More McLuhan

McLuhan is a difficult writer in many ways—his allusions to so many different figures from the past, for instance, can be confusing.  But if McLuhan is not necessarily laying out his ideas in a straightforward way, he is giving us a lot to think about and work out. 

In fact, the more I read McLuhan, the more I’m convinced that the difficulty of his writing actually makes it more useful for readers of different times; his theory is quite flexible.  Although written before computers were common, and certainly long before anything like the internet as we know it, it is easy to make connections between his ideas and the newest media of 2011—because he uses more general terms. For example, he writes that “[e]lectric writing and speed pour upon [modern people], instantaneously and continuously, the concerns of all other men [or people]” (234). In 1964, “electric writing” must surely mean tv, radio, even the telegraph.  But is it useful for a theory to say “TV pours the concerns of everyone on everyone else all the time”?  Today, as the internet takes over tv and the tv format changes to accommodate online viewing, such a statement wouldn't be as helpful.  We can understand this statement now because McLuhan’s thinking comprehends media that he hasn’t actually seen. But to talk about what you haven’t seen necessitates a certain vagueness, even ambiguity.

Likewise McLuhan often contrasts time periods in a way that is difficult for readers to follow. He moves with dizzying speed between the world before print, the rise of print-oriented thinking, and a future? present? of electronic communication. But this movement between times, and the absence of concrete dates, allows us to think about the truth of these cycles; we can look at different examples from different points in history. Indeed, his theory, broadly construed, proposes that media “explode[es] [us] into an agglomeration of individuals” while also—at the same time, perhaps—brings us together and makes us “one tribe once again” (234). In other words, we can be both pulled apart (exploded) and pushed together (imploded) simultaneously. That’s flexibility!