Abstract
‘You know nothing of my work … how you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.’ I was a young graduate student when I first watched Marshall McLuhan deliver his verbal sucker-punch to an unwitting NYU professor in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977). I got the joke, but considering the depth of my own knowledge of McLuhan back then, any rock-star intellectual could have delivered it as far as I was concerned. (Indeed, as we know now, McLuhan was not Allen’s first choice for the scene.) That movie scene was about the sum of my engagement with his work for quite some time.
I finally circled back to McLuhan more than a decade ago and have faced the challenge of featuring his work in perhaps a half dozen university courses since then. I know a lot more about McLuhan than I did in graduate school, yet when I view a clip of the famous Annie Hall scene today, I find myself sympathizing with the professor. How did I ever get to teach a course on McLuhan?
The first obstacle was the man’s descent from relevance. His biographer, Philip Marchand, wrote a short piece about McLuhan’s ‘fall and rise’ a couple of years ago. Marchand (2011) noted that McLuhan’s reputation had begun to decline by 1970. If we combine that observation with Nicholas Negroponte’s reference to McLuhan as ‘Wired’s patron saint’ in the November 1993 issue of Wired, we have a tidy chronology from fall to rise. Unfortunately, my graduate education in history of science and technology took place around the mid-point of that chronology, beginning just before I saw Annie Hall in the movie theater and ending long before the year of DOOM and the Mosaic web browser and McLuhan’s elevation in Wired. I was a child (academically speaking) of the McLuhan Dark Ages stretching from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.
McLuhan was not entirely absent during these years. For one thing, he made a great whipping boy. My recollection is that his name came up a few times in seminar as the incarnation of technological determinism. I think this memory must be true. (Earlier this year I was charmed by an image with the caption ‘Marshall McLuhan, Technological Determinism Theorist’ that I found on the web while preparing PowerPoint slides for a lecture. I used it.) The communications historian Susan Douglas called Understanding Media ‘an exercise in hard-core determinism’ in her Da Vinci Medal speech before the Society for the History of Technology in 2009. Of course, this view of McLuhan persists today – and rightly so. Douglas is roughly my contemporary, and in this speech she described her education in history of technology as conditioned by Marxism, externalism, and SCOT (social construction of technology), not McLuhan.
The interesting thing about McLuhan’s absence from my graduate education is that as a ‘technological determinism theorist’, he should have been right in the middle of things. As Douglas points out, science and technology studies opened up during the 1970s and 1980s. For example, during my years in Berkeley there was a seminar on social science methods in history of science and another on quantification, as well as a big international conference on quantitative methods. This may not seem particularly earth-shattering today. However, the point I want to make is that history of science and technology was a frothy field during those times, with many new ideas that challenged the kinds of stories that had previously been told about invention and discovery. It seems a little strange in retrospect that McLuhan was left out, considering that Understanding Media was a huge can-opener for radical notions about the impact of media technologies.
If McLuhan was not part of the discussion during his Dark Age, the elephant in every seminar room was surely Thomas Kuhn. Published only two years before Understanding Media, Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) was the Copernican Revolution of the history of science. Google’s Ngram viewer lends support to the idea that Kuhn’s presence mirrored McLuhan’s absence during the period from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. Consider the terms ‘paradigm shift’ (Kuhn) and ‘global village’ (McLuhan). In 1970, usage of McLuhan’s term beats Kuhn’s by a ratio of 6:1, and it peaks in 1971. By 1978 the terms are running even. In 1986, the Kuhn/McLuhan ratio is well over 3:1, 6:1 in 1992, 10:1 in 1998; ‘paradigm shift’ does not peak until 2004, when the ratio is about 13:1. ‘Global village’ appears in the book corpus about as frequently in 2008 as it had in 1978, and the ratio remains steady at about 13:1.
The point of this little exercise is to contrast the impact of two super-novae in the intellectual world of the early 1960s. McLuhan fizzled while Kuhn exploded, right? Yet, something is not quite right here. Why did Negroponte choose McLuhan when he could have designated Wired as the reader’s guide to the paradigm shifts of digital media, an especially valid question considering McLuhan’s ideas about electronic media were formed by television rather than computing. Perhaps we should look at Negroponte’s exact words: Wired’s patron saint, Marshall McLuhan, was right about the medium being the message in the 1960s and 1970s. But that is not the case today. In a digital world the message is the message, and the message, in fact, may be the medium.
I just completed teaching a McLuhan-inspired course (with my friend and colleague Scott Bukatman) called ‘Media and Message’. We have taught McLuhan to Stanford freshmen four or five times now, and every time we help our students through their struggle with McLuhan’s wonky ideas about television, trying to break down ‘hot and cool’ media, explaining how a light bulb can be a medium, and so on. And yet it works. It’s maddening really. How is it that somebody whose intellectual influence seemed to have begun stagnating 40 years ago is again fresh and alive in the classroom? I’ll be darned if I can explain it.