TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/81/81.45

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 3.7 KB | 72 lines

                                                                                January 12, 1981

MILESTONES

Prophet of Cool: Marshall McLuhan


His writing was clumsy, his thoughts badly organized, and even
he complained that he had trouble understanding his ideas. But
he persisted nonetheless, and when he died last week in Toronto
at the age of 69, Marshall McLuhan was recognized as one of the
most influential thinkers of the '60s. Some of his insights
into the nature of television and the electronic age became
conventional wisdom, and people who did not know his name
confidently repeated his most famous aphorism:  "The medium is
the message."

What that means is that television is more important then
anything it broadcasts and that critics who worry about the
content of programs are missing the point. People will watch
TV no matter what the shows are; it commands their attention as
no other medium ever has.

In a dozen or so almost unreadable books ("Clear prose," he once
wrote in one of his more penetrable sentences, "indicates the
absence of thought"), McLuhan formulated his theory of
communication. Primitive, illiterate man, he wrote, lived in
a kind of Eden. People spoke to one another face to face;
communication involved touch and smell as well as sight and
sound. The invention of writing was the serpent's apple that
destroyed paradise:  thought was separated from feeling, and
meaning was attached to abstract words instead of things. The
Gutenberg printing press, which eventually led to the mass
production of books, newspapers and magazines, completed the
process. Literacy became commonplace, and as people got used
to following lines of type on printed pages, they started
thinking in a linear, sequential way. Information could
be--indeed, had to be--absorbed in isolation, and that Eden-like
community of direct contact was quickly abolished.

The new age of electronics, McLuhan concluded, reversed all that
and brought man back to his roots. Movies and TV require use
of the ear as well as the eye and demand involvement. With his
penchant for catchy, if confusing jargon, McLuhan called TV a
cool medium; books, by contrast, are hot. (A hot medium, he
said, "allows of less participation than a cool one.")  Books
are also obsolescent, he believed, and once the power of print
is removed, Eden will be restored. United by electronics, man
will live happily in his "global village," another phrase the
author contributed to the language.

Much of what McLuhan said was what Critic Dwight Macdonald
called "impure nonsense," that is, "nonsense adulterated by
sense."  Though his sensible observations about the power of TV
now seem obvious, they were angrily contested when he first made
them. Others may have recognized what was happening; McLuhan
was the first to say so.

Like many other radical theoreticians, McLuhan himself was
happier with the old ways. Born in Edmonton, Alta., be began
college with the idea of becoming an engineer. A love of
literature, ironically, led him into English studies and to
Cambridge University. Influenced by the writing of G.K.
Chesterton, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1937.

He taught at St. Michael's College, the Catholic unit of the
University of Toronto, for 34 years, and except for occasional
excursions, he stayed there, reading, writing, and enjoying his
Texas-born wife and six children. Soft-spoken, amiable and
amusing, with a fondness for puns, he scarcely seemed like the
prophet of a new age. But in many ways he was, and one of his
favorite quotations, from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, might stand as his epitaph: "We were the first that
ever burst/Into that silent sea."