McLuhan is the Message

Norman Mailer was hardly alone in proclaiming “the medium is the message” as “one of the most useful remarks uttered in the twentieth century.” McLuhan was considered a contemporary Aristotle and “national resource” of Canada. His role and importance were mentioned together with those of Spengler or Arendt. McLuhan regarded himself as a discoverer of the nature of the environment created by media. His main effort was to point out how far the new electronic media have changed the environment formed by print, and how they have changed the ways people feel, think and act. He discerned that due to the effect (function) of electronic media, people are in an all-at-once information environment which reduces the person to a nonentity. The individual in such an instantaneous culture finds his or her private individuality erased. What people feel in the “electronic mosaic” is more important than what they think. Violence then becomes a quest for identity; the individual seeks to discover “Who am I?” and “What are my limits?” Th ese two questions are relevant to McLuhan: who was he? and what were his limits? He constructed impressive collages from slogans, documents, images and quotations to catch reality. Seemingly he was not interested in the question “Is this a good or bad thing?”, but rather “What’s going on?” In other words, moral judgment should not be substituted for insight into what is actually happening: “Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.” Despite McLuhan’s successful academic debut, he was considered less a scholar and more a prophet and guru, at least since his year (1967). The Greek prophet foretells what is happening; he has divine qualities; he uses rhetoric and poetic style. He is a messenger, a spokesperson. He proclaims a new doctrine. The Sanskrit guru derives his authority from great wisdom and knowledge; he is able to guide people; he is a teacher. McLuhan’s metaphors cannot be easily forgotten: he described information gathering people as nomads and spoke of the global village thirty years before the Internet. Following globalism, postmodernism, and deconstructionism, McLuhan does not seem as eccentric a figure as he did in his day. His fundamental conclusion is especially enlightening: the changes of means of communication reshape human existence. McLuhan has presented his intuitions in a way that caused still newer thoughts to emerge. “The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the great fallacy.” McLuhan has stayed true to his aphorism: he has avoided making small mistakes. If one thinks testability is the most obvious criterion of a good theory, McLuhan can hardly be taken seriously. He has, of course, replied with a mcluhanism: “Detractors are left -brain critics, who are incapable of understanding right-brain concepts.” Here, as in many other cases, we see the use of intentionally parodistic exaggeration, inexactness and misinterpretation. Yet if he had surrounded all of his propositions with fortifications as detailed and deliberate as the majority of his critics demanded, the hundredth anniversary of his birth would certainly not be celebrated all over the world. His activities across the areas of cultural studies, sociology and psychology resist categorization. Nevertheless, as his theses are the elementary parts of today’s theory of communication, it is the task of scientific inquiry to deal with them. “McLuhan was a genius. He opened new windows and did not close them. Closed concepts are the end of science” (Castells).