Marshall McLuhan Speaks

I was surprised to learn from a review of Coupland's recent biography (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2115029) that McLuhan largely deplored the social changes he was writing about. "Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I'm resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button." The popular image of McLuhan (and he was extremely popular - up there with rock stars) was definitely not that of a button-turner-offer.

Such a mindset in many critics would make them predictable and boring, but to me it makes McLuhan more interesting. The knock against him was always that he was glib, but this suggests a depth that isn't obvious.

I remember hearing that McLuhan was once at an academic conference where some professor excoriated him after his talk (McLuhan was loathed by his fellow academics). McLuhan shrugged and said, "You don't like these ideas? I got others."

This is great, McLuhan has a lot to teach.

I tend to find his work much more insightful and broadly applicable than Kevin Kelly, et al.

His ideas reproduced in _The Medium is the Massage_ are the most popular, but my favorite is the concept of the media tetrad because it tends towards the descriptive, instead of the prescriptive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrad_of_media_effects

Taking Twitter for example, instead of saying "Twitter has foo effect on society", McLuhan's tetrad provides a framework for discussion and analysis. e.g., Perhaps you think Twitter retrieves the telegraph, maybe you don't, but McLuhan provides an easy method for discussion.

If, like me, you have heard bits and pieces about McLuhan, but never delved deeper, the 20 minute introduction by Tom Wolfe is well worth your time.