Word: mcluhanism
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ONCE UPON a time, when the Beatles were still in Liverpool and no one had heard of LSD, Marshall McLuhan was an easy man to like. He could explain everything from Homer to baseball with a single, breathtaking theory. The few who had read him possessed the key to history, politics, art, literature and contemporary society. But now it has all been lost...
Like too many other good things, McLuhan has become public property. His face is on half the coffee-tables in America, and any self-respecting house wife can speak authoritatively about the electronic media, and the global village, and the death of print. The ideas have been diluted, distilled and vulgarized. No longer is it possible to discover McLuhan; it requires a strenuous effort just to avoid...
THIS IS MARSHALL MCLUHAN: THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE (NBC, 4-5 p.m.). The massage is administered via the proper medium, in an attempt to give McLuhan's controversial ideas the visual life they are all about...
Aphoristic Armory. McLuhan himself works his readers over with aphorisms and jokes. "If we were to dispose of the city right now," he says, "future societies would reconstruct them, like so many Williamsburgs." Of Renaissance art, which he blames for placing Western man "outside the frame of reference," he says: "A piazza for everything and everything in its piazza." Telstar, movies and jetliners have generated "a worldpool of information"; the clash of cultures in the modern world is a "collide-oscope"; television programming is "the charge of the light brigade." As a result of the information explosion occasioned by modern...
There is no denying many of the McLuhanian truisms. Mankind today is indeed caught up in a technological tsunami of unprocessed information and unrelated impressions, events and pseudo events. But the world is not quite yet McLuhan's "global village," nor can the sequential thought patterns of three millennia be totally dissolved in a burst of electronic energy, however it is harnessed. With the sweeping generalization that delights his followers but irks so many anti-McLuhanians, he compares present times with the late medieval era, when tribal thought was giving way to print-processed "linear" thought, and finds...