Marshall McLuhan

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Marshall McLuhan, photo from 1945

Herbert Marshall McLuhan , CC (born July 21, 1911 in Edmonton , Alberta , † December 31, 1980 in Toronto ) was a Canadian philosopher , humanities scholar , professor of English literature , literary critic , rhetorician and communication theorist . McLuhan's work is considered a cornerstone of media theory . His central thesis is that the medium is the message . He also formulated the term “ global village ”. McLuhan shaped the media discussion from the late 1960s until his death.

biography

McLuhan was in 1911 in Edmonton , Alberta , Canada , the son of Methodist born Elsie Naomi McLuhan, born Hall, and Herbert Ernest McLuhan. Marshall was his maternal grandmother's last name. His mother first worked as a teacher at a Baptist school and later as an actress. His father was a real estate agent in Edmonton. After the outbreak of the First World War , the shop had to be closed and Herbert McLuhan joined the Canadian army. After a year he fell ill with the flu and was discharged from the army in 1915. Upon release, the family moved to Winnipeg , where Marshall McLuhan attended Kelvin Technical High School and enrolled at the University of Manitoba in 1928 .

In 1933 McLuhan achieved a Bachelor of Arts degree , where he won a university gold medal in the arts and sciences . In 1934 he achieved a Master of Arts degree in English Studies after majoring in mechanical engineering for a year. After unsuccessfully applying for a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University , he was able to fulfill his wish to study in England at Cambridge University . There he was required to complete a bachelor's degree within four years before starting a doctoral degree. McLuhan entered Trinity Hall College in the fall of 1934 , where he studied with IA Richards and FR Leavis (1895–1978) and was influenced by New Criticism . In later reflections of his student days, he recognized the faculty for its emphasis on exercise of perception and concepts such as Richard's feedforward . McLuhan's studies at Cambridge University formed an essential basis for his later ideas and methods. In 1936 he received a bachelor's degree from Cambridge and began his dissertation. After he returned from England , he worked in the academic year 1936-1937 as an assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison , since no adequate post was available in Canada.

During his trivium in Cambridge, influenced by the writings of GK Chestertons , he first approached the Roman Catholic Church . In March 1937, McLuhan converted to Catholicism. His father accepted the conversion after talking to a clergyman, his mother feared that the conversion would damage his career and regretted him. McLuhan was a believer throughout his life, but did not make his belief the subject of public debate. McLuhan had a keen interest in the number three, the trivium, and the trinity. The Virgin Mary was of spiritual importance to McLuhan . For the remainder of his career he taught exclusively in Roman Catholic institutions. He taught English at St. Louis University from 1937 to 1944 , with an interruption from 1939 to 1940 when he was in Cambridge. In Saint Louis he taught Father Walter J. Ong SJ (1912-2003), who wrote his dissertation on a topic proposed by McLuhan and was later considered an expert in communication and technology.

On August 4, 1939, McLuhan married Corinne Lewis (* 1912 † 2008), a Fort Worth teacher and budding actress whom he had met in St. Louis. They lived in Cambridge from 1939 to 1940, where McLuhan was awarded his Masters degree in January 1940 and worked on his PhD dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the oral arts. After the outbreak of World War II , McLuhan was given permission to work on his doctorate from the United States without having to return to England for an oral exam. McLuhan then returned to St. Louis University, where he continued to teach. He was awarded his doctorate in December 1943. From 1944 to 1946, McLuhan taught at Assumption University in Windsor, Ontario . From 1946 McLuhan worked at St. Michael's College, a Catholic part of the University of Toronto . McLuhan taught there, among others, Hugh Kenner . One of his colleagues was the Canadian economist and communication theorist Harold Innis , who greatly influenced McLuhan's work.

In the early 1950s, McLuhan founded the Communication and Culture Seminars at the University of Toronto with support from the Ford Foundation . With increasing awareness, McLuhan received numerous offers from other universities; to keep it up, the University of Toronto founded the Center for Culture and Technology in 1963 . During this time he released The Mechanical Bride. Folklore of Industrial Man 1951 his first major work. The Mechanical Bride covers the impact of advertising on society and culture. During the 1950s McLuhan published Explorations magazine with Harold Innis , Eric A. Havelock , Derrick de Kerckhove and Barry Wellmann . Carpenter and McLuhan were the best known representatives of the Toronto School . McLuhan remained at the University of Toronto until 1979, where he was largely responsible for the management of the Center for Culture and Technology.

