The Place of Marshall McLuhan in the History of Information Society Studies

One may witness today that public discourses on information society are dominated by Frank Webster’s thoughts, while the original approaches of the Civilization Theory and the Great Social Transformation by McLuhan, Toffler, and the less known Tadao Umesao are crowded out. In this ‘epistemic vacuum’ it is common to reflect on the enormous social, economic and cultural change with quasi or half-theories, providing easy targets to the furious technology critics. Can we find a place for the young McLuhan in this debate, re-reading his early works? Looking at McLuhan’s work from between 1958 and 1962, one may recognize strong arguments and concepts resonating with the ‘criterion models’ of the information society. McLuhan, to some extent, precedes the key dual concept of control crisis/control revolution in theories on the institutional-structural failures of the bureaucratic control revolution by Beniger. The recognition of these positions McLuhan’s work into a new dimension. Still, this paper argues that although McLuhan had fundamental ideas related to the later concepts of the information society, he did never provide us with more complex theoretical constructions in the topic, and thus his works should not be conceived as part of the information society studies.