Word: mcluhaner
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...suggestion behind these questions goes to the root of Marshall McLuhan's theory that "the medium is the message." McLuhan, the communications gadfly who wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, is the proponent of some slap-happy notions (The "jazz babies" of the 1920s caused the Depression by not caring about work). But his most fascinating idea is that television is a "cool, low-intensity" medium that projects a fuzzy image, compared with "hot" print and film. This means that the TV image demands the viewer's involvement by requiring him to complete the picture himself through...
Murky Stories. Television men have been kicking these ideas around for a couple of years, but it is only recently that a network official decided to take McLuhan on. Writing in the current issue of Television Quarterly, CBS Public Information Vice President Charles Steinberg, a Ph.D. specializing in communications, called McLuhanism "an amalgam of camp and voodoo," "semantic nonsense," and an "alienation of humanism." And besides, he added, it flies in the face of "conventional wisdom...
These distinctions are only general, but they are also tantalizing enough to constitute a basis for debate within the networks. NBC Audience Measurement Vice President Paul Klein and MGM-TV's sales coordinator, Herman Keld, argue that McLuhan is essentially right. Keld, for example, predicted that Joey Bishop, a "hot" nightclub comic who comes on strong, was bound to start out at a disadvantage in audience ratings when he went on the late-night air for ABC against "cool" Johnny Carson. He was right; and when Bishop decided to switch to a low-key approach, his ratings improved...
...York's Fordham University wanted a headliner for its liberal arts program, and it picked a winner. For a $30,000 salary, plus $70,000 for research assistants, the adventurous Roman Catholic university got Canada's self-styled Mind-Massager Marshall McLuhan, 56, to come down for a year's guest professorship. In his very first lecture, McLuhan told his 178 students that the Viet Nam war is "an all-outeducational effort" and that TV is "an Xray machine." The one student who tried to take notes dissolved in utter confusion. But the rest were turned...
...with brilliant swatches of color and eye-catching graphics. Most of Sister Corita's serigraphs use kaleidoscopic excerpts from advertising slogans blown up and tossed across the pages, often upside down, sideways or in mirror images. Accompanying them are quotations that range from Hasidic folk tales to Marshall McLuhan, all tied together with Sister Corita's own blank verse celebrating love, peace, action-and God. In this context the reader suddenly discovers that Chevrolet's slogan, "See the man who can save you the most," may have religious overtones. So can "Wonder helps build strong bodies...