McLuhan on the future of newspapers

Tsk. That reads like envy. Perhaps his logorrhea has soured you.

I view him as both philosopher and provocateur. He was off in the Big Think, as the expression now goes. I heard him lecture several times, when he always seem to love spurring debate and disagreement.

One of my favorites was not in a book, rather when he addressed the S.C. educational broadcaster gathering. He was a big supporter of that particular group, in no small part because of his Southern wife. He tied in that state with his forecasting saying S.C. was prepared to lead the parade into the 21st Century (pause, beat, beat) because it has missed the 20th.

While both humor and hyperbole, after the flying eyebrows and gasps, the remark brought considerable discussion both at the cocktails afterward and later among the journalists assembled. That kind of spark seemed to be his forte. I cut him a lot of slack in acknowledgment.

McLuhan is more of a poet than an academic. His research is spotty at best, his writing opaque and his conclusions over-determined — so he’s been a punching bag in academia for decades. But he really did have the poet’s eye and ear for how a culture is transformed via technological change. His insights into how a culture transforms from what he called a visual to an oral culture have been prescient. I think we hear echoes of McLuhan in many current cultural trends, especially among youth. These transformations include things like a disregard for the sanctity of the written word, the privileging of the fragmentary and the spectacular over traditional logical argumentation and the trend of constant checking and re-checking in with “the tribe” via electronic devices. McLuhan predicted all of this and much else as we moved to greater and greater reliance on electronic media. And this was in 1964.

One of the things I’m reading on vacation is the compendium “the BEST Technological Writing 2010“. I am particularly enjoying this article by Clay Shirky, which is peripherally related to the topic at hand.

A sample:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Actually, in Understanding Media, McLuhan also predicted the rise of angry talk radio, noting that because radio is an intimate medium, it is capable of creating bonds with the listeners, but it is also capable of amplifying the demagogue and creating an appetite for rumor, gossip and malice (306).