Thursday is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the literary scholar, media theorist and intellectual icon Marshall McLuhan.

In his books The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967), War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) and From Cliché to Archetype (1970), McLuhan analyzed the effect of a wide range of media on individual psychology and common culture.

This essay examines McLuhan’s legacy by reading one of his rare experiments in new media,The Medium is the Massage, a collaboration with designer Quentin Fiore that remains McLuhan’s best-selling work.

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The Medium Is the Massage, pp. 34-35

I take the book out of its envelope and open it at random. My thumbs cover perfectly two black-and-white photographs of thumbs. I laugh, nervously, and reach for my phone to take a photo. I have to remove one of my thumbs to hold the camera.

I am holding a book in one hand (that is no ordinary book) and a camera in the other (that is no ordinary camera). I can see the shadow of my thumb and the shadow of my hand holding the camera.

Later, I read the next page and discover that this spread is part of a larger argument (such as it is). The next two pages continue the text beginning “The book,” adding “is an extension of the eye…” overlaid against a photo of an eye. But for the moment, holding book and camera, I am both self-conscious and entirely immersed.

Immediately, McLuhan and Fiore want you to understand — you are not merely taking in information: it is information in a highly particular form, positioned in a definite relationship to your body. Every word and image in the book is aimed at disrupting the phony transparency of media.

Look! it demands. Look, right now, at what you are doing!

It is only an historical accident of our hyperliterate typographic culture that allows us to ignore the printed page as a particular and definite media form at all, just as the technology we have always known for generations ceases to be “technology” and becomes something else: “tools,” or “language,” or “furniture.”

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pp. 40-41

I am typing this on what McLuhan would recognize as a flattened electric typewriter, powered by a tiny microcomputer, attached by a hinge to an impossibly thin television screen. Attached to the typewriter are headphones, through which I am listening to (but not watching) a digital video of author Tom Wolfe discussing McLuhan’s work. I do not look at my typing fingers, but at the text on the screen.

I have just installed a new software update on my microcomputer that will give me new tactile control over its actions, but will change what I have learned as Up to Down instead. This new motion control is called “natural.” My friends and other technology writers accustomed to using tablets assure me that I will quickly adjust myself to it.

On the screen, too, is a digital photograph of two pages from The Medium is the Massage. The text calls electric circuitry “an extension of the nervous system.” Media, it says,

by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act — the way we perceive the world.

“When these ratios change,” the text now booms, “men change.”

At least while I am typing this, I believe it.

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pp. 74-75

Image: A car in traffic. In the rear-view mirror, a superimposed silhouette of a horse-drawn buggy, as in a wagon train. The text below begins, “The past went that-a-way.”

McLuhan is, I think, too often hailed as a futurist. He was a futurist, perhaps but a most peculiar, maybe entirely idiosyncratic kind.

McLuhan’s most powerful contributions were of this sort: “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” Our futures are always experienced and frequently determined by a past that few of us fully acknowledge or understand — including quite possibly McLuhan himself.

His best book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, digs into this past, showing how the advent of print — not a 20th-century invention, but a 15th-century one — helped make 20th-century human beings what they are: visual, fragmented, individual, hyperspecialized. It took five centuries for our art and politics to even begin to recognize the changes wrought by technical media.

We still experience our future by way of our past whenever we turn to McLuhan in order to understand what will happen next. We still think in categories half a century old that he generated to try to understand media that in some cases were older than he was.

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pp. 110-111

Bang!!! ‘The ear favors no particular “point of view”.’

Then there is the unacknowledged primal past, which unearths itself like repressed memory of a socially unacceptable but privately universal desire.

For McLuhan, this primal past is orality/aurality, the mouth and the ear, reconfigured and newly foregrounded by electric media like radio, television, the telephone, and even print itself.

McLuhan, being himself almost fully a creature of the book, marveled especially in visual ironies like this one — orality transformed into print through pop/pulp culture, the comic book’s “Bang!” on the left page exploding against the neatly justified text on the right.

What is this event? Aural or visual? What senses are invoked? Which are genuinely experienced?

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pp. 116-117

McLuhan actually winds up championing neither the aural/oral dynamics of speech, television, or pop culture or the austere, individual, spatial rationality of print culture. I think he was infatuated by the former while reflexively a creature of the latter, but his allegiances lay elsewhere.

Instead, McLuhan emerges as a champion of integrated sense experience, and a profound skeptic towards any media form that hyperextends a single sense at the expense of flattening the others. This is why he would laugh at any discussion of him as a “visionary.”

This means that from moment to moment, it’s nearly impossible to say whether he’s praising a technology for its power or fearful of it. Frequently, it’s both at once.

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pp. 92-93

Discussion of the amateur, with specific reference to Michael Faraday.

The consistent enemy for McLuhan is specialization, fragmentation, professionalization. As a critic and teacher, he wanted to feel free to borrow from anywhere and everywhere. The professional man, the specialist, was inherently suspect. So much education could only lead to blindness.

This usually meant trampling over fields where others simply knew better than he did, resulting in countless misunderstandings and mistakes. Still, few thinkers’ misunderstandings were as productive — few writers’ interdisciplinary mistakes created as many brand-new disciplines — as McLuhan’s.

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pp. 120-121

Barely intelligible analysis of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (and for McLuhan and for FW, calling it “barely intelligible” is saying something)

McLuhan, after all, was neither a scientist nor an engineer, but a professor of literature. In an admiring 1951 letter to Toronto colleague Harold Innis, he praises the economic historian’s groundbreaking study of the history of media while bubbling over with enthusiasm for the poetry of Mallarmé and Poe, Vico’s 18th-century scienza nuova, Eisenstein’s avant-garde films, modernist novelists like Joyce, interspersed with odd amateur enthusiasm for radio technology.

He was a man of universal literacy, although not in the sense that he meant it. He stared at the sky and saw only constellations. It did not matter how far away their light really was.

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pp. 88-89

Cartoon and discussion of the fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

McLuhan was not an apologist for his time — nor, indeed for ours. He did not fit in.

He thought of himself as a man who was sounding the alarm, that technology and media had worked human beings over completely, without them having become aware of it.

His meant for his propositions to be understood not as predictions, but as a bright, shining warning sign.

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p. 25

For all that, however — McLuhan was not, as so many have charged, a technological determinist. Not truly.

His focus on media and technology was methodological. It was an attempt to determine, so far as was possible, the utmost effect of technology on us. It was a study of the evolution of values that itself aimed to be largely value-free.

The only way that technology could be truly determining of our fate was to ignore it, or stubbornly resist it (which amounted to the same thing).

The first fact — Look! Look, right now, at what you are doing! — that was the beginning. But not the end.

Photos by Tim Carmody/Wired.com
Cover of The Medium Is the Massage designed by Shepard Fairey