The Day a Prophet Passed

December 31, 2011 marks 30 years since media guru Marshall McLuhan died, a victim of a final stroke after suffering from a series of them. How kind the intervening years have been to him. At the time of his death, he was viewed in his native Canada as somewhat of an embarrassment, but today he is an oracle, having essentially foreseen Facebook Amazon, Twitter, the iPhone and other modern media. In the words of a New York Times article published this past summer to mark McLuhan's centenary, "Instead of being viewed as an academic fraud, McLuhan is now widely celebrated as the man who prophesied both the Internet and its impact on society." Indeed, Professor B. W. Powe of Toronto's York University, and one of the organizers of a weeklong series of memorial events in that city, said this: “We read the 21st-century media through his eyes.”

Quite a turnaround for one man, though not unusual. As with most social visionaries, McLuhan challenged tightly held beliefs, and most people are afraid to let go of such ideas. His vocabulary was also new and alien. He introduced us to his definitions of "hot" and "cold" media: Hot media, such as print and the cinema, are sharp in definition, filled with data, exclusively visual and verbal. He also asserted that these media were psychologically damaging and low in audience participation. Other hot media, according to McLuhan, were photography, competitive spectator sports and radio. Moreover, he said that hot media make people think logically and independently rather than naturally and communally. McLuhan preferred "cool" media, noting that while they are low in information, they also challenge their users by forcing them to fill in the "missing" information. He saw the telephone, modern painting and, most significantly, television as cool media because they are oral-auditory, tactile and visceral. McLuhan believed that these media would be a unifying force, putting modern "back into the tribal or oral pattern with its seamless web of kinship and interdependence." These behaviors would, in turn, create his "global village," a term that he coined

As with many prophets, McLuhan's revolutionary ideas were not regarded kindly in his own time. A Time magazine review of his book Understanding Media  -- regarded today as the seminal work on the effect of media in the modern world and which contained many of the concepts described above -- called the book "pseudo science." Yet years later, when Time published their obituary of McLuhan, the magazine stated that "his writing was clumsy, his thoughts badly organized, and even he complained that he had trouble understanding his ideas. But...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." 

One of McLuhan's prime principles was that “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” Can we doubt that statement today, given how we interact through Web 2.0? We make "friends" through Facebook, we reveal our innermost thoughts through our blogs, we make spectacles of ourselves through YouTube, and we have learned to communicate succinctly in just 140 characters through our Twitter accounts.

Once again, we are currently reminded of the power of the media in our politics. And I do not mean our primary Presidential politics. No, the "global village" that McLuhan foresaw also has global politics. Time scoffed yet again when McLuhan stated in Understanding Media that "Had TV occurred on a large scale during Hitler's reign, he would have vanished quickly." No, the Old Professor was on target, as we have seen Twitter and Facebook cut through censorship and propaganda to produce an Arab Spring or rally for the rights of the disenfranchised. And here in this country, presidential front runners fall back almost immediately as they wilt under the glare of the media spotlight. That durability under scrutiny seems to determine winners more than any other obstacle. Some partisans may complain that Barrack Obama did not face any real scrutiny during his primary campaign, but come on; I was viewing fresh footage of his pastor, the incendiary Rev. Jeremiah Wright, every morning, whether through the network news or the Internet. And will Mitt Romney, seemingly made of asbestos and impervious to the heat of battle, win his party's nomination because no medium will be able to lay a finger on him long enough to count him out as they have so many others? We'll see.

When McLuhan made his pronouncements more than 40 years ago, some listened while many others dismissed them as nonsense. He stated that media are "not neutral; instead they have an effect on people." Today, as we study the effects of television on what we buy, who we elect and how we learn, and as we study how video games and the Internet are affecting the linearity of our thinking, his theories are easily echoed. Yet because they are so commonsense and commonplace, we forget their origins. However, we learned similar lessons from Einstein, whose ideas were so advanced that they were also ineffable because no suitable language existed to express them. (How does one explain E=MC squared?)


The global village did not exist when Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase. But somehow he emerged from his intellectual rabbit hole to glimpse it, and then he wrote many books and essays to prepare us for it. Let's stay aware of the power we possess through our media, which have indeed become our extensions and have united us (and conformed us) in ways that only he seemed to imagine.

Marshall McLuhan at 100: The Media Are Still the Messages (and more)

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of famed academician, philosopher and media observer Marshall McLuhan. In reflecting on his life, it is stunning to see how his influence and his relevance have only grown in this era of "The Social Network." Consider that McLuhan coined now-common phrases such as "the medium is the message, "information overload" and "hot and cool media" decades before we would understand their full significance.

His watershed book, Understanding Media, was written 20 years before the PC revolution and 30 years before the rise of the Internet. Yet his insights predicted how we would engage with the world through the wide variety of media available to us. In 1964, Understanding Media seemed to be the rantings of a crazy man. But in the light of the 21st century digital world, he makes perfect sense. One can argue that Understanding Media is the most important book ever written on communication. (I would accept that premise.)

