[3 articles]
The medium is still the message, if a convoluted one
http://www.vancouversun.com/medium+still+message+convoluted/2760443/story.html
In the Internet era, Marshall McLuhan's work has fresh relevance
By Richard Cavell
April 3, 2010
The faculty of arts at the University of British Columbia is a
vibrant community of scholars whose expertise ranges from the
humanities to creative and performing arts and social sciences. Here
we continue a series of essays that aim to deepen our understanding
of the world in which we live, and offer provocative and informed
views on cultural issues.
-- Nancy Gallini, Dean of Arts, UBC
--
Marshall McLuhan was born nearly a hundred years ago, yet his ideas
about media continue to speak to the present moment, when media stars
like Ann Coulter become subjects of debate at universities and
politics start looking more like a game show.
McLuhan was the first person to use a phrase that is now commonplace:
"the media." But McLuhan insisted that media don't do anything on
their own; as extensions of our bodies and our psyches, media are
deeply human. They don't simply represent issues; they make them,
transforming everything they touch.
Whereas print culture transformed oral communities into a collection
of discrete individuals, electronic media were re-tribalizing us,
according to McLuhan. The result would be a struggle -- often violent
-- to reclaim our individual identities. This struggle would also
herald great creativity as two powerful media -- print and electronic
-- confronted each other.
McLuhan was convinced that education had to take new media into
account if it was going to prepare students to negotiate the world
into which they would be graduating. Media, he realized, had
implications far beyond the idea of moving information around. They
had created new spaces for learning and in the process had
transformed not only how we learn but what we learn.
The ubiquity of media, the fact that we cannot get along without
them, emphasizes that they affect not only what we know but who we
are: we have become ourselves through print, television, digital and
mobile media.
The "global village," perhaps McLuhan's most debated idea, is a place
of struggle, yet its creative potential was immense, having social,
political, historical and cultural implications that we are only
beginning to come to terms with now. Environmental issues, for
example, remind us that everything is connected, and that green
technologies will require the interface of the sun, the genome and
the Internet.
These ideas are presented in a new and urgent context by Douglas
Coupland's recent biography of McLuhan in the Extraordinary Canadians
series published by Penguin Press. Coupland has given us the McLuhan
of the Internet era, a McLuhan constituted not only by the man born
in Edmonton on July 20, 1911, but also by his ghostly presence on
websites, by the millions of McLuhan hits on Google and by
conversations on Twitter.
With this mass of information, the question becomes: How do we
process it? McLuhan said that in the new information era the goal was
not simply to amass information but to find patterns in it. Finding
patterns was at once a critical and creative act. As Coupland notes,
McLuhan was, in this sense, an artist, "someone on the frontiers of
perception, who looks at information overload with the goal of
pattern recognition."
The end of McLuhan's life was sad: he had a stroke in 1979 that
rendered him unable to read, write or speak. He had been in physical
decline for a number of years, but when I met him in the fall of 1978
he was still in good form, his conversational powers startling, each
sentence proposing a new idea from an apparently limitless font. His
light must have shone very brightly indeed in those early years when
he began his pioneering work in media studies.
--
Richard Cavell is a professor of English at UBC and author of McLuhan
in Space: A Cultural Geography Douglas Coupland will give a public
lecture on McLuhan on Thursday at 5:15 p.m. at UBC. More information
at mediatrans.ca
--------
Googling Marshall McLuhan seems just so appropriate
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/article/786002--googling-marshall-mcluhan-seems-just-so-appropriate
Who better than multi-media artist star Douglas Coupland to consider
the prescient one's reality today?
Mar 26 2010
Alex Good
The latest offering in what has been thus far a very disappointing
Penguin series of lives of Extraordinary Canadians gets back to
basics in a self-referential way by highlighting the question of why
we want a new biography of celebrated media guru Marshall McLuhan in
the first place.
Series editor John Ralston Saul provides the standard boilerplate
about how through these books, each by an author "engaged in building
what Canada is now becoming," we "discover what we have been, but
also what we can be." This is just a way of dressing up with
nationalist cant what has proven to be a slickly effective bit of
marketing on the part of Penguin, the same "less-for-more" strategy
that has proved successful in their Penguin Lives and Great Ideas
series. It can and should be ignored.
But why, and author Douglas Coupland raises the point himself,
another McLuhan bio when two "terrific" biographies by Philip
Marchand and Terrence Gordon already exist? Coupland suggests that
with the accelerating pace of change in the texture of daily life we
need a McLuhan for the 21st century and the Internet era; a goal
that, given McLuhan's prescience, almost seems redundant.
Mentioning the Internet raises another question about the project,
highlighted in the Acknowledgments. Among the sources Coupland thanks
we find AbeBooks, Amazon, Google, MapQuest, Wikipedia, Yahoo! and
YouTube. This isn't surprising none of the Extraordinary Canadians
books I have read contain much if any original research but it does
make you wonder what Coupland sees as the value of this particular
book, or even "the book" itself as a medium. After all, why go to a
library to look things up when one can find the same information online?
In a section talking about McLuhan's time at Cambridge, for example,
Coupland admits that "much of this information came from Wikipedia."
When discussing McLuhan's seminal Understanding Media from 1964, a
Coupland footnote directs the reader to the Wikipedia entry on same
as it is "wonderfully done and can elaborate far more than there is
space to do here." A later passage describing brain anatomy is
sourced as "condensed from Wikipedia."
