By Doug Draper
I was about 17 years old when I first tried ploughing through the pages of Marshall McLuhan’s mind-bending book ‘Understanding Media’.
Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan
A read of that 1964 book was one of those rites of passage in the 1960s for anyone in their teens or early 20s who wanted to be on the cutting edge of the counter-cultural curve. It was as critical a thing to do as going to the local movie theatre back then and watching Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey ‘ two or three times. I remember some of my friends and I using words and phrases like “far out,” “heavy” and “cool” with response to both experience, without any of us ever wanting to admit to one another that we were still struggling to comprehend a good bit of what we viewed on the screen, in the case of Kubrick’s movie, or read, in the case of McLuhan’s book. I kept praying that no one would ever ask me to write an essay on what McLuhan meant when he said that “the medium is the message” for fear that my ignorance would be exposed.
Marshall McLuhan, who died in 1980 on New Years Eve, virtually unappreciated by his fellow Canadians and by the academic community and University of Toronto where he taught in the English department, would have turned 100 this July 21. And it is too bad he isn’t still with us to celebrate because there are numerous tributes this week in his owner as he is at long last being rediscovered for his pioneering insights on how the electronic media has shaped our world.
Even the University of Toronto, according to a recent feature on McLuhan by Michael Valpy in The Globe and Mail, is scrambling to re-introduce a McLuhan program for a generation of young people who have discovered his work and see the relevance of it in our internet age.
It would also be great to have McLuhan around today to hear and read what his brilliant mind, which also made iconic the phrase “the global village” years decades before the advent of the email, let alone Twitter and Facebook,” would have to say about the way media is shaping our the way we as individuals and communities behave relate to one another today. Chances are that his insights would be so far ahead of the conventional wisdom, we’d still be struggling to grasp them. And that’s what made this individual so fascinating and place ‘Understanding Media’ among a handful of books from the past half century, like Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ and Jane Jacob’s ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’ and John Howard Griffin’s ‘Black Like Me’, that changed the way we think about the world we live in forever.
Happy Birthday Mr. McLuhan.
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