Like many other future-oriented thinkers, such as H.G. Wells and Louis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan accurately predicted many events. For example, he believed that printed books would become obsolete, killed off by television and by other electronic information technology (e-books, anyone?). In War and Peace in the Global Village, he predicted that a coming, vast electronic network (read: the Internet) would recreate "the world in the image of a global village" (another McLuhan phrase that has entered our lexicon). And quite a village it is: When Time magazine proclaimed Mark Zuckerberg the 2010 Man of of the Year, they noted that Facebook users around the world comprised "a social entity almost twice as large as the U.S. If Facebook were a country it would be the third largest, behind only China and India."

Though he is somewhat forgotten today, McLuhan's popularity grew throughout the 1960s and 70s. His work was translated into more than 20 languages, he appeared in magazines across the world. Embraced by the counter-culture and acknowledged somewhat by the mainstream, McLuhan had an hour-long TV special on NBC in 1967, a Playboy interview in 1969, and an appearance on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, a cutting-edge TV show of the late 60s. However, McLuhan may be best remembered for his ironic cameo in Woody Allen's 1977 Oscar winner, Annie Hall, where Allen makes McLuhan appear magically just to settle an argument with a pedant in a movie queue.

McLuhan never claimed to be a crusader, and in fact, he never was. He was an observer and a documentarian. His various epigrams are testimony to this, and they have gained increased significance in today's media-encrusted world:

• "A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding." (Think of all the media talking heads who provide much heat but little light.)
• "All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values." (One example is that people who watch more news on TV than average believe that crime rates are higher than they actually are.)
• "Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either." (Sesame Street, anyone?)
• "Art is anything you can get away with." (McLuhan foreshadowed Warhol and Basquiat with that one.)
• "Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be." (Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit as Exhibit A, Ronald Reagan. As Exhibit B -- Barack Obama.)
• "The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man." (From fast food consumed in cars to the docks for our various electronic gear, he nailed this one.)
• "There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew." (This statement was made before "Ecoimagination" became an advertising buzz phrase.)
• "We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us." (Is there any doubt that our perceptions have been influenced first by television and later -- today -- by Facebook? Our whole notion of what constitutes a "friend" is entirely different.)

McLuhan continued to influence even after his demise. In 1988, eight years after his death, his son published McLuhan’s Four Laws of Media. These questions resulted in the formulation of the following four laws of media, and how they affect us. Using cell phones as an example, here is how McLuhan's Laws manifest themselves:

1. Extension/Enhancement: Every technology extends or amplifies some organ or faculty of the user. What does the medium enhance or intensify? (In this case, the voice is enhanced.)
2. Closure/Obsolescence: Because there is equilibrium in sensibility, when one area of experience is heightened or intensified, another is diminished or numbed. What is pushed aside or obsolesced by the new medium? (Answer: the telephone booth.)
3. Reversal: Every form, pushed to the limit of its potential, reverses its characteristics. (In this case, the cell phone does not free us. Instead, it puts us on a leash because we are always accessible.)
4. Retrieval: The content of any medium is an older medium. (Childhood yelling has become the content of cell phones, as we raise our voices to be heard.)

McLuhan found significance in the most mundane matters. For example, he could see how typography, with its specific variations of form and aesthetics, became forms of expression in themselves. Even print was not a monolithic medium to him.

So in this media-oriented world, where jeans have special pockets for iPods and the backpacks of most self-respecting kids are loaded with electronic gear, it is good to consider the visionary insights of Marshall McLuhan. His star grows ever so brightly, perhaps even directly proportional with the glow of display panels and their increasing influences on our lives and psyches.

Note: While I admire McLuhan greatly, I also direct you to this more critical article by Paul Seaman titled, "Marshall McLuhan: A Media Guru Reconsidered." While I don't agree with much of what Mr. Seaman has written, I appreciate his even-handed approach to McLuhan's legacy.

35 (no make that 36) Years of "Nashville"

As a self-styled film historian and film buff, I tend to know many trivial facts about films, so imagine my surprise and embarrassment when I completed writing this piece and discovered that the premise was all wrong. Let me first explain the raison d'etre of my post.

