Media Portrait- Marshall McLuhan
How Making the Medium the Message Changed the World Forever
Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan forever altered the world of media with his research and observations on how communication mediums affect those around them
Marshall McLuhan is not a name that individuals the world over tend to know; he is no Ronald McDonald, Bill Clinton or Osama bin Laden. He is not even a name that academics necessarily revere anymore: much of what he taught is no longer believed by many eminent media studies researchers. However, McLuhan was a media and communications pioneer, and in many ways, a maverick. He revolutionized the way that many saw and thought about the media, and coined a few choice phrases along the way.
The Work of McLuhan
From his time as a young academic at Cambridge to his death on New Years’ Eve 1980, McLuhan studied and analyzed the way that the media works. His ideas and research topics became widely known and greatly debated.
McLuhan studied English at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and wrote his PhD dissertation on the history of the verbal arts. His early interest in this subject influenced his later works on a wide number of subjects, including the media. How verbal communication works became one of his focuses early on in life, and continued throughout the great scholar’s work.
McLuhan realized, earlier than many, just how influential the new medium of television had become for individuals of all ages. In particular, McLuhan saw the effects of advertising on a post-war industrial society. In his first major piece of work, titled The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan examines how advertising looks in a world of non-stop television. It is in this book that McLuhan first uses that famous phrase, “the medium is the message”, although he goes on to describe the meaning of this in much greater detail in subsequent pieces.
The Medium is the Message
The idea that it does not matter what is being said on television, and that it is the fact that one is watching television itself that matters, was profoundly affecting for the academic community at the time. McLuhan acknowledges that concepts do matter (and, thus, it matters what it is that we are watching on television), but he is interested in precepts, and these are apparent at the level of the medium. Therefore, precepts, as McLuhan sees them, have more to do with cultural reference points than with particular subject matters.
McLuhan’s idea of the medium being the essential feature of communication in our era began to spread to popular culture. In a famous scene in Annie Hall, Woody Allen conveniently grabs McLuhan in from off-screen to confront a pompous media scholar in the movie. After McLuhan’s death, his popularity remains; he was named the patron saint of Wired magazine, and continues to be quoted and referenced in songs, books, and movies up to this day.
