McKenzie, 'BOOK REVIEW: MARSHALL MCLUHAN: THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSENGER (1989), by Philip Marchand', Interpersonal Computing and Technology v2n02 (April 1994) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/ipct/ipct-v2n02-mckenzie-book + Page 28 + ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ####### ######## ######## ########### ### ### ## ### ## # ### # Interpersonal Computing and ### ### ## ### ## ### Technology: ### ### ## ### ### An Electronic Journal for ### ######## ### ### the 21st Century ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ## ### ISSN: 1064-4326 ### ### ### ## ### April, 1994 ####### ### ######## ### Volume 2, Number 2, pp. 28-30 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Published by the Center for Teaching and Technology, Academic Computer Center, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057 Additional support provided by the Center for Academic Computing, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 This article is archived as MCKENZIE IPCTV2N2 on LISTSERV@GUVM ---------------------------------------------------------------- BOOK REVIEW: MARSHALL MCLUHAN: THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSENGER (1989), by Philip Marchand New York: Ticknor and Fields. $11.95. Reviewed by Robert McKenzie, East Stroudsburg University Marchand's MARSHALL MCLUHAN is a biography not of the Canadian English professor's life but of his ideas. Except for Chapters 1 and 13 (the final chapter), which detail some of McLuhan's family history, most of the writing concentrates on McLuhan, the enigma, and his frantic lifetime of generating wild yet reasonable ideas about the effects of new electronic media technology on the poor souls of the previous print generation. The biography is impeccably researched, offering more than 700 end notes referencing McLuhan correspondences and interviews with family, friends and colleagues. Many readers familiar with McLuhan's own books will be surprised to learn of his essential scholarly training not only in literature but also in classical rhetoric. McLuhan's mother, who had a commanding import on his beginning interests in education, was an active performer in the elocutionary movement. Marchand's book provides a thorough description of McLuhan's undergraduate studies in literature at the University of Manitoba and his pivotal discovery of graduate studies in the classical trivium--rhetoric, dialectic, and grammar--at Cambridge, where he earned a Masters and Doctorate. Along the way we learn also of McLuhan's defining mentors--R.W. Chambers, Q.D. Leavis, and his thesis advisor, F.P. Wilson. It is McLuhan's study of the trivium, we learn, and particularly of the grammar component, that serves as his investigative current of thought throughout his checkered career. This current can be thought of as an ongoing rhetorical inquiry not into the nature of a medium's content but rather into how the technology of a new mass medium upsets the context of the lifestyles and thinking of its audiences. + Page 29 + Curiously and defectively absent from the book is McLuhan's conversion to Catholicism. McLuhan was not raised a Catholic, but he spent his entire professional career teaching and researching at Catholic universities (St. Louis, Assumption College, and St. Michael's College of the University of Toronto). Therefore, Marchand should have provided a linkage between McLuhan's obvious spiritual discovery, his commitment to academic dialogue at Catholic institutions, and his thoughts on technology. The reader will be happy to see Marchand distill many of McLuhan's most famous aphorisms into understandable insights. Among those discussed include "the medium is the message," "the future is contained in the present," and "the content of a medium is the reader." Also demystified by Marchand are McLuhan's controversial dichotomies like high definition versus low definition and acoustic thought versus visual thought. The biography chronicles McLuhan's many publications and reveals how prolific a thinker he was. With over 18 books to his credit, thousands of dollars in grants, and too many articles to mention, it is also troubling to learn that McLuhan dictated almost all of his material to either his wife or his secretary, and he was hardly able to finish any of the many books he signed contracts for or reached agreement on after 1970. It seems McLuhan was a victim of his own warnings about entrapment in an acoustic mode of thought. Also troubling is Marchand's account of McLuhan's inability to converse or collaborate. As a man who loved to argue and provoke (no hour of the night or morning was sacred if McLuhan wanted to share an idea), we find that McLuhan rarely got along with his co-"writers," could hardly say anything good about his students, and had a penchant for talking past those who tried to disagree with his untestable ideas. In fact, Marchand paints a clear picture of McLuhan as a crotchety, pedantic scholar, with little regard for evidencing or even justifying his ideas in anything remotely resembling a scientific or social-scientific method of investigation. Indeed, McLuhan disdained such procedures as a unpleasant consequence of the print-dictated, dialectical academy. It was a mode of corroboration he neither understood nor accepted; luckily for him, his aphorisms did not lend themselves to testable premises anyhow. McLuhan's success and decline in the academic world revolved around his most well-appraised book, Understanding Media, published in 1964. This book sparked a generation of thought about the effects that media technology has on society's ability to make meaning of everyday life. Understanding Media gave McLuhan the public profile that enabled him to mix with and advise Madison Avenue advertisers, national politicians (including Jerry Brown and his hero Pierre Trudeau) and television network executives. Unfortunately, the enigmatic + Page 30 + nature of McLuhan's novel ideas about the problem of a print- literate populace living in an electronic age led corporate figures in almost every case to abandon his proposals. The peculiar notoriety McLuhan received in the 60s was more like a freak show for corporate executives than a reverent attendance to insights about technology, meaning and society. The notoriety also led scholars to resent McLuhan and call him a fake. Such an innuendo was to follow McLuhan throughout his decline as a universally respected academic throughout the 70s and until his death in 1980. The rather bleak appraisal of McLuhan's ideas by many of his colleagues in the latter half of the book is mitigated by the general reception among scholars of McLuhan's aphorisms as starting points for discussion. Today McLuhan's humanistic, abstruse, scatter-shot approach to media remains mostly as semantic kindling to ignite an inquiry into how the introduction of a new medium fundamentally changes the way we live. Readers of this biography who are seeking a revealing story of McLuhan's home-life will be disappointed. Readers of the biography who are seeking clarification of McLuhan's ideas and how one of his publications relates to another will be pleasantly gratified. All readers will be troubled by McLuhan's simultaneous ostracism and acceptance by both industry and academia. Such a Janus effect makes for a very good reading and an important revisiting of ageless questions about media, particularly as we face the computer age. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century Copyright 1994 Georgetown University. Copyright of individual articles in this publication is retained by the individual authors. Copyright of the compilation as a whole is held by Georgetown University. It is asked that any republication of this article state that the article was first published in IPCT-J. Contributions to IPCT-J can be submitted by electronic mail in APA style to: Gerald Phillips, Editor IPCT-J GMP3@PSUVM.PSU.EDU