Marshall McLuhan was a media darling in the late 60s and early 70s. I aced quite a few college papers by explaining the world in terms of his theories about communication. It sure seems to me that his ideas are evident in the impact that the Internet and computers have had on society. But I haven’t followed the field very closely since graduation, and so much about the 60s turned out to be hype. So I ask you: Was McLuhan really a seminal thinker? How are his theories regarded today? –Judith, Highland Park, IL
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I put McLuhan in the same category as Andy Warhol, who was described in a recent magazine article as a “honkie bullshitter.” Most of the time that seems like an apt characterization of Warhol, but then I catch myself using some variation of his most famous dictum, “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” and I think: Well, the son of a bitch sure got that right. My take on McLuhan is pretty similar. Though 99 percent of what he wrote was horse manure, the remaining 1 percent was dead-on.
Some of McLuhan’s key concepts:
Still, McLuhan was right about one thing: the central place media would assume in our daily lives. Less a systematic thinker than a provocateur (read: honkie bullshitter), he was among the first to raise the public’s consciousness–another McLuhan-era term–about communications. No one doubts now that we live in a postindustrial age or that we traffic not so much in material goods as in information. It’s a stretch to say that McLuhan predicted the contours of the modern world, but the extent to which it has evolved in directions he anticipated is remarkable. The global village, for example, may have been oversold, but a version thereof is definitely emerging: on the Straight Dope Message Board, for instance, we’ve got one moderator in Amsterdam and another in Bombay. Scoffers may say that McLuhan didn’t have any grasp of what it all meant and was only pointing out the obvious. But how many would-be seers even manage that?