From 1967 to 1968, McLuhan was the Albert Schweitzer Professorship at Fordham University in New York . During McLuhan's stay in New York , his son Eric McLuhan conducted the Fordham experiment , which examined the different effects of light-on and light-through media. At the same time, McLuhan was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor that was successfully treated. In 1968 McLuhan returned to Toronto, where he spent the rest of his life. McLuhan continued his career at the University of Toronto and lived in the suburb of Wychwood Park, in the neighborhood of Anatol Rapoport . In 1970 McLuhan was raised to the rank of Companion of the Order of Canada . In 1975 McLuhan held the McDermott Professorship from April to May.

Marshall and Corinne McLuhan had six children: Eric, twins Mary and Theresa, Stephanie, Elizabeth and Michael. The cost of an extended family likely forced McLuhan to take on assignments, consultancy, and speaking engagements from large companies. In September 1979, McLuhan suffered a stroke that affected his ability to speak. The University of Toronto's School of Graduate Studies, which ran the McLuhan's Center for Communication and Technology, tried to close it. The shutdown plan was thwarted by a number of supporters, including Woody Allen , in whose film Urban Neurotics McLuhan made a guest appearance.

On December 31, 1980, McLuhan died in Toronto in his sleep of complications from a stroke.

Major works

During his tenure at Saint Louis University from 1937 to 1944, McLuhan worked simultaneously on two projects: his dissertation for the doctorate and on a manuscript, which was published in 1951 in part as The Mechanical Bride . The final version of The Mechanical Bride included only a representative selection of the materials that McLuhan had prepared.

McLuhan's dissertation for the doctorate, completed in 1942, dealt with the areas known as trivium in the Anglo-American region : grammar , dialectics and rhetoric. In his later publications, McLuhan used the concept of the trivium, which goes back to Roman antiquity, to paint an orderly and systematic picture of certain epochs of Western culture. According to this scheme, for McLuhan the Middle Ages are characterized by the emphasis on theoretical preoccupation with logic. The development that led to the Renaissance was not the rediscovery of ancient texts, but a change from the focus on logic to dealing with rhetoric and languages. For McLuhan, modern life is characterized by the return of grammar as a determining area. McLuhan saw this tendency confirmed by New Criticism.

In The Mechanical Bride , McLuhan was mainly concerned with analyzing various examples of manipulation in contemporary pop culture, aided by the fact that dialectics and rhetoric in the classical trivium are associated with manipulation. After this focus, McLuhan dealt mainly with the influence of media, regardless of its content.

McLuhan founded Explorations magazine with anthropologist Edmund Snow Carpenter . In a letter to Ong dated May 31, 1953, McLuhan wrote that he had received a grant of $ 43,000 from the Ford Foundation to run an interdisciplinary communications project at the University of Toronto that resulted in the magazine.

The Mechanical Bride (1951)

The 1951 work erstveröffentlichte The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Eng .: Mechanical Bride: folk culture of the industrial people ) is one of the first studies of popular culture. His interest in the critical study of pop culture was primarily aroused by FR Leavis' book Culture and Environment , published in 1933 . The title Mechanical Bride comes from a work by the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp . Like the 1962 published book The Gutenberg Galaxy (dt .: The Gutenberg Galaxy) is The Mechanical Bride written as a series of essays that can be read in any order - a way of working that McLuhan called mosaic access to writing a book. Each essay begins with a quote from a newspaper article or advertisement, which is followed by an analysis of the text example. The analysis includes the aesthetics and the background of the texts and images. McLuhan chose advertisements and articles not only to show the symbols and implications of corporate identities, but also to explore what the advertisements are saying about the society to which they are addressed.

Examples of advertisements and their analysis

  • A nose for news and a stomach for whiskey : McLuhan asks "Why is it his job to get cirrhosis of the liver?" Against this Time Magazine subject , which features a reporter who has come from a story by Ernest Hemingway .
  • Freedom to Hear - Freedom to See : A Radio Corporation of America theme based on this motto shows a family listening to the radio while doing their daily chores. McLuhan adds: “Come here children. Buy a radio and feel free - free to listen. "
  • For men who differ - Lord Calvert : The advertising motif for the whiskey brand Lord Calvert shows nine men drinking whiskey. McLuhan notes that the motif shows only artists and asks the question, “Why do you choose the arts? Didn't anyone in science or industry differ in drinking whiskey? "
  • The famous DuBarry course for success : The subject of a beauty cream showing women in bathing suits describes itself as a "course for success with lessons", which leads McLuhan to ask: "Why laugh and get fat when you can experience agony and success in a straitjacket?" "

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The End of the Book Age ( The Gutenberg Galaxis: The Making of Typographic Man ), written in 1961 and first published in 1962, is one of the earliest studies on oral culture ( orality ), written culture ( literacy ), cultural studies and media ecology . The aim of the study is to show the way in which electronic media influence the cognitive organization and consequently the social organization.

