Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland

Author:Douglas Coupland
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Canada, Philosophy, Biography
ISBN: 9781935633167
Publisher: Atlas
Published: 2010-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

Yelling Across a Broad Land

Harold Adams Innis (he of The Fur Trade in Canada) pioneered the study of media and was a giant’s shoulder on which Marshall was able to stand. Innis was a big deal. In 1946 he was elected president of the Royal Society of Canada, the country’s senior body of scientists and scholars. In 1947 he was appointed the University of Toronto’s dean of graduate studies. He thought highly of McLuhan’s ideas—he placed The Mechanical Bride on his students’ reading lists—and the fact that both men were Canadian and ended up literally writing the books on media theory together is more than coincidence. Their ability to contemplate wide distances with no overriding imperialist agenda gave both men a sense of intellectual freedom, as it did with other minds working in Toronto at the same time. As a bonus, for Marshall to have someone high up on the U of T food chain helping him was a bit of a raspberry at his in-house naysayers.

Innis’s and McLuhan’s ideas about electronic media both overlapped and had differences. Innis was interested in the way various media collapse (or reconfigure) time and space; McLuhan focused on the way media shift the degree to which a society favours the eye or the ear. Innis’s last book, The Bias of Communication (1951), looks at the impact of literacy and its technologies on civilization. McLuhan carried the torch forward, exploring communications far more radically in his 1962 book, The Gutenberg Galaxy.

But above all, McLuhan built on Innis’s idea that, in studying communications media, technological form matters more than content. Biographer Paul Heyer wrote that Innis’s concept of the “bias” of a particular medium of communication can be seen as a “less flamboyant precursor to Marshall’s legendary phrase ‘the medium is the message.’” If Innis hadn’t died of prostate cancer in 1952, who knows what might have come from further collisions of his mind with McLuhan’s?

Innis certainly would have been fascinated by (and felt validated by) the impact of TV and radio in Quebec in the 1950s and 1960s, the ways in which media created the Quiet Revolution. Over a decade, millions of Québécois broke free from the grip of the Church and the yoke of the closest thing to Stalin ever created in North America, Maurice Duplessis, creator of the Great Darkness. Within a decade, Quebec became electrically wired and highly secular. It also became politically self-aware, and in the 1970s began pushing the boundaries of how far a distinct society could coexist within a larger democratic union.

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