Anyone can Google McLuhan. What is the point of a book that is a
condensed version of material that is developed at greater length
online? Was space at such a premium? For such a short book, the
amount of padding is remarkable, amounting to some 20 per cent of the
whole. There are two lengthy excerpts from Coupland's novel
Generation A, pages of computer-generated word lists, MapQuest
directions to different locations, a test for autism (Coupland, whose
approach tends toward what he calls "pathography," thinks McLuhan may
have been borderline autistic) and listings of McLuhan's books taken
from online booksellers, complete with customer reviews.
Given that we can all "hopscotch from link to link to link" through
the internet today anyway, "why write a biography?" Coupland is
unsure, and even more unclear about why we would want to read one, at
least in this Gutenbergian form.
None of this makes Marshall McLuhan a bad book. In fact, I think it's
the best of the Extraordinary Canadians series thus far, both for its
readability and for its meditations on writing biography in the 21st century.
There is also a near-perfect fit between biographer and subject,
Coupland being one of that group of people whose "thought patterns"
seem to map Marshall's own (Coupland stays on a first-name basis with
McLuhan throughout). One recognizes the same verbal dexterity, formal
experimentation, and uncanny insight into a wide range of topics ...
as well as, on the other side of the ledger, the same randomness,
inconsistency and intellectual laziness. That most of it works so
well is due in large part to this shared mental map, which Coupland
is not afraid to further explore through personal anecdotes.
This brings us back again to the present Internet environment, our
own culture's version of what McLuhan called Narcissus narcosis.
Seeing in McLuhan a "genetic and ancestral" mirror, Coupland finally
transforms the story of his life into chapters of autobiography the
user becoming the content, once again.
--------
Coupland finds right balance in McLuhan bio
http://www.calgaryherald.com/technology/Coupland+finds+right+balance+McLuhan/2708025/story.html
By Mark Tremblay
March 21, 2010
Review
Marshall McLuhan, by Douglas Coupland (Penguin, $26, 272 pages)
--
Leave it to novelist Douglas Coupland to try to reinvent the
biography with Marshall McLuhan, the latest instalment in Penguin's
Extraordinary Canadians series.
McLuhan, born in 1911 in Edmonton, was an English professor who
garnered media-guru status in the early 1960s and made the phrases
"the medium is the message," and "the global village" part of the
popular lexicon.
Coupland, who burst onto the literary scene in a similarly meteoric
fashion with the 1991 publication of Generation X: Tales for an
Accelerated Culture, has also coined terms that have entered the
popular culture: in his case, McJobs and Generation X.
But Coupland writes that it was not those similarities, but his
discovery that McLuhan also had to deal with hyperacute hearing, that
convinced him he had to do this biography.
Throughout his insightful but quirky narrative, Coupland shows how
McLuhan's groundbreaking
ideas stemmed, at least in part, from McLuhan's personal traits and
the way his brain was "wired." Anyone
knowledgeable about Asperger's syndrome, an autistic spectrum
disorder, will find much that sounds familiar. "He was the epitome of
the absent-minded professor," Coupland writes, and, for example,
disliked being touched or jostled, was attached to his daily routine
and to ritual, was obsessed with words and memorization, was not shy
to correct anyone who had made an error and was oblivious in a way
that some people interpreted as arrogant.
"This is not to say that Marshall (Coupland calls his subject by his
given name throughout) was autistic, or even a high-functioning
Asperger syndrome autistic. But if he had any specific
psychopathology, that would be the direction in which to look,"
Coupland writes, while helpfully including a four-page quiz -- Simon
Baron-Cohen's Autism-Spectrum Quotient -- meant to measure the extent
of autistic traits in adults.
Coupland muses that "perhaps this opens the door to what may be one
future for the biography -- in which the biographer mixes historical
circumstances with forensic medical diagnosis to create what might be
called a pathography -- an attempt to map a subject's brain functions
and to chart the way they create what we call the self."
While Coupland's amateur medical musings may be inconclusive, what
emerges as indisputable is McLuhan's place in Canadian and world
intellectual history, which Coupland delineates clearly.
Coupland traces McLuhan's progress from grade school in Winnipeg, to
postgraduate studies at England's Cambridge University, where his
instructors included I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis -- pivotal figures
"in the New Criticism," which held that the words on the page were
what counted, and not the author's intentions or context. Leavis
"encouraged Marshall to study the real world with the same sort of
lens used to view the literary world. Thus, Marshall set about
deconstructing mass culture."
McLuhan would later theorize that, "the commonly accepted attitude
that the content of a message is more important than its form (is
wrong). . . . He claimed, for example, that a story has different
meanings depending upon whether it is related orally, written in a
book, acted out on the stage, heard on radio, presented on film,
viewed on television or depicted in a comic book. Each of these media
has its own inherent bias and language or, to put that principle into
its now popular form: 'the medium is the message.' "
There's much more that is fascinating here: McLuhan's infatuation
with James Joyce's novel Finnegan's Wake and Edgar Allen Poe's short
story The Maelstrom, his obsession with the comic strip Dagwood, his
cameo role in Woody Allen's film Annie Hall, his mutual antipathy
with U of T prof Northrop Frye.
Coupland's considerable achievement is making one understand both the
momentousness of McLuhan's intellectual achievement and the
quirkiness of the Canadian crucible that nurtured and gave sustenance
to it. Bravo.
.
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