“When a new technology extends one or more of our senses into the social world, new relationships between all of our senses will arise. This is similar to adding a new note to a melody. If the senses change in any culture, what was clear before will become cloudy, and what was unclear or cloudy will become transparent. "

The Letter

McLuhan's episodic and foray into history leads from the pre-alphabetic tribes to the electronic age. According to McLuhan, the invention of the letter accelerated and intensified the cultural and cognitive changes that have been emerging since the invention and use of the alphabet, which McLuhan calls phonemic orthography. McLuhan makes a precise distinction between the phonetic alphabet and logographic writing systems, such as hieroglyphs and ideograms .

The written culture, initiated by the invention of the Gutenberg press in the middle of the 15th century, brought with it the dominance of visual culture over auditory and oral culture. Referring to an observation on the nature of the printed word in Prints and Visual Communication by William Ivins , McLuhan states:

“In this section [Ivins] not only notes the deep rootedness of uniform, regular habits, but more importantly shows the visual homogenization of the experience of printed culture and the suppression of hearing and other sensory perceptions. [...] The technique and the social effects of typography cause us not to notice interludes and what it was like to keep 'formal' causes out, both in our inner and outer lives. The pressure exists through the fixed separation of functions and cultivates a mentality that resists all but a separating and dividing or specialized consideration. "

The main concept of McLuhan's reasoning (which was later completed in The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967) ) is that new technologies (such as writing systems, printing machines and languages) have an attraction on cognition that, in turn, has an attraction on cognition impact on social organization. Printing technology changes our perceptual habits ( visual homogenization of experience ), which alternately affects social interactions ( cultivates a mentality that opposes all but a […] specialized perspective ). According to McLuhan, the invention of printing technology enabled and caused many of the formative developments of modernity in the western world, such as individualism , democracy , Protestantism , capitalism and nationalism . For McLuhan, these currents reflect the property of printing technology to segment actions, functions and principles of visual quantification.

The global village

In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be replaced by what is known as electronic interdependence as soon as the electronic media replaced visual culture with listening and speaking culture. During this period, humanity would move away from individualism and separation and adopt a collective tribal identity . McLuhan called this social structure a global village . America and Cosmic Man (1948) by Wyndham Lewis and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce are sometimes cited as sources for this term , but none of the authors used the term. According to McLuhan's son Eric McLuhan , McLuhan, who had studied Finnegan's wake extensively and was a close friend of Lewis, often discussed his concept with it, but there is no evidence that the concept of the global village came from Lewis. McLuhan did not use the term judgmental, but exclusively descriptive.

“Instead of becoming a great Alexandrian library, the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, just like children's science fiction . As our senses have stepped outside of us, Big Brother comes in. If we are not aware of this dynamic we suddenly fall into a phase of panic fear, just like in a small world with tribal drums, total dependency and overlapping coexistence. […] Fear is the normal state of any oral society, since in it everything affects everyone at the same time. […] In our long endeavor to regain a bit of unity of sensitivity and thought for the Western world, we were no more prepared to accept the consequences of a tribe than we were ready to accept the fragmentation of the human psyche by the print culture ]. "

The key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no morality in it - it is just a tool that constantly shapes the self-concept - and consequently self-realization - of an individual and also of a society.

“Isn't it obvious that there are always enough moral problems without taking a moral stand in the technical field? […] The pressure is the extreme stage of an alphabetical culture which drives people out of the tribe or decollectivates them in the first place. The print elevates the visual characteristics of the alphabet into the highest possible form of definition. The pressure carries the individualizing power of the phonetic alphabet further than the manuscript culture could ever have done. Printing is the technology of individualism. If mankind chose to modify this visual technology with an electronic component, individualism would also be modified. Appealing against it would be like accusing a buzz saw for severing fingers. "But," someone says, "We didn't know it was going to happen." So far, not even stupidity is a moral issue. It's a problem, but not a moral one; and it would be nice to clear up some of the moral nebulae that surround our technology. It would be good for morale. "

For McLuhan, the moral valence of technology effects on cognition is a matter of perspective. McLuhan compares the excitement and concern caused by the increased circulation of books in the late 17th century with modern fears of the end of the book . If there is no universal moral guideline for technologies, according to McLuhan, “only a disaster can emerge from the unconscious about the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies”.

Although the World Wide Web was invented thirty years after The Gutenberg Galaxy was published, McLuhan coined and popularized the term surfing to denote a fast, irregular, and multidirectional movement through documents or knowledge. In this sense, statements like " Heidegger surfs the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes surfs the mechanical wave."

