The medium is still the message

Marshall McLuhan may have fallen out of favour with media pundits, but his insights into the media and the global village are well worth revisiting, writes Conor Brady

Nowadays, he is frequently overlooked by scholars. But Marshall McLuhan remains, for my money, the great guru, whose theories underpin most of the important things that need to be known about the workings of modern media.

It became fashionable in the 1990s for media teachers to downgrade McLuhan. He was described as banal, a showman, a player-with-words. As the media grew in its scale and complexity some claimed to identify an ever-increasing number of exceptions that tended to disprove his theories.

I like to incorporate at least one lecture on McLuhan into the courses I teach. And I am grateful to a student who recently drew my attention to a series of websites dedicated to his interest in James Joyce and the extent to which Joyce may have inspired McLuhan in developing his concept of the "global village".

Although many instinctively think of him as an American, Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in Canada in 1911. He was initially an English teacher and it was through his experiences as a teacher of language that he began to develop theories of how modern man receives and processes information. Most of his working career was spent in the United States. And his theories of media were almost wholly based on his observation of US media, print and broadcast.

He is probably best known among scholars and analysts for what some describe as his first media "law": "The medium is the message".

But he is more widely recognised as the begetter of the concept of the "global village". The two books in which he articulated this are still in print and widely available. The Medium is the Message was first published in 1967. War and Peace in the Global Village followed in 1968.

The scale of McLuhan's insight – and foresight – can only be appreciated when he is placed in time and context. He grew up in a world in which the motor car was a novelty, in which commercial air travel, television and satellite-borne communications were unknown. When he died in 1980, the world had not seen the advent of the internet, cellular telephony or the CD-ROM.

Many books and scholarly treatises have been written about and around The Medium is the Message. Here, McLuhan propounded the theory that in modern media, the chosen medium may be more influential than the content of the message it carries. He divided media into "hot" and "cold", arguing that there were important differences in the way they conveyed information.

He was influenced by the emergence in the 1960s of television as a powerful medium in shaping public attitudes. American scholars were fascinated and shocked by the out-turn of the Kennedy-Nixon debate in the run-up to the 1960 presidential election. People who listened to the debate on radio thought that Nixon won. But those who watched it on TV believed that Kennedy was the victor. The "medium" was more important than the "message".

From there, McLuhan and his disciples went on to argue that it was wrong to view the media as a passive presence in the shaping of events. Heretofore the media had been viewed as a mirror, simply reflecting a reality that unfolded before it. McLuhan's theories challenged this. The media merged with the reality, becoming part of it and changing it.

In a world that has become hardened to the sight of hostages being beheaded for the TV cameras, this thesis is self-evident. Things often happen because the media are present. Were there no media on hand, something quite different might happen. But this came as a revelation in the 1960s.

War and Peace in the Global Village was published at the height of the Vietnam war. US society was being confronted, for the first time, with images of war as it happened. TV pictures and print images depicted the reality of combat, massacres and the aftermath of bombing raids.

McLuhan realised that all of humanity – or at least the westernised part of it – was becoming "connected" as never before, through a rapidly-growing network of media, of satellite-based communications systems, of expanding telecommunications services. TV images could be beamed across the world in real time. Coast-to-coast networks in the US enabled tens of millions of people to experience the same images or sounds. A world was emerging in which any one human being's experiences might be shared – at least to some degree – by millions of others. The world was becoming a "global village" in which media would one day link everybody to everybody else.

Bear in mind that this was almost two decades before the advent of the internet and the general availability of the mobile telephone.

From today's perspective, much of what McLuhan had to say may appear as blinding flashes of the obvious.

Yet it is remarkable that so many people – both media practitioners and people who find themselves the subject of media attention – have no instinctive awareness of the principles articulated by Marshall McLuhan. They do not understand how media work in society – even in the basic ways described above.

McLuhan's "laws" are perhaps a bit like the law of gravity. It was always there. But nobody realised it until Isaac Newton saw the apple falling and wrote it down.

And where does James Joyce come in? The concept of one's man experiences being shared by "Everyman" is, of course, straight from Ulysses. Google "Marshall McLuhan and James Joyce" and see what you come up with!

Marshall McLuhan's legacy is celebrated also on his official website which is well worth a visit, if only to read the selected "McLuhanisms" – his thought-provoking epigrams.

?More www.marshallmcluhan.com

Conor Brady is Editor Emeritus of The Irish Times. He is a senior teaching fellow at the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, UCD where he lectures on modern media