McLuhan Man of Letters
"It's inevitable,
that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us all about
like corks on a stormy sea, but we keep our cool during the descent into the
maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about
it, we can come through...
I feel that we're standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating
world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man's consciousness
can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to ram the
cosmos."
"If literate Western
man were really interested in preserving the most creative aspects of his civilisation,
he would not cower in his ivory tower bemoaning change, but would plunge himself
into the vortex of electric technology and, by understanding it, dictate his
new environment?turn ivory tower into control tower.
This means running some risks, leaving a secure refuge for a new and dangerous
outpost, abandoning an old and sterile mode of observation in favour of a new
one more in tune with the new evolving environment."
Playboy Interview page 20
From the Ivory Tower stand point, i.e., the Academy, Prof. Elena Lamberti did an outstanding job writing her Marshall McLuhan's Mosaic: Probing the Literary Origins of Media Studies . She reconciles McLuhan as such.
But he is more than that. He foresaw all the revolution that would occur and is happening right now, showing no signs that is wearing out. Quite the contrary, it is gaining momentum.
Prof. Lamberti opens her book with the following story about one of her students:
Professor can you please tell me how many pages out of this novel I have to read in order to pass our final exam?
The problem is apparently lazyness, but McLuhan has a different view:
The Ivory Tower has to be updated in terms of what is now becoming the literature under the influence of technologies that McLuhan refers generically as "electricity" and we can do that with his assistance, as this project.
As a simple consequence of this participational and do-it-yourself aspect of electrical technology, all kinds of entertainment on the TV age favors the same kind of personal involvement. Hence the paradox that, in the age of TV, Johnny can not read because reading, as usually taught, is very superficial and a similar activity of simple consumer. Therefore, the highly intelectualizads readings, due to its character of depthness, may have appeal for young people who reject offers of common narratives. Today's teachers often find that students who can not read a page of history are becoming experts in programming and linguistic analysis. The problem, therefore, is not that Johnny cannot read, but in an era of involvement in depth, Johnny cannot see distant targets. (Understanding Media, pg 187)
The TV child finds if difficult if not impossible to adjust to the fragmented, visual goals of our education after having had all his senses involved by the electric media; he craves in-depth involvement, not linear detachment and uniform sequential patterns. But suddenly and without preparation, he is snatched from the cool, inclusive womb of television and exposed—within a vast bureaucratic structure of courses and credits—to the hot medium of print. His natural instinct, conditioned by the electric media, is to bring all his senses to bear on the book he’s instructed to read, and print resolutely rejects that approach, demanding an isolated visual attitude to learning rather than the Gestalt approach of the unified sensorium. The reading postures of children in elementary school are a pathetic testimonial to the effects of television; children of the TV generation separate book from eye by an average distance of four and a half inches, attempting psychomimetically to bring to the printed page the all-inclusive sensory experience of TV. They are becoming Cyclops, desperately seeking to wallow in the book as they do in the TV screen. (Playboy interview, 1969)
When McLuhan predicted Internet, and I quote:
"The next medium, whatever it is — it may be the extension of consciousness — will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”
He did not only foresaw Internet as we know today, but if you mix the above and the new technologies that are around the corner as extensions of consciousness, it becomes very clear that we are about to enter an era exactly as the one he describes to Nina Sutton as the pre literate or barbarian, in an all encompassing acoustic form of communication will be totally allowed, since it is only partially allowed today.
Take a look also at this preview on virtual reality that will be available very soon.
The same way that although the medium is the message and it does not exclude the message, an acoustic culture does not exclude the visual.