McLuhan frequently cited the 1958 published book Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue of Walter Ong , obviously him to write The Gutenberg Galaxy had caused. Ong published an approving review in America magazine . Ong later weakened his statements by describing The Gutenberg Galaxy as a "peppy analysis, mediocre in some scientific detail but invaluable in showing the pep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes that the transition from illiteracy to print and furthermore brought with it ". McLuhan said of the book:

“I'm not interested in getting any kind of fame out of it. I think it's a book that someone should have written a century ago. I wish someone else had written it. It will be a useful prelude to rewriting Understanding Media. "

The Gutenberg Galaxy was awarded the highest Canadian literary prize, the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction, in 1962 . The committee was chaired by Northrop Frye , McLuhan's fellow student at the University of Toronto and a frequent intellectual partner.

Understanding Media (1964)

McLuhan's best-known work Understanding Media is a formative study of media theory . McLuhan suggested under the slogan The medium is the message that it is not the content transmitted through the media but the medium itself that should be the subject of scientific investigation. McLuhan assumed that it is not the transmitted content of a medium but rather the characteristics of a medium that have an impact on the society in which the medium appears. McLuhan illustrated his argument using the example of an incandescent lamp . An incandescent lamp has no newspaper-style content, it is a medium that creates social effects as it makes it possible to create spaces in the dark that would otherwise be hidden. He describes the light bulb as a medium without content. McLuhan states that an incandescent lamp creates an environment just by its presence. He assumed that the content of a medium had only a small impact on society, that the impact on society would be almost the same if a television station broadcast children's programs or programs containing violence. He found that all media engage consumers in a characteristic way. A section of a book can be read again at will, but a movie must be repeated in its entirety in order for a single section to be viewed again.

“Hot” and “cold” media

In the first part of Understanding Media , McLuhan introduces the (gradual) distinction between “hot” and cold (“cool”) media. “Hot” media are those in which the human sense is addressed with a high information density, while cold media are correspondingly those with a lower information density. In this sense, McLuhan also speaks of media with high resolution (“high definition”) and media with low resolution (“low definition”). A photograph is, for example, a visually high-resolution, “hot” medium in contrast to a low-resolution and therefore “cold” cartoon. The telephone is a cold medium, precisely because of its low auditory information content; In contrast, the radio is a hot medium. Television - at the time still mainly broadcast in black and white with a relatively small screen size and line resolution - is a cold medium compared to the cinema.

This distinction is accompanied by a reverse degree of participation by the respective target group. Because of the high information density of hot media, it is not necessary to fill in or complete information gaps. The opposite is true for cold media, which require a higher level of audience participation.

"A hot medium requires less participation than a cold one, just as a lecture requires less participation than a seminar and a book less than a dialogue."

With regard to this degree of participation, McLuhan sees many examples in our time that hot media exclude but include cold media.

The concept has often been criticized for forcing the media into a dual system. In fact, hot and cold media can be classified on a scale rather than in separate areas. It is also criticized that it is doubtful whether the examples given by McLuhan correspond to his delimitation criteria and what “consequences this classification ultimately has”.

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967)

The book The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects , published in 1967, was McLuhan's best-selling work, selling nearly a million copies. Initiated by Quentin Fiore , McLuhan adapted the term massage after a misprint to describe the effects of a medium that massages the human sensory system . According to McLuhan biographer W. Terrence Gordon, by the time it was published in 1967 , McLuhan had realized that his slogan The Medium Is the Message had become a cliché, and took the opportunity to toss it on the compost heap of language to recycle and to recycle. But the new title is more than an expression of McLuhan's insatiable taste for punch lines, more than a good amalgamation of self-mockery and self-rescue - and the subtitle reads An inventory of the effects of what the lesson condensed in the original slogan - in fact, the title was originally the Result of a printing error. When the book came back from the typesetter , the title was The Medium is the Massage instead of The Medium is the Message originally intended . The typesetter had confused the "e" with the "a". When McLuhan saw the spelling, he exclaimed: Leave it that way! It's great and spot on .

Fiore, a well-known graphic artist and communications consultant at the time, illustrated the effects put together by Jerome Agel. On the first pages of the book, he placed a structure in which an image showing the effects of the media is shown with a text summary on the opposite page. The reader repeatedly changes analytical patterns: from “reading” typographical printing to “scanning” photographic reproductions - thus reinforcing McLuhan's central argument that each medium massages or influences the human sensory differently.

In The Medium Is Massage , McLuhan reworked the argument that appeared in the foreword to The Gutenberg Galaxis that media are extensions of our human senses, body and spirit.

In the last part, McLuhan describes core changes in the way in which humanity perceives the world and the changes in these perceptions through new media.