People often ask me my opinions on the best films ever. I cite many of the usual suspects, such as Citizen Kane (top of the list), It's a Wonderful Life, Chaplin's Modern Times and The Gold Rush, and not too many other surprises. However, when I was asked to name my Top Five, I raised many eyebrows when I included Robert Altman's Nashville.
Yes, that's right, Nashville! Want to make something of it? I think this is a groundbreaking film whose influences have spread far and wide, yet few people acknowledge them. Or, more significant, are not aware of them.
I wrote this thinking that I was honoring the 35th anniversary of the premiere of the film. However, I discovered that it opened on June 11, 1975. So I'm a year late. Still, I'd like to explain why I love this film so much and still consider it one of the best ever.
Let's begin with the setting. Altman was way ahead of the curve in picking the country music capital as the focal point of his film. You would be hard pressed to think of any significant films that were similarly centered. We see people in the recording studios, in clubs, at outdoor performances. It was as though he was clairvoyant in seeing what a cultural force country music would become, and he took us right to its epicenter.
This was no whitewash. An older woman I knew bristled at the portrayal, complaining "That's not what country music is about." Sorry, Ma'am, but these characters are Americans, capable of being as venal, petty, shallow and competitive as the rest of us. If the New York theater could have the vipers of All About Eve and early television could portray the Andy Griffith's ascendant evil in A Face in the Crowd, then country music was entitled to its Nashville.
Altman was also a master at pulling great performances out of a. huge casts and, b. previously unheralded actors. Look at the people in this film! Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Barbara Harris, Ned Beatty, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Keenan Wynn... I could go on. Altman took a popular TV-sketch comedienne named Lily Tomlin (heard of her?) and guided her to an Oscar nomination. Same for Ronee Blakely, who came out of nowhere to channel Loretta Lynn in her fictional character, Barbara Jean. Comic Henry Gibson was known mostly as a member of the cast of Laugh-In, the seminal NBC variety show, but he was brilliant as the duplicitous Haven Hamilton under Altman's direction. A native of Philadelphia, of all places, Gibson was entirely believable as the corn-pone crank and hypocrite. (Altman, et al, even knew to take a little-known bit that Gibson had performed years earlier on The Dick Van Dyke Show and turn it into Hamilton's so-called "signature" song, "Keep A-Goin'.")
Do you like parallel plots, kept straight by canny editing and the power of narrative? Altman pioneered this style in Nashville, and the technique was used brilliantly in much '80s television, notably Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere. It is amazing how these nearly 30 characters wander the landscape of this movies, seemingly disconnected in a head-scratching way, and yet they come together in the climactic scene set at Nashville's Parthenon. All the characters fulfill their destinies in this one dramatic moment, whether it was Barbara Jean's tragic end, Haven Hamilton's unmasking of sorts (best use of a toupee ever), but best exemplified by Barbara Harris seizing the occasion to make her long-awaited start turn.
I saw Bridesmaids recently (very funny, entertaining movie, by the way), and I howled at the use of overlapping dialogue in scenes, such as when Kristen Wiig's character stumbles through the plane under the influence of a sedative. But I also remembered that Altman pioneered the use of such speechifying with his multi-track sound on Nashville and his subsequent films.
It is bewildering to me that the film is so widely forgotten today, as it generated much discussion, disdain and appreciation in its day. It was nominated for five Oscars (picture, director, Tomlin and Blakely for supporting actress) but took home just one for Keith Caradine's song, "I'm Easy." It was the New Film Critics' Best Film of the year, as well as winning best director, and the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics also honored it as the best. Yet I hear very few people mention Nashville today, and when I mention it as one of my all-time favorites, the usual responses range from mild surprise to recriminations from someone who tells me that their audience booed the film
If you get a chance, I suggest you revisit this gem. Tell me what you think, even if you don't like it. I won't agree with you, but that's okay; it don't worry me. :-)

PS. For a fine retrospective of this film, I refer you to a piece by Ray Sawhill of Salon.com, titled A Movie Called Nashville.

From Business World to World Events, The (Social) Medium Is Indeed the Message

In his centenary year, Marshall McLuhan is as relevant as ever. For example, I just returned from a meeting at The Philadelphia Business Journal, where I spoke to the staff about possible speaking engagements. The hot topic that many hopefuls were proposing were the social media or Web 2.0, the media that are "pushed" to audiences.

However, far from the Philly business world, we are seeing those same social media helping to foment democracies in the Middle East. Whereas the Federalist Papers and other pamphlets fueled the American revolution, and in the way megaphones stoked American students in the 1960s and '70s, protesters in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia and other countries are organizing through Facebook and Twitter. Furthermore, these same media are allowing the world to see what is happening in these countries, uncensored and free, in many senses of that word. Both the facts and the spirits of these events are spreading.These events demonstrate just how much ahead of his time McLuhan was. He defined media as "any extension of ourselves," and that included new technologies. Though he was writing in the mid-20th century, he was analyzing not only traditional media, (print, radio, TV), but also computers, which at that time were pretty much limited to entire floors of corporate buildings. He understood early that the structures of these media would affect how we perceive the world around us.

For those of us who are promoting ourselves or our organizations, the social media/web 2.0 must be considered part of the mix, if they're not already. We are seeing how the traditional media are chasing the "new" media to get their leads or fill in the facts of a story. Certainly the people of the Middle East get it, and their worlds are reshaping as surely as they did when the Communism fell. It is exciting to see, and we can. Lucky us.