Many other thinkers of the sixties had noticed that TV addressed its audience differently from, say, cinema or the radio. What made McLuhan’s theory distinctive was that he didn’t bother to ask whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. Media change all the time, and we change with them, and while there is a natural temptation to think that certain forms of media make us worse readers, listeners, viewers, the truth is that this kind of value judgment probably makes it hard to really grasp what media are doing. As a literature professor, I interact with a lot of people who try to explain to me why reading on a Kindle, for instance, is intrinsically worse than reading on paper. Maybe that’s true, but I’ve found that this opinion, while widespread, usually depends on (and in turn enables) a pretty distorted caricature of what’s involved in reading on an e-reader or on paper.
When you read Understanding Media, the 1964 book that made McLuhan a household name, it becomes less surprising that people responded to McLuhan in more general rather than specific terms. Because the specifics are strange. McLuhan was a deeply learned man, and he was determined to show it off. That means: lots of allusions, weird digressions, examples that don’t seem to illustrate the thing they’re supposed to illustrate. To any professor who likes to joke in class, McLuhan’s books are painful, not because his jokes are overly recondite, but because they mistake chumminess and condescension for making common cause with their audience. His books careen constantly between things McLuhan was too much of an expert in to pare down and things McLuhan didn’t know enough about to understand them himself.
At the same time, McLuhan was a master of the pithy slogan—you may not exactly understand what it means that “man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world,” but you have to admit it’s a pretty memorable phrase. He coined terms like “the global village,” and “surfing” in the sense that we today “surf” the web—the latter being all the more impressive given that there was no web yet to surf. He himself was surfing on the zeitgeist, which is remarkable: He was trained as a traditional literary critic in the 1930s, and had been teaching at the University of Toronto for two decades by the time he became a star. The books that made him known to non-academic audiences started coming out when McLuhan was already in his fifties. He had, however, been interested for a while in the transition from one media culture to the other—above all, oral culture to literacy, or the advent of print culture. In the sixties he started thinking about his own era along these lines—and about the era that was to come.
We may think that throughout human history, changes are wrought by human beings transforming their world. But McLuhan proposed that, in fact, history is made by media changing human beings. (For the record, that’s what McLuhan means when he says that “man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world.”) Shifts in communication change our way of thinking, our way of relating to one another, our very ways of conceiving of ourselves.
McLuhan is thinking of newly literate Christians poring over the printed Bible in their own language and going to war over what it says. He is thinking of Germans listening to Hitler’s voice on the radio. But he’s also thinking about the world about to be remade, and about to be made one world, by television and electronic media. “Everybody in the world,” he proclaimed, in a description that has become only truer every day since, “has to live in the utmost proximity created by our electric involvement in one another’s lives.” At the same time, McLuhan thought, “electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.” He predicted that unlike newspapers and movies—which draw us into the same streets, theaters, and public squares, where we become a mass and have one unified experience—electronic media would give us similar experiences but by ourselves, or with our own chosen tribe.
McLuhan can feel scarily prescient when you read him in the age of social media bubbles and memes. But when you flip through his writings today, the references feel very of-the-era: Margaret Mead, Carl Jung, Arnold Toynbee. Understanding Media is a mid-century modern work. But McLuhan mattered to Silicon Valley not for the way he vibed with Eames chairs and shag carpets but for the way the fifty-something literature professor’s Shakespeare-quoting tomes came to resonate with countercultural hipsters half his age. Even by their standards, this adoption was not intuitive. The counterculture’s overall image was fairly technophobic, and mass media—especially television—was widely reviled as a tool of conformity and stultification. Nevertheless, something about McLuhan’s thought and style caught on. He’d always been a wild and eclectic thinker, his books more collections of essays and thoughts than traditional monographs. So there was a formal fit. But the hippies, or certain hippies, also simply liked what he seemed to be saying.
As Fred Turner has pointed out, Understanding Media was a great resource for those members of the counterculture who didn’t distrust technology so much as the institutions and state actors that wielded technology. McLuhan preached that media were all-pervasive, inescapable, but increasingly decentralized in a “global village.” Media’s downstream effects were, in the long run, almost impossible for governments to control. This, as far as the counterculture was concerned, was excellent news. As for the warning that media would eventually transform human consciousness and our very sense of ourselves, well, to sixties rebels this didn’t sound like much of a warning. After all, they already wanted to transform consciousness