“The technique of invention was a 19th century discovery brought about by the adoption of fixed viewpoints and perspectives through typography, while the suspended judgment technology was the 20th century discovery brought about by the Orphic capabilities of radio, television and film are provided. "

Columbia Records produced a sound recording of the work. The recording consists of a pastiche of statements by McLuhan, which are interrupted by other speakers, including speakers in different registers, discordant tones and random music from the 1960s. The result is an attempt to translate the disconnected images of a television broadcast into sound format, thereby preventing a coherent stream of conscious thoughts. Various recording techniques and statements have been used to illustrate the relationship between spoken, literary speech and the characteristics of electronic sound media. The McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand described the recording as "the 1967 [possible] equivalent of a McLuhan video".

Example:

"I wouldn't be seen dead with a living piece of art."

- "Old man" speaks

"Leave the nonsense and finally speak plain text."

- "Middle-aged man" speaks

War and Peace in the Global Village (1968)

War and Peace in the Global Village is a study of wars in history and warfare in the future, inspired by James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake .

McLuhan regards Finnegans Wake as a gigantic cryptogram that represents a cyclical pattern throughout human history in the form of “ten thunders”. Each “thunder” is a portmanteau about 100 characters long that describes a technology and its respective effects on the society in which it is introduced. In order to find a meaning, the reader has to separate the phrase into individual words that can come from different languages. Then the words must be spoken aloud to see the effect of each word. The meaning of the individual word combinations is controversial.

McLuhan assumed that the "Ten Thunders" in Finnegans Wake would represent individual stages of human development.

  • Donner 1: Paleolithic to Neolithic . Language, division into East and West. Development from herding to the utilization of animals.
  • Thunder 2: clothing as a weapon. Fencing of private areas. First social aggression.
  • Thunder 3: Specialization. Centralism by the wheel, transport, cities: civil life.
  • Donner 4: markets and vegetable gardens. Patterns of nature are submitted to greed and power.
  • Thunder 5: Print. Distortion and translation of human patterns and postures and priests.
  • Donner 6: Industrial Revolution . Extreme development of printing technology and individualism.
  • Donner 7: The tribal man again. All characters are separated at the end. Return of the chorus.
  • Thunder 8: Movies . Pop-Art, Pop-Kulch via tribal radio. Marriage of sight and hearing.
  • Thunder 9: cars and planes. Cities in crisis create centralization and decentralization at the same time. Speed ​​and death.
  • Thunder 10: television . Back to tribal participation in the tribal mood slush. The final thunder is turbulent, a muddy wake, a gloom of the non-visual, palpable human being.

From Cliche to Archetype (1970)

In the 1970 book From Cliche to Archetype , McLuhan, in collaboration with the Canadian poet Wilfred Watson, examined the effects of verbal clichés and the archetype . In the work McLuhan coined the term global theater ( Global Theater ).

According to McLuhan's interpretation, a cliché is a normal action, phrase, etc. that is used so often that the consumer is “anesthetized” against its effects.

McLuhan demonstrates this with Eugène Ionesco's play The Bald Singer , whose dialogues consist exclusively of phrases that Ionesco took from an Assimil language book.

"Ionesco translated all of this idiomatic English cliché into literary French, which is English in its most absurd aspect."

According to McLuhan's definition, an archetype is a “cited extension, medium, technology or environment”. Environment in this context also describes the types of consciousness and cognitive changes it exerts on people, similar to the psychological mechanisms described by Carl Gustav Jung .

McLuhan assumed that there was an interlude between cliché and archetype known as duplication .

“Another theme in Finnegans Wake that helps understand the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is 'the past is pastime.' The dominant technologies of one age will become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the 20th century, the number of simultaneously available "times past" is so great that it can cause cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are available at the same time, the artist's work takes on a new scope and urgency as the form emerges. Many people are pushed into the role of artist. The artist can not meet the principles of duplication and interlude without, since this type of hendiadyschem dialogue for the structure of consciousness and autonomy is essential. "

McLuhan sets the period of transition from cliche to archetype with the theater of the absurd in relation

“In the 17th century Pascal told us that the heart has many reasons that the head doesn't know about. The theater of the absurd is principally a communication with the head in one of the silent languages ​​of the heart that it has tried to forget in two or three hundred years. In the 17th century, the languages ​​of the heart were pushed into the unconscious by the dominant prejudice of pressure. "

The languages ​​of the heart that McLuhan would define as Oral Culture are those that have been archetype and cliché by means of the printing press.

According to McLuhan, the medium of the satellite encloses the earth in a human-made environment "which ends 'nature' and transforms the globe into a repertory theater that has to be programmed". All previous environments and their artifacts become obsolete under these conditions ("the past is pastimes"). McLuhan modified the term global village with reference to this assumption , since according to his definition it can be described under the conditions summarized in the term global theater .

