THE
REVIEW OF
COMMUNICATION
1 (2001):
151-154
© 2001 National
Communication Association
Look Out, Old Mac is Back!
Lance Strate
Writing about McLuhan back in the psychedelic
sixties, Tom Wolfe posed the question:
“What if he’s right?”
As we moved through the cybernetic nineties, innumerable computer
mavens have delivered the response:
“He was!” Of
course, there were many who came to this conclusion back in the sixties
(or earlier), Tom Wolfe among them.
And there were those who followed McLuhan’s work during the
seventies, and continued to carry his banner and expand on his ideas
after his death in 1980, Paul Levinson included.
But there is definitely a sense in which we have
been experiencing a McLuhan Revival or Renaissance over the past ten
years or so. Mac (as he was
known to his friends, see Gordon, 1997; Marchand, 1989) is back, and his
return to prominence seems to be much more than sixties nostalgia.
For over the past ten years, the convergence of computing,
telecommunications, and digital media has directed public attention
towards innovations in communications and their social, cultural, and
psychological consequences, McLuhan’s forté.
The rise of e-mail, e-commerce, and e-life has directed the
attention of the digerati back to the man once known as the oracle of
the electronic age. Levinson
refers to this as “the digital fulfillment” of McLuhan (28).
After all, much of McLuhan’s study of
contemporary culture (see, for example, McLuhan 1962, 1964; McLuhan
& McLuhan, 1988) was built on his understanding of electrical
technology in general, as well as its earlier manifestations as the
telegraph, telephone, radio, and television.
He extrapolated out from the characteristics of existing
technologies, assuming quite rightly that they would be taken to their
logical ends. Thus, a
significant portion of his analysis referred to the potential of
electronic media, rather than their initial formats, and therefore fits
today’s e-media as well as, if not better than the electronic
environment of the sixties.
Just as we are now in a much better position to
realize that old Mac’s insights were as sharp as a knife, many now
find McLuhan’s style appropriate for our e-age.
As Levinson explains, McLuhan’s medium of choice was the spoken
word, and his preferred mode of thought was an acoustic one.
This clashes with the literate and visual logic one expects from
scholarship, so that McLuhan’s writings have not exactly been user
friendly to readers brought up within a book culture.
McLuhan’s style does fit the electronic media, however,
according to Levinson: “the
aphoristic bursts of his writing that still so vex his critics seem
ideally suited to the Internet and the online milieu.
McLuhan, in other words, was writing as if he was contributing to
the Web--engaging . . . in
what . . . would become known as ‘computer conferencing’” (30).
No wonder, then, that when Wired
magazine was launched in January of 1993, they included McLuhan on their
masthead under the heading of Patron Saint.
In both form and content, McLuhan is the archetype of the
digital, or as he might have punned, the “dig-it-all” or the
“dig-it-Al” (in reference to Internet “inventor” and
presidential candidate Gore).
It is for these reasons that Digital McLuhan is a book that was begging to be written, and I have
no doubt that there are more than a few writers out there who are
kicking themselves for not having produced their own version. A number of books have already applied Marshall’s
perspective to the new media environment, such as Eric McLuhan’s Electric Language: Understanding
the Message (1998); Robert Logan’s The
Fifth Language : Learning a Living in the Computer Age (1997),
recently revised as The Sixth Language : Learning a Living in the Internet Age (2000);
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation:
Understanding New Media (1999); and George M. Biro’s Marshall
McLuhan Meets the Millennium Bug: The
First 100 Years of Computers, and How We Can Make It (1999). Each of these books is valuable in its own way, using McLuhan
as a jumping off point for original studies.
Levinson himself has done quite the same thing in his recent The
Soft Edge : A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution
(1997).
But what makes Digital
McLuhan unique is its attempt to apply McLuhan’s thought to the
new media in a thorough and comprehensive manner. The book consists of
fifteen chapters; the first two are introductory, and each of the
remaining thirteen takes up one of McLuhan’s theories, or probes as he
liked to call them. Among
them are the key ideas one would expect to find, such as the medium is
the message, the global village, hot and cool media, the rear-view
mirror, acoustic space, and the laws of media.
Also included are lesser known but no less engaging concepts such
as discarnate man, light through vs. light on, and probes such as
“centers everywhere, margins nowhere,” “everyone a publisher,”
“surf-boarding electronic waves,” “the machine turned nature into
an art form,” and “we have no art, we do everything well.”
While this does not represent an exhaustive survey of McLuhan’s
work, it most certainly is a broad and representative selection.
This book, therefore, is quite an undertaking, and
it is one that Paul Levinson is well suited for.
He is an expert on McLuhan’s work, but he is not a McLuhanist.
By this, I mean that he does not take McLuhan’s work as a
gospel to be spread, or as a doctrine to be slavishly adhered to.
He does not try to reproduce McLuhan, but rather recontextualizes
him within the new media environment, applying, interpreting, and
expanding on the scholar’s work.
Levinson is an original thinker in his own right, and his own
ideas about anthropotropic media evolution and Popperian philosophy, for
example, are incorporated into this volume, as are his experiences as
the founder of a nonprofit distance education provider.
Moreover, Levinson’s writing is not McLuhanistic or
McLuhanesque. As he
explains, he studied under Neil Postman and has clearly followed Postman
in utilizing a lucid writing style and clear explanations of McLuhan’s
media ecology perspective.
This may well be the most accessible introduction
to McLuhan ever produced, at least for those already familiar with the
basics of computer technology. It
should therefore appeal to readers interested in getting a handle on the
cyberspace age, as well as scholars and students of McLuhan and media
theory. Those looking for a
deconstruction or critical assessment of McLuhan’s work will be
disappointed, however, as Levinson firmly believes McLuhan was right.
While Digital McLuhan
is no hagiography, Levinson does indulge in some hero worship here,
including some discussion of his interactions with Marshall during the
seventies. To me, this adds
an element of charm and a personal touch to the book.
I do not expect Digital
McLuhan to be the last word on McLuhan and the information age, but
subsequent works on this topic will have to take up an additional
question: “What if
Levinson is right?”
Lance Strate is Associate Professor and Chair of the
Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University.
References
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Marshall McLuhan meets the millennium bug: The first 100 years of computers, and how we can make it.
Kingston, ON: Uplevel.
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Remediation: Understanding new media.
Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
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Levinson, P.
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information revolution. London
& New York: Routledge.
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