James Joyce Encyclopedia

McLuhan Abridged (or Mosaic style)

exactly as it is in the playboy interview (For a more detailed information go to Library and Archives Canada on McLuhan)

acoustic space: space that has no center and no margin, unlike strictly visual space, which is an extension and intensification of the eye.

artist, the man of integral awareness,

Books:

1) First time in 1951 with the publication of “The Mechanical Bride”—an analysis of the social and psychological pressures generated by the press, radio, movies and advertising

2)In 1959, he became director of the Media Project of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters and the United States Office of Education, and the report resulting from this post became the first draft of “Understanding Media.”

3)"Counterblast",his next book, is a manically graphic trip through the land of his theories. 1969

Catholicism:

1) He taught at Catholic universities. (He is a devout Roman Catholic convert.)

Civilized man:

individualism and specialization, the hallmarks of “civilized” Western man.

Concept:

1)McLuhan contends that all media—in and of themselves and regardless of the messages they communicate—exert a compelling influence on man and society. Prehistoric, or tribal, man existed in a harmonious balance of the senses, perceiving the world equally through hearing, smell, touch, sight and taste. But technological innovations are extensions of human abilities and senses that alter this sensory balance—an alteration that, in turn, inexorably reshapes the society that created the technology. According to McLuhan, there have been three basic technological innovations: the invention of the phonetic alphabet, which jolted tribal man out of his sensory balance and gave dominance to the eye; the introduction of movable type in the 16th Century, which accelerated this process; and the invention of the telegraph in 1844, which heralded an electronics revolution that will ultimately retribalize man by restoring his sensory balance. McLuhan has made it his business to explain and extrapolate the repercussions of this electronic revolution

2)Richard Kostelanetz contends that “the most extraordinary quality of McLuhan’s mind is that it discerns significance where others see only data, or nothing; he tells us how to measure phenomena previously unmeasurable.”

3)My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences

4)my books constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery

5)my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories, containers. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks.

In a cool medium, the audience is an active constituent of the viewing or listening experience. A girl wearing open-mesh silk stockings or glasses is inherently cool and sensual because the eye acts as a surrogate hand in filling in the low-definition image thus engendered. Which is why boys make passes at girls who wear glasses. In any case, the overwhelming majority of our technologies and entertainments since the introduction of print technology have been hot, fragmented and exclusive, but in the age of television we see a return to cool values and the inclusive in-depth involvement and participation they engender. This is, of course, just one more reason why the medium is the message, rather than the content; it is the participatory nature of the TV experience itself that is important, rather than the content of the particular TV image that is being invisibly and indelibly inscribed on our skins.

Explorations:

1)the book(The Mechanical Bride) attracted little public notice, it won him the chairmanship of a Ford Foundation seminar on culture and communications and a $40,000 grant, with part of which he started “Explorations,” a small periodical outlet for the seminar’s findings

The electric media are the telegraph, radio, films, telephone, computer and television, all of which have not only extended a single sense or function as the old mechanical media did– i.e., the wheel as an extension of the foot, clothing as an extension of the skin, the phonetic alphabet as an extension of the eye–but have enhanced and externalized our entire central nervous systems, thus transforming all aspects of our social and psychic existence. The use of the electronic media constitutes a break boundary between fragmented Gutenberg man and integral man, just as phonetic literacy was a break boundary between oral-tribal man and visual man.

Basically, a hot medium excludes and a cool medium includes; hot media are low in participation, or completion, by the audience and cool media are high in participation. A hot medium is one that extends a single sense with high definition. High definition means a complete filling in of data by the medium without intense audience participation. A photograph, for example, is high definition or hot; whereas a cartoon is low definition or cool, because the rough outline drawing provides very little visual data and requires the viewer to fill in or complete the image himself. The telephone, which gives the ear relatively little data, is thus cool, as is speech; both demand considerable filling in by the listener. On the other hand, radio is a hot medium because it sharply and intensely provides great amounts of high-definition auditory information that leaves little or nothing to be filled in by the audience. A lecture, by the same token, is hot, but a seminar is cool; a book is hot, but a conversation or bull session is cool.

Image:

1. "Dr. Spock of pop culture,"
2. "the guru of the boob tube,"
3. a "Canadian Nkrumah who has joined the assault on reason," a
4. "metaphysical wizard possessed by a spatial sense of madness," and
5. "the high priest of pop think who conducts a Black Mass for dilettantes before the altar of historical determinism."
6. Amherst professor Benjamin De- Mott observed: "He's swinging, switched on, with it and NOW. And wrong."

Ivory Tower: Protests from a legion of outraged scholastics and old-guard humanists who claim that McLuhan’s ideas range from demented to dangerous

medium is the message: does not imply content plays no role—merely that it plays a distinctly subordinate role.

my definition of media is broad; it includes any technology whatever that creates extensions of the human body and senses, from clothing to the computer. And a vital point I must stress again is that societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media with which men communicate than by the content of the communication.

Nicknames:

Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.

It’s to escape this Narcissus trance that I’ve tried to trace and reveal the impact of media on man, from the beginning of recorded time to the present.

Probes:

1)McLuhan’s observations—“probes,” he prefers to call them—are riddled with such flamboyantly undecipherable aphorisms as “The electric light is pure information” and “People don’t actually read newspapers—they get into them every morning like a hot bath.”

rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world.

Speech: Speech is an utterance, or more precisely, an outering, of all our senses at once

Style:

1)His books are written in a difficult style—at once enigmatic, epigrammatic and overgrown with arcane literary and historic allusions 2)Of his own work, McLuhan has remarked: “I don’t pretend to understand it. After all, my stuff is very difficult.” 3)Despite his convoluted syntax, flashy metaphors and word-playful one-liners, however, McLuhan’s basic thesis is relatively simple. (see concept)McLuhan contends that all media—in and of themselves and regardless of the messages they communicate—exert a compelling influence on man and society

2)It is also, we think, a protean and provocative distillation not only of McLuhan’s original theories about human progress and social institutions but of his almost immobilizingly intricate style–described by novelist George P. Elliott as “deliberately antilogical, circular, repetitious, unqualified, gnomic, outrageous” and, even less charitably, by critic Christopher Ricks as “a viscous fog through which loom stumbling metaphors.” But other authorities contend that McLuhan’s stylistic medium is part and parcel of his message—that the tightly structured “linear” modes of traditional thought and discourse are obsolescent in the new “postliterate” age of the electric media.

Tom Wolfe: “What if he is right? Suppose he is what he sounds like— the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov?”

University of Toronto:

1)Since 1963, McLuhan has headed the University of Toronto’s Center for Culture and Technology, which until recently consisted entirely of McLuhan’s office, but now includes a six-room campus building.