Key concepts

Tetrad of media effects

In Laws of Media , published posthumously by his son Eric in 1988 , McLuhan summarized his theses on media and their effects and used a tetrad to portray them . This arrangement makes it possible to show the effects of technologies (including media) on a society by splitting their effects into four categories and showing them simultaneously. McLuhan designed this form as an educational tool that formulates his theses as a question of how to deal with a medium:

  • What does the medium improve?
  • What makes the medium obsolete?
  • What makes the medium up-to-date again that was previously made obsolete?
  • What does the medium trigger when it is stretched to its extremes?

The laws of the tetrad are in effect simultaneously, not successively or in chronological order, and allow the questioner to explore the grammar and syntax of the language of the media . Based on the theses of his mentor Harold Innis , McLuhan assumes that a medium "overheats" or assumes an opposite shape when it is exaggerated to its extremes.

Tetrad according to McLuhan

Opposite is an illustration of the tetrad as a group of five square surfaces that form an X. The focus is on the name of the medium. The areas on the left describe the enhancement and undo qualities of a medium, both qualities of the figure . Those on the right are the qualities of Aging and Reversing , both qualities of the background .

The example of the radio results in the following design:

  • Reinforcing (figure) What reinforces or intensifies the medium . Radio amplifies speech and music.
  • Obsolete (background) What the medium is displacing. Radio reduces the importance of print and visual goods.
  • Undoing (Figure) What the medium brings back that was previously discarded Radio puts the spoken word back in the foreground.
  • Inverse (background) What the medium does when it is pushed to its extremes. Acoustic radio is changing into audiovisual television.

Figure and background

McLuhan adopted the Gestalt psychological theory of figure and background , which underlay the thesis of the slogan The medium is the message . He used this concept to explain how a communication technology, medium or figure operates through its context of the background .

McLuhan believed that it was necessary to examine the figure (medium) and background (context) together in order to control them, since neither is possible without the other. McLuhan assumed that media had to be examined in their historical context, especially in relation to the technologies that preceded them. The current environment, created by the effects of previous technologies, enables new technologies that continue to transform society and individuals.

They have their own ideas of space and time embedded in all technologies. The message that the medium transmits can only be understood if the medium and the environment in which it is used - and which it creates at the same time - are analyzed together. McLuhan believed that examining the relationship between figure and background would reveal a critical look at culture and society.

legacy

After the release of Understanding Media , McLuhan gained a high level of notoriety. Its high publicity was mainly promoted by the work of the Californian advertising experts Gerald Feigen and Howard Gossage , who founded the practice of genius scouting . In May 1965, Feigen and Gossage arranged a meeting between McLuhan and the editors of numerous New York magazines at the Lombardy Hotel in New York. According to Philip Marchand, as a result of that meeting, McLuhan was offered the use of an office in both the Time Magazine and Newsweek editorial offices .

In August 1965, Feigen and Gossage held a so-called "McLuhan Festival" on the premises of Gossen's advertising agency in San Francisco. During this festival, McLuhan met with numerous advertising professionals, members of the city council, editors of the San Francisco Chronicle and Ramparts magazine. McLuhan's fame was significantly enhanced by a text written by Tom Wolfe , entitled What If He Is Right? (Eng: what if he's right?) has been published in New York Magazine and in Wolfes magazine The Pump House Gang . According to Feigen and Gossage, their work had little effect on McLuhan's notoriety, saying their work likely sped McLuhan's reception up by six months. McLuhan's recognized position as an expert in the media discussion resulted in increased media coverage, with reports on McLuhan appearing in Life Magazine, Harper's, Fortune, Esquire and others , among others . The New Yorker published cartoons about McLuhan. In 1969 Playboy published an eclectic interview with McLuhan.

During his lifetime, McLuhan influenced cultural critics , humanities scholars and, above all, media theorists such as Neil Postman , Jean Baudrillard , Camille Paglia , Timothy Leary , Terence McKenna , William Irwin Thompson , Paul Levinson , Douglas Rushkoff , Jaron Lanier and John David Ebert , as well as politicians like Pierre Trudeau and Jerry Brown . Andy Warhol referred to McLuhan with his postulate of 15 minutes of fame . When asked about a way to end the violence in Angola in the 1970s, McLuhan suggested the massive distribution of televisions. In 1991, McLuhan was named patron of Wired Magazine . A quote McLuhan was in the first 10 years of its publication in the imprint printed.

reception

The American composer and pianist Duke Ellington recorded an album in 1971 entitled The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse and subtitled A Suite in Eight Parts . As Ellington explains in his introduction, the album title goes back to a note by Marshall McLuhan and refers to his statement: “Well, the simple fact of the matter is the whole world is an East / West happening, and while the Western world is going Oriental, the Oriental world is going Western. "

Posthumous reception

In 2011, numerous media celebrated his 100th birthday, including Die Zeit , the Rheinische Post , Der Standard (Vienna), DRadio , the Bayerischer Rundfunk and Telepolis .

