Spent a whole lunch hour pouring over the glossy pamphlets provided by the good folks at Hoover. And that’s why Canadian teenagers don’t like Canadian history; they haven’t bought the product yet.
Me (November 2009, age 57). The problem with highlighting
Marshall McLuhan wrote in his books. If you go to the national archives you can see his writing in his copies of Saussure, Joyce, and the rest. I do much the same myself with McLuhan’s books. Except that I often write orders to myself. Things like “compare this 1952 outline for The End of the Gutenberg Era to the final table of contents of 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy.” Or “See Postman.”
There are different ways of marking in books. Many students I see studying at McGill and Concordia University seem to prefer highlighting. That is you work your way through a photocopied article or textbook assiduously highlighting in pink, yellow, or blue everything you think is worth keeping and ignoring the rest. This approach is a method of summarization. In the olden days, before highlighters, students would underline using coloured pencils or ball point pens to obtain a similar result. The idea being, I think, that the highlighted or underlined material was what you should pay attention to when you re-read the article or text when it was time to study for your final exams.
The problem is highlighting or underlining does not make you the equal of the article or text, it makes you subservient to it. May be that’s what you need to do to get an undergraduate degree at university; talking, conversing, writing in the margins is what you need to do to be the equal or the better of the writers of the books you read.
Do you write in your books? Do you underline? Do you highlight? Do use post it notes? Is it possible to read an electronic book or an article or book on your computer’s screen with understanding if you cannot mark it or make notes on it in some way?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
William H. Whyte, Jr. Is Anybody Listening? New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952.
Tags: Advertising, American mind, Books, Communications, Education, History, Hot and cool media, Learning, Management education, Reading, Technology, Visual medium, Visual thinking
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 (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 (March 1957, age 45). Students learn more outside than inside the classroom
For your information, let me ask you a question. Do you know why universities contain so much knowledge? It’s because students enter knowing so much and leave knowing so little. That however is not the problem with education today. Knowing what you know that isn’t true is what universities do well. What they do badly is: (1) Using the new media to teach and (2) Harnessing the student’s current enthusiasms and interests to teach.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). Do students know what’s best
Given Marshall McLuhan’s views, a recent article “Concordia gets passing grades in Globe and Mail’s annual report card,” by Amy Minsky, in the November 3, 2009 issue of The Concordian, a student newspaper at Montreal’s Concordia University provokes some thoughts. According to Ms Minsky the most important finding of the Globe and Mail’s report card was that Concordia University, the university she attends, “earned a C+) as far the 700 Concordia students who were surveyed on the question of “career preparation.” Apparently this was the same grade students at the University of Ottawa and the University of Toronto, St. George campus, assessed their schools. And the highest grade for career preparation was given by students at the University of Waterloo, was an unexceptional B+.
The thoughts are: (1) Who is failing here, the universities or the students? (2) Given students come to university to learn rather than to teach, are their opinions the ones that should matter for the design of university programs? (3) Given that surveys of business for many years have repeatedly shown that businesses want to hire recent graduates of university programs who can read, write, think analytically, solve problems, and get along with other people, all things a classic, impractical liberal arts education teaches, should universities offer less liberal arts and more project management, time management, and supply-chain management? (4) Given students are so very interested in practical, career preparation why are universities so poor at persuading students that the best career preparation is a liberal arts education?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
McLuhan, Marshall. “Classroom without Walls,” in Explorations, no.7, March 1957, reprinted in Explorations in Communication, Edited by Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960. pp. 1-3.
Tags: Business, Communications, Culture, Education, Learning, Listening
Marshall McLuhan (March 14, 1951, age 39). Literature is dead
I wrote today to Innis. He has written a dazzling book, Empire and Communications. I shared with him some of the ideas that flowed from our meeting of minds, both in writing and in conversation. For example, literature today is in decline. (Innis shows in his book how few the ages of literature have been and how short.) The end of the present epoch of the book is evident in so many symptoms exhibited in our world today – for example the shortness of the attention span of young people.
A young man came to see me in my office today. He asked me what was the use of reading Edgar Poe. I decided to do a Euclid on him. I said, “Have you read ‘A Descent into The Maelstrom’?” “Yes,” he said. “Good,” I said, “here’s a dollar.”
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). With friends like Peter Drucker who needs enemies
Marshall McLuhan’s claim that literature is dead was one of many statements McLuhan would make over his career that drove his enemies and quite a number of his friends crazy. Consider for example what Peter Drucker, “the father of management,” said about McLuhan in 1994 when he was asked to reflect on what he had learned from Marshall McLuhan. “Not one of McLuhan’s specific predictions has come true and not one of them is likely to come true.” If Drucker meant this statement seriously, either it reveals his ignorance of McLuhan’s thinking or his willingness to engage in the slander of the reputation of a man who thought of him as a friend and colleague.
To give but one example of a McLuhan prediction that came true, consider this anecdote recounted by Professor Abraham Rotstein, Professor emeritus, economics, at the University of Toronto, and a member of McLuhan’s circle in the 1960s, in a conversation I had with him in August about McLuhan. “Mcluhan comes into class sometime in the 1960s and waves a plastic card at the students. ‘This, ladies and gentlemen is a new kind of credit card, it lets you pay in cash.”
Is Drucker right? Are McLuhan’s predictions all bogus? Is Drucker simply being a cranky old man?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan, edited by Corrine McLuhan, Matie Molinaro, and William Toye. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 223.
Barrington with Maurice McLuhan Nevitt, Who was Marshall McLuhan? 1995, pp.122-126.
Tags: American mind, Communications, Conversation, Culture, Education, Learning, Literature, Management education, Medium is the message, Relationship, Technology