Up first, the segments from NPR. Of special interest to me was the fourth segment, Carrie Rickey talks about one of the films that shaped/warped my brain back in the 1980s, David Cronenberg's "Videodrome." There is a link to her article that inspired the talk.
Paul Levinson on "Digital McLuhan"
Interviewer:Guest(s):07.24.2011Paul Levinson is the author of "Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium." He talks to Jim Fleming about his friendship with McLuhan and the man's work.
Robert Logan on "Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan"
Interviewer:07.21.2011Robert Logan is the author of "Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan." He talks to Anne Strainchamps about their friendship and the great man's work.
Douglas Coupland on Marshall McLuhan
Interviewer:Guest(s):07.24.2011Canadian author and artist Douglas Coupland talks to Steve Paulson about his unconventional McLuhan biography, "Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!"
Carrie Rickey on David Cronenberg's "Videodrome"
Interviewer:07.21.2011Carrie Rickey is the film critic for "The Philadelphia Inquirer." She talks to Steve Paulson about how Marshall McLuhan's ideas influenced David Cronenberg's 1983 sci-fi/horror film, as chronicled in her essay, "Videodrome; Make Mine Cronenberg." The essay accompanies the Criterion Collection's DVD release of "Videodrome."
Carrie Rickey on "The Philadelphia Inquirer" website
McLuhan at 100 by Nicholas Carr
by
Nicholas Carr
One of my favorite YouTube videos is a clip from a 1968 Canadian TV show featuring a debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan. The two men, both icons of the sixties, could hardly be more different. Leaning forward in his chair, Mailer is pugnacious, animated, engaged. McLuhan, abstracted and smiling wanly, seems to be on autopilot. He speaks in canned riddles. “The planet is no longer nature,” he declares, to Mailer’s uncomprehending stare; “it’s now the content of an art work.”
Read the whole article.Watching McLuhan, you can’t quite decide whether he was a genius or just had a screw loose. Both impressions, it turns out, are valid. As the novelist Douglas Coupland argued in his recent biography, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, McLuhan’s mind was probably situated at the mild end of the autism spectrum. He also suffered from a couple of major cerebral traumas. In 1960, he had a stroke so severe that he was given his last rites. In 1967, just a few months before the Mailer debate, surgeons removed a tumor the size of a small apple from the base of his brain. A later procedure revealed that McLuhan had an extra artery pumping blood into his cranium.
Between the stroke and the tumor, McLuhan managed to write a pair of extravagantly original books. The Gutenberg Galaxy, published in 1962, explored the cultural and personal consequences of the invention of the printing press, arguing that Gutenberg’s invention shaped the modern mind. Two years later, Understanding Media extended the analysis to the electric media of the twentieth century, which, McLuhan argued, were destroying the individualist ethic of print culture and turning the world into a tightly networked global village. The ideas in both books drew heavily on the works of other thinkers, including such contemporaries as Harold Innis, Albert Lord, and Wyndham Lewis, but McLuhan’s synthesis was, in content and tone, unlike anything that had come before.
When you read McLuhan today, you find all sorts of reasons to be impressed by his insight into media’s far-reaching effects and by his anticipation of the course of technological progress. When he looked at a Xerox machine in 1966, he didn’t just see the ramifications of cheap photocopying, as great as they were. He foresaw the transformation of the book from a manufactured object into an information service: “Instead of the book as a fixed package of repeatable and uniform character suited to the market with pricing, the book is increasingly taking on the character of a service, an information service, and the book as an information service is tailor-made and custom-built.” That must have sounded outrageous a half century ago. Today, with books shedding their physical skins and turning into software programs, it sounds like a given.
You also realize that McLuhan got a whole lot wrong. One of his central assumptions was that electric communication technologies would displace the phonetic alphabet from the center of culture, a process that he felt was well under way in his own lifetime. “Our Western values, built on the written word, have already been considerably affected by the electric media of telephone, radio, and TV,” he wrote in Understanding Media. He believed that readers, because their attention is consumed by the act of interpreting the visual symbols of alphabetic letters, become alienated from their other senses, sacrifice their attachment to other people, and enter a world of abstraction, individualism, and rigorously linear thinking. This, for McLuhan, was the story of Western civilization, particularly after the arrival of Gutenberg’s press.
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