
How Marshall McLuhan Became a Famous Media Scholar - Hooke
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/become-famous-media-scholar-case-marshall-mcluhan/
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mwfunk
McLuhan is fascinating to me. A lot of the criticisms people level against him
are correct- much of his writing is composed of terse declarative statements
that sound deep and insightful, but aren't really backed up by much.

It's like reading a series of bombshell opening statements about different
topics, but instead of following up with arguments to flesh out those
statements, he just moves on to another bombshell opening statement about some
other issue that also doesn't get fleshed out.

A lot of people take that to mean that's it's all fluff, but I think that's
throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He was known to keep track of ideas
on index cards- something interesting would occur to him, so he'd make an
index card for that concept, and flesh it out with more thoughts on the topic,
sketches, etc. He would then pick out a related set of index cards as the
basis for a book. So, his process went a long way towards defining the
structure of his books.

So, it's true that his books tend to be a loosely-connected series of concepts
presented in an evocative and profound-sounding manner, but never fully
fleshed out. But they're often great food for thought- maybe he doesn't go
into sufficient detail, but they're full of nuggets of intellectual goodness
that are great starting points for thinking about modern media and the flow of
information in the modern world (even if the end result is coming to the
conclusion that he was wrong about something).

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jgalt212
> It's like reading a series of bombshell opening statements about different
> topics, but instead of following up with arguments to flesh out those
> statements, he just moves on to another bombshell opening statement about
> some other issue that also doesn't get fleshed out.

That's basically Elon Musk's marketing scheme.

~~~
mwfunk
This is my fear about Elon Musk. In a darker timeline he turns out to be a
genius gambler who was always upping the ante and getting involved in
increasingly diverse ventures, each one bolder and riskier than the last. Each
venture is leveraged off the previous one, but the older ventures continue to
exist in parallel with the newer ones.

Finally, in 2038, the ever-expanding Musk Bubble pops. It had to eventually.
No bubble can expand indefinitely when pressurized by constant application of
Musk Force (designated by Μμ, or /Mu/mu in LaTeX, although the more
interesting number is Musks over time (Μμ/s), assuming a constant Μμ/s^2). I
hope this is not that timeline.

In a lighter timeline, 100 years from now he's remembered as a Thomas Edison-
like historical figure who helped make space travel a reality. Hopefully
that's our timeline, I just don't know.

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wu-ikkyu
This reads more like a vaguely passive aggressive ad hominem attack against
McLuhan being a conservative Christian primarily motivated by dreams of
stardom rather than an analytical critique of his ideas and writings, which is
finally made plain after a long rambling in the last sentence.

>McLuhan’s probes, taken as truth-indifferent provocations, really are good to
think with. It’s just that the man — rewarded for closeting his gloom — is
more instructive than his books.

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lern_too_spel
Your critique is itself an ad-hominem. The article gives plenty of examples,
including his outlandish disparagement of Blondie. Saying that the article is
a passive aggressive attack against a conservative Christian thinker is no
more convincing than saying an article about Miscavige is a passive aggressive
attack against a Scientologist thinker. You must explain why their ideas have
any merit.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
Indeed. But the important ideas at hand here are of technical design, rather
than subjective private metaphysical beliefs. Many scientific and
philosophical advancements have come cultures with wildly varying religious
beliefs.

>You must explain why their ideas have any merit.

McLuhan does so if you read his books. Equally so you must explain why ideas
_do not_ have merit without ultimately dismissing them because of private
metaphysics.

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supernumerary
I always short-circuit McLuhan, 'the medium is the message' at its logical
extreme really means that... the message is McLuhan, the concerted pr campaign
described in this article would back this up.

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adpoe
I do like McLuhan's work, and there's more to it than that sound byte--though
it's very memorable.

He has a pretty wide body of literature, and some of the more interesting
aspects of it are about how technology (especially media) become an extension
of the nervous system and body itself. (Of course this logical extreme is hive
mind, singularity, etc...)

One of the other more interesting points (that has seemed more or less
accurate) is that connecting the world via communication technology returns
man to a mentality more like our tribal ancestors (I.e. 'the global village').

He also has some very interesting narratives about how new technologies create
pain as they are introduced to the world, going back to stirrups, the printing
press, and other historical examples.

Some of his books are full of illustrations and are generally very strange and
forward thinking; most of all, McLuhan was an extremely creative person with
an agile mind and mischievous sense of humor. You can get the sense that much
of what he did was trolling the media & academia at some level. And that's
where his quirky PR personality comes in. Above all, he was enjoying himself
and his 30minutes of fame. Nothing wrong with that!

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beautifulfreak
His use of language always made me wonder if I had understood any particular
point he made. It seems so vague and uncertain. I get the same thing from
Buckminster Fuller's writing, or Marcuse. Abstractions of abstractions. This
explanation of his rise to fame at least helps me understand why he was
considered important. It also helps explain his appearance in Annie Hall. He
was doing PR.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wWUc8BZgWE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wWUc8BZgWE)

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fudged71
I had the pleasure of sharing a dinner with two of the McLuhans at a
conference in Banff. I'm in the 3D printing business, and it was very
interesting to discuss with them what is possible as the digital medium
becomes physical.

