Marshall McLuhan Said the Darndest Things

Thanks to Cookiemouse on Flickr for the use of this image.

Last week, July 21 to be exact, was Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday.  Or it would have been if the great media theorist had not died in 1980. His centenary brought a spate of remembrances and appreciations on the Web, and got me to thinking about all the marvelous things McLuhan said.

If you went to college in the 1960s, a passing familiarity with McLuhan was inescapable, but I really got to know his work in grad school during a course called Critical Theory. This was critical literary theory taught be a solemn, bearded prof in a weekly seminar over sherry at his house on Monday evenings. This particular prof was fond of actually using the expression, “Blow your mind,” as an encomium - as in “We’ll read Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body for next week. Let him blow your mind!”  Norman O. Brown, Suzanne Langer, Kenneth Burke, Gaston Bachelard - these are a few of the heavyweights I can recall reading that semester. 

Marshall McLuhan did not say, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

McLuhan was a sea breeze in this crowd. His books - Understanding Media was our main text – actually made sense and you could comprehend his ideas without paying your neurons to work overtime. McLuhan had a gift for pith, and he was a thought leader before a Booz, Allen & Hamilton magazine editor coined the term in 1994. He was Canadian to boot, which gave him a sort of exotic outsider’s authority in analyzing the modern world. Some of his ideas – “the global village” and “the medium is the message” come to mind – have become so widely accepted as to have attained the status of conventional wisdom, a state McLuhan would surely have disavowed and relished at the same time.

In honor of McLuhan at 100, I’ve dug back into his work and pulled out what I think of his Top 15 bits of wisdom. As I carried out this exercise, it occurred to me that these quotes could explain a lot of what’s going in today’s world, 30 years after McLuhan’s death. As a public service and a workout for your brain cells, then, I offer below the Posthumous Prognosticator Quiz.

The rules are simple. First, you read McLuhan’s Top 15, and then you match them up with the 15 cultural phenomena of our times that follow. The beauty of this quiz is there are no right or wrong answers and no scoring system, just the pleasure of playing the game. I am curious as to what apercus you stumble across taking on this assignment so, please, feel free to comment on your results.  Here we go. 

McLuhan’s Top 15

A) “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

B) “A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”

c) “Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.”

D) “Affluence creates poverty.”

E) “Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.”

F) “As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of ‘do it yourself.’ ”

G) “For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.”

H) “I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.”

I) “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.”

J) “Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.”

K) “Jokes are grievances.”

L) “Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”

M) “Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.”

N) “The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.”

0) “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”

And here are the matchups:

1. Barack Obama
2. Blogging
3. Decline of newspapers
4. Don Draper
5. Fall of the Iron Curtain
6. George W. Bush
7. Global warming
8. Google
9. I-Phone sales
10. Islamic fundamentalism
11. Lady Gaga
12. Mark Zuckerberg
13. Rush Limbaugh
14. Tea Party Republicans
15. YouTube