1964
The Past Went That-A-Way
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September 7, 2027, will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television was invented. To celebrate the Centennial, this website and accompanying podcast are going to countdown the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television.
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By the time The Beatles walked off the stage of The Ed Sullivan Show, it was clear to anybody with eyes and ears that in ways seen and unseen, television had transformed the world.
But there was no way that television could explain itself to that world.
That was going to take something a little more old-fashioned – like a book.
Sometime in 1964, McGraw-Hill published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan, a relatively obscure English professor at the University of Toronto.
Marshall McLuhan did not set out to become the Guru of the Global Village. He studied English at the University of Manitoba, then crossed the pond to Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1934. There he fell in with I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis — the founders of “Practical Criticism,” a discipline built on a deceptively simple question: what if how something is communicated matters more than what is said?
Rewiring
McLuhan brought those questions home. After a few years teaching in the U.S., McLuhan landed at the University of Toronto in 1946, where he stayed for the rest of his career, turning the same close-reading instincts Richards and Leavis had trained on poetry onto advertising, comic books, radio, and eventually television — not as entertainment, but as forces rewiring how people think.
To his academic colleagues, this was an odd pursuit. Popular culture was not yet considered worthy of scholarly attention. But McLuhan was beginning to regard mass media as something more than information or entertainment. He began to think of mass media as subliminal environments that rewired how people think, how they perceive time and space, and how societies organize themselves.
More Than A Medium
As TV antennas proliferated and eyes around the world glued to screens, McLuhan could see that something both invisible and profound was happening. Television was not just another medium like books or newspapers or even radio. Television was reshaping human consciousness.
Before Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan had already begun mapping the cultural effects of modern communication in The Mechanical Bride (1951), his witty dissection of advertising and popular culture, and The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), his award-winning exploration of how print technology reshaped human thought and society.
But Understanding Media was the magnum opus that added the name of Marshall McLuhan to the cultural zeitgeist of the 20th century.
McLuhan’s unique insight took him beyond “content” to exploring the effect of countless technologies that he regarded as “extensions” of human organisms. Print, radio, television, film, telephone, even clothing, roads, and money – he argued – extended human senses in different ways. The wheel, he said, is an extension of the foot; the book is an extension of the eye; clothing, an extension of the skin.1
But television, McLuhan asserted, was the culmination of everything that preceded it: An extension of the entire central nervous system.
The Great Aphorism
McLuhan’s central thesis is stated in an aphorism that is oft repeated though little understood:
The medium is the message.
In other words, McLuhan wrote, “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”
McLuhan elaborated the thesis more clearly in The Medium is the Massage, a uniquely illustrated sequel to Understanding Media that McLuhan created with graphic designer Quentin Fiore in 1967.
McLuhan did not mean that content was irrelevant or didn’t have any impact.
Instead, he argued for a higher-altitude perspective into the changes that the media themselves caused in human behavior. Television, McLuhan said, mattered not because of what it broadcast, but because it transformed the environment into something new, immersive, and participatory.
The Speed of Light
McLuhan deftly described how print – first introduced in the 15th century and dominant until the 20th – fostered private, linear thinking, individualism, and even nationalism. 2
But information that once traveled slowly – by ship, rail, or print – now moved at the speed of light. Electronic media had collapsed the distances that had once separated people and cultures, effectively retribalizing humanity on a global scale.
Indeed, even more so than “the medium is the message,” the expression most indelibly associated with Marshall McLuan is “the global village.”
Television, McLuhan observed, created a shared, simultaneous experience – as we have seen in previous milestones like the Kennedy assassination in November, 1963 and the Beatles appearances on Ed Sullivan in February, 1964. By the mid-1960s, tens of millions of people were watching the same images simultaneously, experiencing events around the world in real time.
The result, McLuhan said, was not a larger, more anonymous world, but something paradoxically smaller and more intimate — a planet wrapped in a vibrating web of electric circuity that mimicked the oral traditions of pre-literate, tribal societies. The whole world was wiring itself into a single village, where everyone could suddenly see, hear, and respond to everyone else.
Obtuse and Baffling
These ideas were as new and exhilarating as McLuhan’s prose was at times obtuse and baffling. McLuhan wrote in aphorisms, paradoxes, and elliptical observations. Perhaps deliberately invoking the premise of a world rewired, he rarely built arguments in traditional academic fashion. Instead, he leapt from one metaphor to another, leaving readers to connect the dots.
Critics complained that McLuhan was obscure, even deliberately confusing. Academics accused him of being unserious. Journalists sometimes treated him as a mystic rather than a scholar. But his ideas were tantalizing, even irresistible at a time when the world was rapidly changing.
The release of The Medium Is The Massage in 1967 brought McLuhan to an even larger audience with its novel, visually dynamic, image-driven format. Taking its title from a play on his oft-quoted aphorism, Massage became a bestseller and cemented McLuhan’s place in popular culture.
The Rear-View Mirror
In Massage, McLuhan added another dimension to his central thesis, the idea that cultures always drive into the future through filters created in the past.
“The past went that-a-way,” McLuhan wrote. “When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
In the 1970s, critics tried to dismiss McLuhan, arguing that his ideas were too broad or lacked empirical rigor. As academic trends shifted, McLuhan’s reputation faded, but that didn’t stop Woody Allen from featuring him in a cameo appearance in the Oscar winning 1977 film Annie Hall.
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Woody Allen finds Marshall McLuhan behind a sandwich board in “Annie Hall” (1977)
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Lab Rats
When Understanding Media was first published in 1964 television was still young. Cable TV had barely begun its incursion into urban areas. Satellites were still experimental. And the internet was simply unimaginable. But the the themes McLuhan introduced found vivid echoes in the decades that followed.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Neil Postman argued that television had transformed public discourse — from politics to religion to journalism — into a form of entertainment. Drawing explicitly on McLuhan, Postman warned that our culture was not controlled by force – as envisioned in George Orwell’s 1984, but by pleasure, amusement, and distraction — as described in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World.
A generation later, Nicholas Carr updated the alarm for the internet age with The Shallows (2010) arguing – as McLuhan had – that the medium was literally rewiring our brains: “The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.” Carr himself acknowledged the debt, noting that what both enthusiasts and skeptics miss “is what McLuhan saw: that in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act.”
And as recently as 2017, Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire drew heavily on McLuhan’s doctrines to explain the election of Donald Trump the previous year.
In McLuhan’s day, the cultural, political, and economic landscapes were dominated by mass media. On television it was mostly three networks and three to five stations in any given market. There were a very limited number of points of transmission and an infinite number of points of reception.
But with computers, smart phones and the world wide web – all using displays that started as modified televisions – that ratio has reached parity: every point of reception is a potential source of transmission, and everyone who wants to can have their own “channel.” 3
And while that 21st century transformation may make the the concept of a “global village” see antiquated, the filters the McLuhan devised for understanding tectonic shifts in the media landscape remain as relevant as ever.
The content has become infinitely more diversified, but the medium is still the message. _____________________________
1 The idea that the “wheel is an extension of the foot” was echoed some years later when Steve Jobs said much the same, calling the computer a “bicycle for the mind.”
2 Yes, electric media – most notably the telegraph and the telephone – were first introduced in the 19th century but were used primarily for private, point-to-point messaging. “Mass media” did not become a challenge to print until the advent broadcasting in the first decades of the 20th century.
3 The first use of CRT displays for computers was described in Countdown #73 Whirlwind.
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