{"id":3692,"date":"2023-05-03T10:47:09","date_gmt":"2023-05-03T18:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=3692"},"modified":"2024-05-21T05:25:58","modified_gmt":"2024-05-21T13:25:58","slug":"the-future-of-the-future-is-the-present-tuning-back-to-marshall-mcluhan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=3692","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;The Future of The Future is the Present&#8221;: Tuning Back to Marshall McLuhan"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?attachment_id=3695\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-3695\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-3695\" src=\"https:\/\/www.geneseymour.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/Marshall_McLuhan_with_and_on_television_cropped-177x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"177\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.geneseymour.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/Marshall_McLuhan_with_and_on_television_cropped-177x300.jpeg 177w, https:\/\/www.geneseymour.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/Marshall_McLuhan_with_and_on_television_cropped.jpeg 340w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 177px) 100vw, 177px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"This Is Marshall McLuhan - The Medium Is The Massage (1967)\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cFwVCHkL-JU?start=7&#038;feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p>I discovered Marshall McLuhan where you were supposed to: on television. It was during the late winter of 1967 in what was in those days referred to as the Sunday afternoon \u201cghetto\u201d for \u201chighbrow\u201d programming. The series was called <em>NBC Experiment in Television<\/em> and it featured everything from absurdist theater to unknown Black writers in Watts workshopping their poetry and prose. Even then, my teeming high-school-age brain was a sucker for eclecticism served up fresh and hot and that lizard brain somehow seemed especially primed for a white middle-aged Canadian college professor shooting off aphoristic sparklers about my best and most faithful pal, TV, and why it mattered.<\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?attachment_id=3697\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-3697\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-3697\" src=\"https:\/\/www.geneseymour.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/mm_massageaudioreissue1-300x284.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"284\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.geneseymour.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/mm_massageaudioreissue1-300x284.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/www.geneseymour.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/mm_massageaudioreissue1.jpeg 686w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p><br \/>The show was called &#8220;This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage&#8221; which was basically a filmed adaptation of the paperback book with the same title (the latter half, anyway) and whose hip, flashy visual design was laid out by Quentin Fiore. But the book and the documentary ramped up the heat on McLuhan\u2019s then-burgeoning fame for his ideas about \u201chot\u201d and \u201ccool\u201d mediums; how electronic media has all but overrun print\u2019s autonomy over civilization and that mass communication has transformed the world into a \u201cglobal village\u201d that is, as McLuhan characterized it in the film and elsewhere, \u201cas wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is engaged in everybody else\u2019s business.\u201d <br \/><br \/><\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?attachment_id=3702\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-3702\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-3702\" src=\"https:\/\/www.geneseymour.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/9781888869026-us-177x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"177\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.geneseymour.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/9781888869026-us-177x300.jpeg 177w, https:\/\/www.geneseymour.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/9781888869026-us.jpeg 280w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 177px) 100vw, 177px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p><br \/>I was so dazzled by it all that I not only secured a copy of that slick little book as soon as I could get my hands on it, but I wrote my senior AP term paper on McLuhan three years later. On a typewriter, of course, because who knew from computers back then except as those big blocky things with magnetic tape at my father\u2019s workplace. (He, by the way, dug most of what McLuhan was laying down on that NBC special, even if he wasn\u2019t entirely sure of all the specifics.) I ended up reading some of the McLuhan books with no pictures like <em>Understanding Media<\/em> (1964) and even <em>The Gutenberg Galaxy<\/em> (1962). even if I ended up cherry-picking my way through the latter for material that I found mostly to be similar, at times word for word, as the later book.<\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?attachment_id=3704\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-3704\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3704\" src=\"https:\/\/www.geneseymour.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/McLuhan-Newsweek-cover.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"259\" \/><\/a><\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p><br \/>Which was a big reason why my teenage self connected with him. Even without pictures and fancy graphics to augment it, McLuhan\u2019s prose was what many readers, pro and con, called mosaic-like; I\u2019m guessing what they meant was the way his oracular, inscrutable assertions and observations swooped, doubled back, and swooped again (in case you didn\u2019t get them the first time) in flashy, sometimes puffy and dense, but riveting patterns, much like the panels in the Marvel comic books I was devouring at about the same time. He kept you reading for the same reason as Tom Wolfe, one of his first promotors <a href=\"https:\/\/contemporarythinkers.org\/tom-wolfe\/essay\/hes-right\/\">(\u201cWhat If He is Right?\u201d)<\/a>. Put a toga on him and the Romans would have had to invent their own word for \u201cbeatnik\u201d to classify him. <br \/><br \/>Even at the time I wrote my school paper, he was getting divebombed by scholars and various other defenders of the status-quo believing him to be too slick to be taken seriously. They thought he was a charlatan, spinning the kind of buzzy phrases (\u201chot\u201d and \u201ccool\u201d mediums, \u201cglobal village,\u201d \u201cparticipation mystique,\u201d) that only baby boomers and the advertising agencies that\u00a0 catered to them could embrace as higher wisdom. I might even have mentioned some of these qualms in my paper, though I\u2019m sure that if I did, I chose to give them cursory attention.<\/p>\r\n<p><br \/>Still, for most of what was left of the 20th century, cursory attention is what I mostly gave McLuhan and his vision of the future. Like everybody else who saw <em>Annie Hall<\/em> in 1977, I was charmed by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=vTSmbMm7MDg\">Woody Allen dragging him from off-screen to suavely scold the obnoxious pedant waiting in line to see a movie about knowing \u201cnothing of my ideas<\/a>,\u201d even though in the years since, I\u2019ve wondered how much space in the soul of that same movie\u2019s writer-director-star is rented by said pedant. The year before, I remember being pleasantly surprised that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ZF8jej3j5vA&amp;t=224s\">McLuhan\u2019s observations of the Carter-Ford presidential debate,<\/a> as registered the morning after on the<em> Today<\/em> show, were as sour as my own.<br \/><br \/>But as the 20th century wound down and the 21st began, McLuhan himself seemed less present in the culture than his observations \u2013 most of which, thanks to the Internet and its myriad spoils, were coming true. As<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/2011\/05\/26\/mcluhan-galaxy\/\"> one writer put it,<\/a> we were too busy living out McLuhan\u2019s prophecies to go back and read them. Or watch them. <br \/><br \/>Until I did, for the first time in over fifty years. It\u2019s no longer a matter of, as Tom Wolfe asked, \u201cWhat If He Is Right?\u201d It&#8217;s how &#8220;right&#8221; is he? Watch the show above. Now watch this excerpt from a 1966 interview. Think he&#8217;s just talking about TV? He&#8217;s also talking about the Internet&#8230;<em>and AI<\/em>!\u00a0<br \/><br \/><\/p>\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Marshall McLuhan 1966 - Predicting the Internet with Robert Fulford\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ijeMM-NXvus?start=5&#038;feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; I discovered Marshall McLuhan where you were supposed to: on television. It was during the late winter of 1967 in what was in those days referred to as the Sunday afternoon \u201cghetto\u201d for \u201chighbrow\u201d programming. The series was called NBC Experiment in Television and it featured everything from absurdist theater to unknown [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[185,368],"tags":[1206,689],"class_list":["post-3692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-writing-lit-and-unlit","category-tv-reviews","tag-marshall-mcluhan","tag-tom-wolfe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3692"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3892,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3692\/revisions\/3892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}