The Canadian Embassy in Berlin maintains a publicly accessible McLuhan archive of film and audio documents.

The extensive McLuhan Archives at the National Library of Canada and the University Library in Toronto were declared World Document Heritage in 2017 .

Works cited

By Marshall McLuhan

About Marshall McLuhan

See also

literature

  • Martin Baltes, Rainer Höltschl (eds.): Absolute Marshall McLuhan. orange-press, Freiburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-936086-55-3 .
  • Wolfram Buddecke: Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media. In: MEDIENwissenschaft: Reviews | Reviews , Vol. 13 (1996), No. 1, pp. 114-118. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17192/ep1996.1.4148 .
  • Derrick de Kerckhove, Martina Leeker, Kerstin Schmidt (eds.): McLuhan reread: Critical analyzes of media and culture in the 21st century . Transcript 2008, ISBN 978-3-89942-762-2 .
  • Rainer Höltschl: Marshall McLuhan. UTB, Stuttgart 2010, ISBN 978-3-8252-3360-0 .
  • Martin Baltes: Marshall McLuhan. In: Martin L. Hofmann u. a. (Ed.): Culture Club II. Classics of culture theory . Frankfurt / M. 2006, pp. 148-163.
  • Till A. Heilmann: A look in the rearview mirror. On the past and present of ›Understanding Media‹. In: Navigationen - Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften , Vol. 14 (2014), No. 2, pp. 87-103. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/1420 .
  • Till A. Heilmann, Jens Schröter (Ed.): Understanding the media. Marshall McLuhan's UNDERSTANDING MEDIA . Lüneburg: meson press 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/790 .
  • Stefan Hoffmann: Review of Marshall McLuhan absolute , ed. by Martin Baltes and Rainer Höltschl. In: MEDIENwissenschaft: Reviews | Reviews. (2003), Issue 1, pp. 57-58.
  • Stefan Hoffmann: Reread: Marshall McLuhan's “Understanding Media”. In: Media Studies. (2002) Issue 1, pp. 118-121. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17192/ep2002.1.2360
  • Philip Marchand: Marshall McLuhan. Media Ambassador. Biography. Stuttgart 1999.
  • Review of Understanding McLuhan. In the electric world change is the only stable factor . CD-ROM, Voyager, New York; Systhema, Munich 1996. In: c't Heft 10 (1996) p. 406.
  • Douglas Coupland : Marshall McLuhan: A Biography. Tropen-Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-608-50306-7 .
  • Sven Grampp: "Marshall McLuhan: An Introduction", UVK-Verlagsgesellschaft, 2011, ISBN 9783825235703

Web links

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English-language web links

Wikiquote: Marshall McLuhan  - Quotes

German-language web links

Wikiquote: Marshall McLuhan  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gordon, pp. 99-100.
  2. ↑ Gordon, p. 40; McLuhan later commented on this, "One advantage we Westerners have is that we're under no illusion we've had an education. That's why I started at the bottom again." Marchand (1990), p 30.
  3. ↑ Marchand, pp. 33-34.
  4. ↑ Marchand, pp. 37-47.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan , part of a virtual museum at Library and Archives Canada
  6. ↑ a b Gordon, p. 94.
  7. ↑ Gordon, pp. 69-70.
  8. ^ Lewis H. Lapham, Introduction to Understanding Media (First MIT Press Edition), pp. Xvii
  9. ↑ Gordon, pp. 54-56.
  10. ↑ Gordon, p. 74, states March 25; Marchand (1990), p. 44, reports March 30th.
  11. ↑ Marchand (1990), pp. 44-45.
  12. ↑ Marchand (1990), p. 45.
  13. ↑ Acquaintances speculated about his connection to the Virgin Mary, one said: "He [McLuhan] had a direct connection to the Blessed Virgin Mary ... He spoke briefly once, almost fearfully, in a please-don't-laugh-at-me tone. He didn't say, "I know because the Virgin Mary told me," but it was clear that one of the reasons he was so sure about certain things was that the Virgin Mary gave him his knowledge of the subject had confirmed. " (quoted in Marchand, p. 51).
  14. ↑ She was Marshall McLuhan's great love ardent defender, supporter and critic , Lisa Fitterman, Globe and Mail, April 19, 2008, accessed June 29, 2008
  15. ^ Gordon, p. 115.
  16. ^ Website of the Governor General of Canada
  17. ^ University of Toronto Bulletin , 1979; Martin Friedland, The University of Toronto: A History , University of Toronto Press, 2002
  18. ↑ Annie Hall on YouTube
  19. ^ Marshall McLuhan, "Poetic and Rhetorical Exegesis: The Case for Leavis against Richards and Empson" in the Sewanee Review , Volume 52, Number 2 (1944): 266-76.
  20. ^ The Mechanical Bride , p. 9.
  21. ^ The Mechanical Bride , p. 21.
  22. ^ The Mechanical Bride , p. 56.
  23. ^ The Mechanical Bride , p. 152.
  24. ↑ Gutenberg Galaxy 1962, p. 41.
  25. ↑ Gutenberg Galaxy pp. 124-26.
  26. ↑ Gutenberg Galaxy p. 154.
  27. ^ McLuhan Studies , Issue 2, Eric McLuhan, The source of the term "global Village", 1996, accessed December 30, 2008
  28. ↑ Gutenberg Galaxy p. 32.
  29. ↑ Gutenberg Galaxy p. 158.
  30. ^ Paul Levinson: Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium , Routledge 1999, ISBN 0-415-19251-X ( Online ).
  31. ↑ Bill Stewart: Marshall McLuhan Foresees The Global Village , in: Living Internet , January 7, 2007 Bill Stewart, Marshall McLuhan Foresees The Global Village, published in: Living Internet, January 7, 2007, accessed on: May 8, 2008
  32. ↑ America 107 (Sept. 15, 1962): 743, 747.
  33. ^ New Catholic Encyclopedia 8 (1967): 838.
  34. ^ Gordon, p. 109.
  35. ↑ Understanding Media , p. 8.
  36. ↑ Understanding Media , p. 24f.
  37. ↑ Understanding Media , p. 25.
  38. ↑ Understanding Media , p. 25.
  39. ^ Klaus Beck : Communication Science. 4th edition. UVK, Konstanz 2015 (UTB basics), ISBN 978-3-8252-2964-1 , p. 86
  40. ^ A b Gary Wolf, The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool, published in: Wired 4.01, January 1996, accessed May 10, 2009
  41. ↑ Marchand, p. 203.
  42. ^ McLuhan & Fiore, 1967
  43. ^ Gordon, p. 175.
  44. ↑ - ( Memento of the original from July 17, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / marshallmcluhan.com
  45. ↑ Understanding Media , p. 68.
  46. ↑ Marchand (1998), p. 187.
  47. ^ War and Peace in the Global Village , p. 46.
  48. ↑ From Cliché to Archetype , p. 4.
  49. ↑ From Cliché to Archetype , p. 99.
  50. ↑ From Cliché to Archetype , p. 5.
  51. ↑ From Cliché to Archetype , p. 9.
  52. ↑ Marchand, pp. 182-184.
  53. ↑ Playboy, March 1969, Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan, pp. 26-27, 45, 55-56, 61, 63
  54. ↑ It's cool not to shave - Marshall McLuhan, the Man and his Message - CBC Archives.Retrieved July 2, 2007
  55. ↑ Daniele Luttazzi , interview in the radio show Stereonotte ( Memento of the original from June 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.radio.rai.it archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. by RAI Radio1 (Italian), July 1, 2007 02:00. Quote: “ McLuhan era uno che al premier canadese che si interrogava su un modo per sedare dei disordini in Angola, McLuhan disse, negli anni 70, 'riempite la nazione diapparecchi televisivi'; ed è quello che venne fatto; e la rivoluzione in Angola cessò. "
  56. ↑ An Unpublished Interview with Marshall McLuhan (1967) by Artist P. Mansaram .
  57. ↑ zeit.de: The magician. - In these days Marshall McLuhan, the most influential media theorist of all time, would have turned 100 years old. He transfigured televisions and computers into the religion of salvation. His disciples still do that today.
  58. ↑ The thinker of the global village (RP 20 July 2011 p. A7)
  59. ↑ A prophet returns. July 15, 2011, accessed January 29, 2012 . and media seismograph
  60. ↑ We remember: Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born 100 years ago today  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / Wissen.dradio.de  
  61. ↑ Marshall McLuhan: Backward into the future  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.br-online.de  
  62. ↑ heise.de: Martin Baltes (July 21, 2011): The medium is the message: is Marshall McLuhan's media theory still relevant in the age of smartphones and Facebook?
  63. ^ Archive, Berlin. The breakdown can be viewed on this site.
  64. ↑ Marshall McLuhan: The Archives of the Future , UNESCO Memory of the World, accessed June 25, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME McLuhan, Marshall
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McLuhan, Herbert Marshall (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian philosopher, humanities scholar, professor of English literature, literary critic, rhetorician and communication theorist
DATE OF BIRTH July 21, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Edmonton , Alberta
DATE OF DEATH December 31, 1980
Place of death Toronto